> Swimmers in Fleishhacker Pool which closed in 1971.
That’s gotta be the biggest swimming pool I’ve seen. I was born in ‘74 (hello, fellow Gen X-er) and we went to various public pools through the summer. The biggest was an “olympic sized” pool 20min driving distance from our house - and this one looks double that from the camera’s perspective.
The original Broad Ripple Park (Indianapolis) Pool was the "largest in the world" at one point (250' x 500'). I knew people who swam in it, but it had been turned into basketball courts by the time I saw the former pool. Shortly after that, it was removed.
The US swimming Olympic tryouts were held there in 1924 and 1952.
What’s really interesting/sad is there used to be tons of really large pools created as part of depression era recovery act public works programs. Then later, when equal rights law allowed non-whites to use the pools equally, cities and communities closed the pools and filled them up instead of allowing integration.
That’s a trope that doesn’t bear on the Fleishhacker pool closure. There’s been a shift I think in govt spending from things like recreation to social services. If you took the SF homeless and other social services budgets including state Medi-cal funding that dwarfs recreational spending - and this is a shift in allocation over time. And I thought pools were racially integrated historically and it’s when they integrated genders the race panic stupidity came in big time. Especially in south some bad behavior.
Sure, Fleischacker pool was underfunded for years and fell into disrepair and then closed in 1971. But why was it underfunded, and why was there not enough money to repair it?
The term you're looking for is "racism", and it's been ruining America for a lot longer than a century, and it still is, in fact it's on a resurgence, as we all well know (but some try to deny).
And "for a century" is historically incorrect and revisionist, if you were actually talking about racism, which I don't believe you were.
What was the real point you were trying to make? It sounds to me you're offering "NIMBY", which has nothing to do with race, as an alternative theory to counter the parent's point that it's actually racism, which is extremely well documented and not legitimately contested, and has been going on for a lot longer than a century.
Are you literally saying people don't want swimming pools in their back yards? Really??! That's news to me. Or is it actually that they don't want black people in their public swimming pools? That's not what "NIMBY" means, but mutually exclusively exactly what "racism" means.
At 6,7m gallons (25k cubic meters) volume it was a bit larger and freshwater. The big deal about it was that it was used year round in Moscow. It was quite the experience to swim in it in the winter at -15C. -20C was the official operating limit.
We had a 120m x 50m public pool around as a kid. It was fantastic, more like swimming in a lake. It got replaced by two stainless steel contraptions (one regular 50m pool and one "play pool"). The play pool has many features that are supposed to be "fun" for kids.
But I remember the thrill of swimming to the centre of the pool and being away from everything. It felt like a real achievement and a little unsafe but in a good way.
I suppose it wasn't easy to maintain and not as "safe".
That was my first thought ok. I thought I was looking at the reflecting pool at the Washington monument or something. I’m completely in awe of the size of that pool.
It actually is closer to the reflecting pool than an Olympic pool
I've read the article twice and can't seem to find how they know there are two other cabinets. Did James Martin's family tell them that there were two others his son dumped? Judging by the flyer he posted, he seemed to know there were two other cabinets before he even knew who they belonged to.
> Donnie Weaver, an artist who works with preschoolers, saw the shiny cabinets curbside and stopped short.
> “I thought, ‘Oh, what a cool box! ’ ” he remembered. “Because I like stuff from that era. I picked it up without really looking inside, opened it up when I got home, and thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
> Weaver later ran back with a wheelie cart — the cabinets weighed about 15 pounds each — but the other two boxes were gone.
Yeah, there's a missing sentence or paragraph explaining it, but that was my impression too. The son who went rogue and purged the cabinets put three of them out on the street, only one has been recovered, according to the family. Something like that.
Based on personal experience it seems like his sons would have a general idea of what was stored in the garage or attic. Considering he threw his brother under the bus to the city newspaper, I suspect he had been keeping an eye on those boxes for quite some time.
