Drive-in movie theaters stand for the great American auto-centric suburban dream, though as time goes by fewer and fewer of the outdoor screens remain standing.

Driven Out

(image via: WebUrbanist)

On June 6th, 1933, as many as 400 New Jersey motorists looking to escape the harsh realities of the Great Depression for a while enjoyed Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou, from the comfort of their automobiles. Though the 40 by 50 ft screen at Park-In Theaters in Camden is long gone (it operated for only three years), other relics of the Drive-In Theater Age still stand, if just barely.

The Drive-In Project

(images via: Gadling and Ego-TV)

According to travel photographer Craig Deman, “approximately 90 percent of drive-ins are closed from their peak in the late 1950s.” Deman is somewhat of an expert on the topic, having authored the hauntingly illustrated The Drive-In Project which documents the current state of abandoned drive-in movie theaters from coast to coast.

After The Last Picture Show

(images via: Debra Jane Seltzer, robert e weston jr and Paul A. Valentine)

They say “Life Is Sweet In Texas” but since the Midway Drive-In Theatre in Sweetwater, Texas closed things just haven’t been the same. The 230-car capacity drive-in was opened in the 1950s and like many drive-ins of the era, provided a large playground for kids and an outdoor seating area for families in front of the screen.

(image via: Nicholas Henderson)

The jagged faux mountain range painted in bold Indian red & forest green on the back of the Midway Drive-In Theatre‘s screen make it an easily identified landmark, even from far across the windswept plains of north-central Texas. Flickr user Nicholas Henderson captured the screen-back backdrop’s eerie essence above, looking little the worse for wear, on a bright summer’s day in 2011.

Lake Woe Begone

(images via: Darren Snow and Lowand77)

There’s not much left of Mt. Orab, Ohio’s Lake Drive-In besides its inimitable Fabulous Fifties main sign and the moldering wooden ticket shack. Indeed, the theater’s Happy Days indeed have long since faded though Richie, Potsie, Ralph and the Fonz still likely have fond memories of many a moonlit night… hey Arthur, don’t you think it’s about time you let those guys out of the trunk?

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Trouble Feature 10 Abandoned Drive In Movie Theaters

In America’s golden age of black & white television, the dark shadows cast by cathode ray tubes were tempered by the warm glow of kitschy set-top TV Lamps.

Colorizing a Black & White World

(image via: TVLamps.net)

What’s a TV Lamp? The question is a legitimate one today but back in the 1950’s it would have been greeted with “What planet are you from?” amazement – almost anyone who had a TV had a TV Lamp perched on top, and by the end of the Fabulous Fifties almost every middle-class American family had a TV in their living room.

(images via: Postcard Roundup and Philosophy & Philosophers)

TV Lamps were one answer to the question the Man Of The House was asking as the first primitive television sets took pride of place in America’s living rooms: how will this new entertainment device affect my family?

(images via: Lise Vintage Lighting and The Glass Junkie)

The cathode ray tubes in the hearts of those early TV sets put out a low level of luminosity and the natural inclination was to reduce room lighting as much as possible, as broadcast images were easily washed out by bright room lighting. Turn on the TV and turn off the lights… what’s wrong with this picture?

(images via: NewsOne, Amazon.com and BB-Blog)

Another factor contributing to the dimming of America’s living rooms was that people had been watching movies in darkened theaters for decades. Naturally, they sought to transfer the cinematic experience to their private, in-house small silver screens. Movie theaters of the day weren’t completely dark, however, having a range of wall sconces and/or back-lit shapes and shades… lighting unavailable in houses.

(images via: eBay/Refbookman and eBay/Bltsgirl)

The purpose of this gentle lighting was to protect movie-watchers from eyestrain. TV watchers, however, were watching television much more often than they were seeing movies. As the entire concept of television was relatively new, parents who grew up without it had real concerns about eyestrain (or worse) and were eager to grasp any solution which would alleviate those concerns.

(image via: Texans Incorporated)

Enter the TV Lamp: a home version, as it were, of those purpose-built theater lamps and lights designed to provide a source of room illumination that wouldn’t detract from the TV-watching experience. The ideal place to install such lighting was, naturally, right on top of the big, bulky TV sets of the era.

