[Shadowmuse Blown]

Chinatown NYC, 1900.  Love the two buildings on the right.

Almost the definition of the word, "eclectic".  Love all the fancy balconies, and the neat rooflines.

It’s a fascinating picture, isn’t it?  I love stuff from this time period: big city life with no electricity.  There are no lamp posts, not even gas.  Most of the objects on the street are made of wood and those poor horses are pulling a ridiculous amount of weight.

It gives a teeny little sliver of a slice of what life was like in those days.

[solvegas]

Opened on April 3, 1941, The El Rancho was opened on Highway 91, which was named the Los Angeles Road in those days and later on became the Las Vegas Boulevard, aka The Strip, and it had an Old West theme with cottages and hitching posts for the horses it maintained to rent to the guests. In those days, that was the boonies and per the 1950 census, the Las Vegas valley only had 50,000 people more or less and now it has 2.3 Million.  It was the first place that had an all you can eat buffet, which became the normal for all casinos in Las Vegas until the pandemic closed the buffets and killed most of them. For years the buffets were lost leaders used to attract gamblers so the casinos could make more money but no more.  On June 17, 1960, a fire destroyed the casino/hotel and it was never rebuilt. The lot where it was on Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard on The Strip is used for outdoors concerts but it remains without a permanent structure. It is across from the Sahara Hotel and Casino on the north end of The Strip.

[solvegas]

Located a 45 mile drive from Las Vegas, the most visited dam in the USA is the Hoover Dam. Built between 1931 and 1935 and put in full operation in 1936, it was built to control the Colorado river, which at the time, had a nasty habit of flooding parts of the Imperial Valley in California, which wasn't good for agriculture. Built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado river in the border of the states of Nevada and Arizona, it created Lake Mead, which is the largest man-made lake in the USA and the main source of water for Las Vegas. At the time, it was the largest dam in the world until it was surpassed by the Grand Coulee dam in Washington state on the Columbia river.   

[MaxBigfoot]

It's almost 700 years old and has spent each of those years balanced on a narrow corbelled wall.
The Eschif in Périgueux in France, was a lookout for a toll bridge.

It's an oak timber frame building with wattle & daub infill, built in 1347.

The building is balanced on the narrow ramparts of Puy-Saint-Front (the medieval centre of Périgueux) supported on oak struts along its length.

[rtpoe]

Located a 45 mile drive from Las Vegas, the most visited dam in the USA is the Hoover Dam. Built between 1931 and 1935 and put in full operation in 1936, it was built to control the Colorado river, which at the time, had a nasty habit of flooding parts of the Imperial Valley in California, which wasn't good for agriculture. Built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado river in the border of the states of Nevada and Arizona, it created Lake Mead, which is the largest man-made lake in the USA and the main source of water for Las Vegas. At the time, it was the largest dam in the world until it was surpassed by the Grand Coulee dam in Washington state on the Columbia river.

The "border" between Mountain and Pacific Time Zones runs right through the middle of the dam.

Since both sides of the dam need to be on the same time zone for operational reasons, I asked them about it.

The entire dam complex operates according to the time in Arizona.

[solvegas]

Back in 1976, opened in the Bicentennial year, the most award winning and innovative building in Houston, Texas is the Pennzoil Place towers in Downtown which are mirror images of each other and are 36 floors and 523 feet/ 159 meters high. It was built during the oil boom era of the 1970's.

[solvegas]

An old iconic casino in Las Vegas, the Stardust Hotel and casino. First opened on July 2, 1958, it was the largest hotel in the world with 1065 rooms, which were mostly 2 Storey bungalows built on a 60-acre lot. They built an RV park in 1972, the first one in Vegas, and it was purchased by the Boyd family in 1985 and they built the 30-floor tower which gave the property a total of 1552 rooms in 1990. The iconic sign, when built in 1960, was based on the above ground nuclear weapons tests done in the Nuclear Weapons Testing site south of Area 51 and back in the 1950's and early 1960's, the population could see the mushroom clouds. The property was closed on November 1, 2006, and imploded to make room for a new property called The Echelon which was planned to have up to 6,000 rooms but then, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and work was stopped due to a lack of funding. Then Boyd family group sold the property to Resorts World which has built and opened a property there.

[gOOber]

 

[solvegas]

The county seat of Esmeralda County in Nevada, located about 200 miles from Las Vegas on Highway 95, the road that connects Las Vegas to Reno, is the mostly abandoned town of Goldfield, Nevada with a population of 200 or so and in the 1880's, Gold was found and Goldfield became the largest town in Southern Nevada at the time. But by the turn of the century, the gold mine run dry and the decline started in the 1920's. As you drive from Las Vegas to Reno on Highway 95, you can see what used to be the main hotel of the town which still stands but has been abandoned for many years.

[MaxBigfoot]

I don't know what the feature is called, but that round structure at the two corners really sets this building off for me.   

[solvegas]

Located on 45th Street and Park Avenue, an iconic building which originally was the Pan Am building when opened in March 7, 1963, and which is now the Met Life building, I like to mention it because when my family moved from Mexico City to the USA, we flew on Pan Am airlines to Los Angeles back in July 1971 and it was my first airplane flight ever and it was in a Boeing 707. I remember we walked from the terminal to the runway and walked up the ladder into the cabin and there were no baggage checks since we gave them to the loading crew when we were by the airplane. No body searches or bag searches. After take off, most of the adults lit up their cigarettes and the cabin was full of smoke. When we landed, inside a bag of ours, my father had brought a firearm and when it was looked at by customs in LAX, it was no big deal when my father told the custom agent that he had gotten it as a gift from his father, my Mexican Grandfather, and it was ok and we were picked up by my Aunt, my American mother sister, who lived in Burbank at the airport in her station wagon and it is a good memory.   

[MaxBigfoot]

Back when they built them cool, a trifecta.   

Art Deco skyscrapers in Chicago, Illinois.

333 N. Michigan building on left (Holabird & Root, 1928) was the first Art Deco skyscraper in Chicago.

London Guaranty building, center.

Mather Tower, right.

[solvegas]

Brutalism was a post World War 2 architecture style which began in the United Kingdom as the country was reconstructing itself. It was simple and cheaper but eventually became unpopular, but it was used in the USSR, aka Soviet Union, and some of those ugly buildings are still used like this one in the Black Sea country of Georgia which is the Bank of Georgia.   

[gOOber]

 

[solvegas]

That red Pegasus was/is the Mobil Oil company trademark/corporate symbol.