All I can think of is that something on the cabinet indicating it was cabinet number 3/3? It seems they knew there were two others before the family came forward.
> - Craigslist is full of tire kickers who just annoy the crap out of you with stupid questions (for free things!!!)
In my experience listing your stuff for even a couple of dollars greatly reduces this problem. If I want to get rid of something on craigslist for free I just put it on the curb and post the address.
I avoided eBay for years due to horror stories online. Then I had some junk I wanted to sell for a token amount where I didn’t mind a chance of losing some of the money.
A couple hundred sales later and I’ve only had one problem. eBay sided with me on it, to my surprise.
Maybe don’t list one-off priceless family heirlooms on eBay, but it’s actually quite good for moving a lot of random products in my experience.
Did you make decent money-per-hour on it? My experience is you can sell stuff, but you're talking hours of effort photographing, listing, communicating with sellers, packing, and shipping for a couple bucks-per-hour reward, even accounting for the big-ticket items. It's just not worth it compared to the dumpster. Sucks.
Facebook Marketplace is great for this type of thing. I know many HN'ers hate FB, but it's really easy to move stuff there. You definitely still get tire kickers, but like CL it's local, so you're not shipping.
I just moved cross country and was downsizing, so we put a bunch of stuff up on Marketplace, some free, some for money. The hardest part was communicating dimensions despite listing them specifically. People would show up with a compact SUV (CR-V/RAV4/etc.) to pick up a couch. I just shook my head. I would take about 3 pictures, no editing, write a 2 sentence description, put in the dimensions (if appropriate for the item) and generally within a day have it gone.
Note that I wasn't trying to make money, I just wanted to get rid of things, but that's probably not much different than CL, but could be different than listing things on ebay.
It's still probably not worth it time wise, but the stuff I was getting rid of was still in good shape and could be useful to somebody, so I'd prefer to have somebody get some use out of it instead of just throwing it away.
Our town and some neighboring towns (all suburbs of Boston) have "free lists" on Facebook for this purpose. Membership is nominally restricted to town residents, and picky/annoying takers and resellers become "known" fairly quickly and ignored. Very effective for rehoming stuff that isn't trash but not worth selling.
There's a house down the street from me who had a "free stuff" pile sitting outside for a month or two. Just a few things, but they got replenished over time, and I'm sure the ones that were never picked up went to the trash, so overall it seemed like it worked. We got some nice still-packaged outlets and dimmer switches from it.
When giving away a bunch of stuff while emptying my late parents’ home, we had much better luck on Facebook Marketplace than Craigslist. Way higher percentage of people who showed up when they said they would. Once we switched to listing things there, it went way faster. No idea why there was such a difference.
Paypal is an enabler for eBay scam artists. Try reporting something, it's hilarious, completely byzantine and it will only end when they have wasted enough time to say the case is too old and will be closed.
Yeah. I have a bunch of stuff I'm sure others would treasure--at least for a few days. But I have zero interest in uniting the pile with them if it takes more than a super-token effort.
There’s an interesting album/book that was put together out of a dumpster find: https://www.metafilter.com/145686/Margaret-A-scrapbook-found... Apparently “Chicken John” had taken money to take a vanload of junk to the dump, found a dumpster with some furniture that he thought he could sell, so he swapped out the furniture and junk, and found a scrapbook and candle in the bottom of the dumpster and sat there looking through the photos and poems, etc. I’m not sure if the album is still available, but it’s a great listen (I have the deluxe package from when it was first released).
Kodachrome slides look unreal to modern eyes. My grandfather was a pretty decent amateur photographer so pretty much all of my mom’s childhood in the 1950s is captured in color. We scanned them in and my friends don’t believe that the color pictures on my screen are of my mom when she was 3 or my grandmother when she was in her 20s.
I scanned our family 35mm slides on a good scanner a few years ago and the resolution, even after scanning, is incredible. It took a long time for digital cameras to catch up.