Momentary Lamps Of Reason

(images via: Charles Phoenix and Millscentral)

The designers of the first TV Lamps were working in the dark, so to speak, as the need for a mass-market lamp providing soft, indirect lighting had never arisen before. The engineering was no big deal but the look of the finished product very much was.

(images via: Lise Vintage Lighting and In With The Old)

Unlike your typical table lamp, TV Lamps had to be more than just a room accessory. Sitting atop the TV – in most cases the most expensive appliance in the home – put these lamps squarely in the spotlight.

(images via: TallGlassOfH2O and Bitchin’ Kitsch ‘n’ Kitchen)

Prop a drab, gauche lamp on your impressive new TV set where it would be squarely in the focus of family and friends? No sirree, that’s one boat that’s not gonna float!

(images via: Lise Vintage Lighting and Texans Incorporated)

TV Lamp designers had other issues to concern themselves with, mainly being that these were lamps housing incandescent bulbs that were on for hours at a stretch: no meltdowns in front of my nuclear family if you please.

(image via: Allee Willis)

The ideal material was ceramic and a host of pottery-makers such as Rosemeade and Texans Incorporated quickly leapt into this new market niche.

(images via: PW Style, eBay/FinderskeepersAntiques and TVLamps.net)

Fired clay and, to a lesser extent, glass offered designers a stable, rock-solid base from which to construct TV Lamps. Being glazed at high temperatures, ceramic lamps would hold their color finishes over time and the flexibility of raw clay (and molten glass) allowed for an abundance subject choices both organic and inorganic, animate or inanimate.

(images via: Texans Incorporated)

Most vintage TV Lamps are wider than they’re tall, a function of the need to attain a low center of gravity… the lamps were meant to be placed atop 3-ft-tall television sets and consoles after all. Width came into play as a result of size since TV Lamps had to be large in order to properly shield the light source and create a satisfactory scene of back-lighting.

Cinematic Ceramics

(images via: Tinkers Moon and Etsy/Estatehound)

Looking at some of the more common TV Lamps and with the aforementioned caveats in mind, we can see why lamp designers leaned towards long, lithe animals such as skulking panthers, leaping sport fish and galloping horses.

(images via: Tinkers Moon, No Pattern Required and Dancentury)

Panthers were a big hit with both TV Lamp designers and consumer buyers, perhaps owing to the then-current trend for exoticism and tropic mystery. Another point in favor of panthers was that they were often depicted in their melanistic (black) phase, making them look black whether the lamp was on or off, by day or by night. Even so, a few pink panthers made the scene well before Inspector Clouseau took his first shot in the dark.

(images via: Lise Vintage Lighting and Texans Incorporated)

Maritime imagery was also popular since what’s a sailing ship without a wide, wavy ocean to support it? Nautical themes worked especially well with glass TV Lamps as employing blue-tinted glass added to the look of an angry sea while working to dim and diffuse the light of the lamp itself.

(image via: Retro Renovation)

TV Lamps had their moment in the limelight and it was quite a long moment at that, ranging roughly from the late 1940s to the early-1960s. By then, TV sets were being offered with larger screens and cathode ray tube technology had improved to the point where the scenes on the screen could hold their own even in well-lit rooms.

(images via: io9 and Tumblr)

Though TV Lamps had successfully made the jump from functional furnishings to true objects of decorative art, times (and TVs) had changed and the once-ubiquitous décor pieces found themselves falling through a fast-opening cultural/technological gap. Their fall from grace was both fast and furious – notoriety can work both ways. Almost a half-century later, the relatively few survivors are praised by collectors and hailed as essential signposts along the post-war road to modern pop culture. Fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on the TV? Times have changed indeed.

Back in the 1950s, Cold War tensions ran high and so did the DEW Line: high above the Arctic Circle, that is. Though many of the original 63 radar stations have been re-purposed or dismantled, many still remain in place, remarkably preserved by some of the coldest temperatures found outside Antarctica.

How DEW You Do?

(images via: Tundra Daisy and 50before50)

The Cold War didn’t get much colder than the chain of 63 lonely radar stations strung across the 69th parallel, roughly 200 miles (300 kilometers) above the Arctic Circle. Ironically, the DEW Line was meant to function as a sort of “trip wire”, providing us with a Distant Early Warning of an impending Soviet nuclear airstrike.