This is why the 70s look amazing. All those film recordings to be remastered over and over again and keep putting out. The 80s and 90s will forever be stuck in lousy low resolution.
You see convenience jump and quality (temporarily) regress over and over in the short time photography has been around. Black & white film and photos look amazing. When color started coming around you needed more light and the quality dropped for awhile. In the 70s you can see faster film become available to filmmakers. This let them move out of the studio with more outdoor footage instead of large studio lights and hand-held instead of being locked on a tripod or crane. In exchange, the quality of the picture dropped. Then again, with digital scanning and vfx. I remember hearing vfx studios would sometimes get away with 1k images for theatrically released feature films if the effect was fast or blurry enough.
> The 80s and 90s will forever be stuck in lousy low resolution.
You are off by few decades though. 35mm film photography and cinematography was still dominating until the end of 90s. Nikon D1 and Canon 1D were released in 1999 and 2001 respectively, and Star Wars EP2 in 2002 was notably first major movie recorded with digital cameras. Pleasantville (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) were early examples of using digital intermediates.
Now those are interesting examples of digital cameras you provide above; definitely worth sharing and bringing to the table.
Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too? Like how exactly were TV shows broadcast anyways now that I think about it. The Abba remastered stuff is where my association got set https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrGuyw1V8s, that stuff is incredible.
> Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too?
The cliff note's version is that the BBC perfected filming live TV. It worked because their analog version of deinterlacing 50 fields per second to 25 frames per second matched European film.
But, in the US, where TV ran at 60 fields per second, filming it at 30fps was just too short of an exposure time. So video was favored in the US.
A lot of pre-digital stuff was shot on film for various reasons. One reason is that 24/25fps film adapts very well to 50 fields per second or 60 frames per second; the consequence is a very minor speedup / slowdown. In contrast, it's a lot harder to adapt video between the two framerates with analog technologies.
Edit: I also suspect cost may have had something to do with it. I suspect that film was cheaper than video in the 1970s, but someone who was around at the time might understand the cost difference between video versus film.
I don't know if anyone "anticipated" HDTV in the 1970s, but back then artists did like putting their videos up on a big projected screen. At least in the 1990s, a lot of content, like Seinfeld and Friends, was done on film; both for the look, and so that it could be remastered for HDTV.
that would be deep if producers anticipated future remasterings and wanted to keep their options open for downstream derivatives that could bump royalties and revenue all along the way. That's some deep thinking if they actively rejected state of the art recording tech that precluded that sort of option.
It's not "deep" that producers at the time anticipated that re-runs would be broadcast on HDTV. In the 1990s, a lot of producers preferred the look of film over video; or even considered it a better overall medium.
This is another example of someone’s hobby/collection not meaning anything to people that inherit them. If you are a collector and getting older please give away or sell your collection to someone that cares about the same thing before it’s too late.
There have been innumerable collections of things that other collectors or historians would kill for that have been lost because they seem like junk to the people that inherit it. I have ended up collecting vacuum tubes and I almost weep at stories of warehouses of them being junked. There have been plenty of other things like comic books, LPs, cameras, etc. that faced a similar fate. And while I would never argue that collections of these things are all that important in the grand scheme of things collecting is fun and brings enjoyment. If nothing else selling them can bring in a few bucks.
Losing historic pictures is just tragic. Any given historical image could prove to be important in some sort of research.
Or maybe maintain instructions for how to get it a good home and/or fair price?
(For example, "sell it at ___, and expect ___ money". Or "email ___ at ___ museum/archive, who would like it as a donation someday". Or "if you're up for it, post this prepared inventory list to enthusiast forum ___, and flip a coin on which respondent to give it to".)
This not only means you can enjoy it until the end, but that you don't have to guess/decide when is the right time. You can draft easy instructions/inventory now, and occasionally update them, over hopefully many decades.
The correct market to sell stuff changes too quickly for that to work. And sometimes older people don't even know what markets exist. My father collects some things but has never ever used ebay for example. Plenty of collections might be valuable internationally but not valued locally.
Also in my experience the best collections are for the love of it - collectors often don't care about the value and often don't even know the value. They might care about rareness or uniqueness but not $$$ directly.
Also the value of many collections is unknown until far in the future.
My uncle (Uncle Bill) was fascinated with actors and ended up being good friends with a lot. He took pics and slides for years and years and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asked for them. Well before he died he packed up a significant portion of his collection and sent them off. After he died, we gathered more and sent them out.
Now that my mother is moving in with me and we are cleaning out, yet again, and packing, I've found more slides. Some were from Uncle Bill and others were from my father's side of the family. I had never seen them before. Kinda cool, but not something to keep. So I bundled them up with several other items and off to the historical society they went. Over the past three years, I've shipped probably 10 boxes of all manner of stuff. Family bibles, mortgages, pictures, diaries, correspondence, etc. I've been told that some students have been helping catalog and have found the diaries and correspondence, in particular, interesting. What they were reading was written by my aunt (who married a professor of philosophy and member of the International Red Cross) as she traveled with my uncle, Colonel, around the world.
So glad they are being taken care of and are of interest to at least a few.
I'm an oldish guy with older friends and have dealt with this problem several times. If you have a cherished collection of something, it's very unlikely any of your heirs will be willing to put effort into finding a good home for it unless they can get significant money for it (which is also very unlikely).
You are the best person to find a recipient for your collection. Do it while you still have your wits. Strongly consider having the transfer made while you are still alive, so it doesn't have to go through probate. Don't let your heirs maintain unrealistic expectations of how much they could get for selling the stuff.
> You are the best person to find a recipient for your collection. Do it while you still have your wits. Strongly consider having the transfer made while you are still alive
++ again for this.
Imagine (with some irony): The easiest items for others to pick out -- aside from the occasional curiosity -- might be the most ordinary, recognizable, and commonly-usable items, which is to say also available in stores.
It can be liberating and instructive to assume it will all go to the curb or the trash upon your passing.
> Ms. Evans, who was a Kodak janitor in the early 1980s before her rise to executive there and at other leading firms like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, recalls a different experience.
> “One thing about Eastman Kodak is they believed in their people,” said Ms. Evans, now chief information officer at Mercer, the human resources consulting giant. “It was like a family. You always had someone willing to help open a door if you demonstrated that you were willing to commit to growing your skills and become an asset that was valuable for the company.”
I was reading an article that they were scaling down all of their color film production, and then the mini-renisance happened right during/after Covid and they have been having a hard time scaling back up ever since.
Bankruptcy is not the same as going out of business. They restructured and still produce color film and slide film, but not Kodachrome. It was a very sophisticated film which could only be processed in a specialized lab and they couldn't stay open with low film demand.
I'm now remembering a couple hundred slides I saw scattered on the sidewalk and street on Cesar Chavez near Sanchez in early 2020. I picked up a couple to take a look, but I can't recall what they were of anymore...
As far as I know, slides tend to degrade over long time. I've seen some becoming crap in less than 40 years, so it may be advisable to scan all of them.
As I also have inherited a big number of them, probably twice the number contained in that cabinet, I'd ask if anyone can suggest an automatic scanner that doesn't cost a fortune.
I’m a layman and know very little about this but for one big job like this wouldn’t you be better off paying a specialist lab to scan these for you if it’s a one time thing?
Yup we're talking archival quality for couple of centuries if kept in the dark. Modern E6 is decent but earlier films and especially older Ektachrome processes fade badly.
Beautiful pictures. I would have loved to have shot Kodachrome before Kodak stopped manufacturing it; the closest we can get today is Ektachrome (which has also been reformulated over the years).
It is kind of funny just how different Kodachrome and Ektachrome look though. To me Ektachrome seems cold while Kodachrome always looks like the 1970s in spite of the fact it was preferred by archivists because it remains stable in storage so well.