(images via: Tundra Daisy and 50before50)

Though the DEW Line was rendered mainly obsolete by the mid-1960s when speedy Soviet ICBMs supplanted slow bomber aircraft, the stations were officially kept in operation from April 15th, 1957 through to July 15th, 1993. Some of the stations were then incorporated into the DEW Line’s successor, the North Warning System or NWS; many others were left to slowly decay beneath drifting snow, howling winds and the ghostly aurora borealis.

(images via: DEWLine Adventures)

One significant DEW Line station isn’t located quite as far north as the others: northern Illinois, to be exact. A prototype station was set up in a cornfield outside Streator, Illinois, where technical functions of the radar equipment could be tested and human operators were sent to be trained. Above are views of the facility in its heyday and just below, the current remnants.

(images via: Paul Malon and WIX.com)

In late 1954 the USAF contracted the design and construction of the DEW Line stations to Western Electric, who were given until July 1957 to build 63 separate stations stretching from northwestern Alaska to the east coast of Greenland – a distance of over 6,200 miles (10,000 km). Against all odds and despite the challenge of constructing sensitive electronic installations in mostly uninhabited, prohibitively cold and nearly inaccessible locations, Western Electric handed the “keys” to the DEW Line over to the Air Force almost three months ahead of schedule.

The (Polar) Bear Necessities

(images via: Yvon from Ottawa, WFNS and Zone Interdite)

Not all 63 stations were identical in appearance, functionality, number of on-site staff or all of the above. Some of the Auxiliary (“AUX”) and Intermediate (“I”) sites had as little as a half-dozen staff while the keystone MAIN stations housed dozens.

(images via: Hallbeach.com, DEW Line History and The Kraalspace)

The locations of the DEW Line stations are also evocative of the High Arctic: Icy Cape, Cold Bay, Storm Hills and of course, Point Lonely. On the other hand, Hall Beach (above, top) sounds positively summery but don’t bother bringing a surfboard.

(images via: Idlewild Expedition, UT Systems Ecology Lab and Wikipedia)

The Air Force’s relative lack of experience in arctic warfare didn’t impact on the design of the DEW Line stations, which ended up being remarkably low-maintenance facilities regardless of the main problem: drifting snow.

(images via: Przystanek Grenlandia and Radar-Junk)

The average DEW Line station consisted of two long rows of connected metal huts for equipment and staff. The rows were laid out along the direction of the prevailing winds and parallel to one another. They were connected by a raised “bridge”, making the station itself take on the appearance of a spindly letter H.

(image via: Seldon’s Gate)

Inside one of the H’s three-sided courtyards was a round, geodesic radome that housed and protected a pair of radar dishes mounted back to back. The radome was mounted of steel stilts that raised it as much as 50 feet off the permafrost. The stations also featured other radar dishes and reflectors that facilitated communications with neighboring stations and also to command and control centers hundreds of miles to the south.

Drawing a Line in the Snow

(images via: Wild-A, Roclar.net and Paul B Jones)

DEW Line installations were built to last; environmental concerns came last, for the most part. Asbestos insulation kept the manned modules warm, PCB lubricants ensured the radar dishes spun easily in the cold, and lead-based paint kept rust at bay. All well and good until the stations were decommissioned and their components left to decay or worse: be salvaged by local Inuit for building materials.

(image via: BS Keyhole.com)

Getting equipment OUT of the High Arctic can be just as difficult, time-consuming and expensive as getting it there in the first place. How’d you like to be the guy whose job it is to dismantle the main radar station at Cape Dyer, on the rugged (to say the least: above) eastern shore of Baffin Island?

(images via: Radar-Junk, Polar Star and Ruud Leeuw)

Other original DEW Line sites are more accessible but have their own issues. Take the LIZ-3 DEW Auxiliary site at Wainwright, Alaska, closed in 2007 due to soil erosion. Unlike some of the northern Canadian and Greenland sites, Wainwright can be TOO warm at times leading to subsidence of the permafrost and severe shoreline erosion unhindered by ice-free seas.

(images via: Tundra Daisy)

Without the preservation afforded by sub-zero temperatures, structures and equipment can decay and corrode alarmingly quickly – that’s a typewriter above right (or at least, it was). Corrosion exacerbates pollution problems as well. Most of those 55-gallon oil drums typically dumped in rusty mounds contain residual fuel and lubricants that can (and do) leach into the soil, contaminating groundwater.