Velvia was another film stock that seemed to have an outsized personality.
I still have some Kodachrome slides and when you get the exposure right, and the scene is within the dynamic range ... it's something quite magical! Should scan them and put them online sometime...
Kodachrome required a lot more equipment and chemicals to develop. There used to be a Kodak processing plant in Palo Alto on Page Mill Road. As a high school student, I applied for a job there and got a tour. I just remember a lot of equipment in dimly lit rooms. It was a big facility. I didn’t end up getting the job and ended up working as a page at the pubilc library.
Ektachrome got a lot better over the years (starting with around the Lumiere era in the 90s) and, really, it was Kodachrome 25 that was special--which was obviously ridiculously slow by modern ISO standards.
Always like KC 25 a lot more than the colors of Fuji's Velvia which while nominally ISO 50 was really about the same effective speed.
Yeah. It's all in the eye of the beholder, but I find Kodachrome/Ektachrome's saturated colors very aesthetically pleasing, while similarly saturated digital photographs come off as sterile and overly processed (the kind you'd see on a hotel's website).
ive always thought there was a market for these kinds of photos as a tv channel. some background muzak, slideshow presentation and block programming. something to fall asleep to.
There are two comments we should learn from this story. I've advocated them for years and I've been dismayed that even professional photographers and those in the imaging/scanning business don't advocate them as mantra thus they haven't become common practice.
First, don't ever throw your slides or film negatives away as you may need them again (if you're sure you'll never want them again then give them to relatives or failing that to those who collect and archive old photos). If you have scanned them then pack them away sealed from dust, dirt, high humidity and high temperatures.
Second, if you are scanning negatives or slides then never skimp on the resolution, if you do and you no longer have the originals you can't rescan them for more detail (the large size of high resolution scans is not an issue these days). The classic error many make is they scan say a school or army platoon photo at low or medium resolution and it looks OK on the screen, later when they have to select an individual from the group and need to enlarge the image it's too pixelated to use. (It's very disconcerting for say a family who has lost a soldier in war and they can't recover his photo.)
A Kodachrome slide under good conditions has a limiting resolution of around 100 lines/mm and a 35mm negative or slide is 24x36mm which means the scanned image has to have at least a horizontal resolution of 3600 pixels to extract all the picture information. 100 lines/mm resolution means you need set your scanner to at least 2500 px per inch. In fact, ideally you should scan at double that rate to allow for the Nyquist factor—like your audio CDs which sample at 44kHz to get 20kHz audio reproduction, you should do the same with photo scans. Sometimes, scanning at the Nyquist rate (here, 5000 px per inch) can be difficult so you should set the scanner to as high resolution as is practicable).
Even today, scanning is fraught with problems that remain unclear to many. As mentioned, the biggest is the lack of information and I blame the professionals for not adequately informing the public.
The next is the lack of good scanners and it's a big problem—and Kodachrome slides have special requirements when scanned. Ideally, slides should be scanned at a color depth of more than the standard 8 bits per channel (24-bit) to stop color banding in sky areas. (Banding shows up as annoying discontinuities in colors that are close but range over a gentle gradient such as sky areas and it's caused by insufficient bits). Kodachrome has enough color dynamic range to make banding obvious. Banding is stopped by going to 48-bit color depth but unfortunately many scanners cannot support it (hence my comment about the lack of good scanners). It's also an excellent reason why you should keep your original slides and negatives.
Also, Kodachrome slides are particularly difficult to scan because they are intrinsically different to other color films in that they contain residual silver and this throws the scanning out. The better scanners allow for this and they also come with specialized software to overcome the problem.
That’s gotta be the biggest swimming pool I’ve seen. I was born in ‘74 (hello, fellow Gen X-er) and we went to various public pools through the summer. The biggest was an “olympic sized” pool 20min driving distance from our house - and this one looks double that from the camera’s perspective.