(images via: J P Newell and Polar Star)

Cleanup costs skyrocketed when the realities of arctic environmental remediation became apparent and the cleanup completion date has been extended from 2011 to 2018.

(images via: ThisBlogIsMyBlog and Dew Line History)

The DEW Line served a noble purpose in its heyday, drawing a line in the snow against Soviet aggression that was never crossed in anger. In doing so, the long and lonely chain of isolated radar stations forced both Americans and Canadians to see their far northern territories in a different light. With post-Soviet Russia taking a greater interest in the real roof of the world these days and Global Warming setting the stage for a scramble for arctic resources tomorrow, our erstwhile line in the snow north of 69 degrees may have been the shape of things to come.

What is Film Noir ? Well basically it’s a cinematic term used to describe a certain type of movie. It’s hard to pin down with absolute precision, because it’s essentially about an instantly recognizable ‘look’ and ‘mood’. The guys were tough but vulnerable, the women were beautiful but flawed, everyone smoked like a chimney and the whole thing was shot in gloomy, brooding black and white. The classic ‘film noir’ period stretched from the early 1940s to the late 1950s although the low-key, black and white visual style of the films had its roots in earlier German expressionist cinema.  Film Noir movies were often crime dramas that explored moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Many of the typical stories and much of the attitude of classic ‘noir’ derive from the fashion in the USA at the time for ‘tough’ crime fiction, for example Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Movie buffs argue endlessly about the ‘best’ Film Noir movies so we won’t stray into that mine-field. Instead lets just remember a few great examples of the genre.

The Maltese Falcon

(image via: moviewallpapers)

One of the strongest influences on the film noir genre of the 1940s was Americas love-affair with the ‘hard-boiled’ detective of popular fiction. Dashiell Hammett’s private-eye Sam Spade was as tough as they come. Sam, played here with laconic cool by Humphrey Bogart, finds himself hounded by police when his partner is killed whilst tailing a man. The girl who asked him to follow the man turns out not to be who she says she is and is secretly involved in something to do with a mysterious ‘Maltese Falcon’, a gold-encrusted life-sized statue of a falcon. The plot thickens.

Casablanca – 1942

(image via: cinemamasterpieces)

Settings don’t come much more seedy than Casablanca in World War II and Rick Blaine, exiled American and former freedom fighter, is the perfect morally ambiguous noir ‘hero’. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) runs the most popular nightspot in Casablanca. The plot involves Nazis, secret letters, a crooked police chief and, of course, Rick’s lost love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) who turns up in his bar one night needing his help. The director, Michael Curtiz, somehow managed to transcend the genre and produce what has become one of the great movie love-stories of all time.

Double Indemnity – 1944

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Directed by Billy Wilder and with a tag line of ‘It’s Love And Murder At First Sight’, Double Indemnity contained the characteristic moral uncertainty of the Film Noir genre. Smooth-talking insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) becomes infatuated with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and agrees to help murder her husband. After she has tricked him into signing a ‘double indemnity’ policy, they kill the husband to make it look like an accident. However, the suspicious insurance company investigates, uncovering shocking facts about the widow. A scheming woman, a weak and gullible man, infatuation, murder and double-cross, this is Film Noir at its cynical best.

The Big Sleep – 1946

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This Howard Hawks movie took Noir star Humphrey Bogart and plugged him straight back into his successful ‘private eye’ persona in a screenplay from a popular Raymond Chandler crime novel. The plot, shockingly for its time, contains homosexuality, gambling, police corruption, sex photos, criminals, scam artists, murder and an unflattering portrait of the very wealthy of Los Angeles. World-weary private-eye Phillip Marlow (Bogart) is a basically decent but flawed man trying to solve a complex series of mysteries and stay alive at the same time. The film is a good example of how the brooding cinematic style and the portrayal of imperfect humanity come together in Film Noir.

The Killers – 1946

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One of the things you can say in favor of movies from this era is that they were often based on good writing, in this case a Hemingway story, unlike so much current cinema where plot and characterization seem to take a back-seat to gimmicks and special effects . In this story the Swede (Burt Lancaster), is an ex-prize fighter who has foolishly gotten mixed up with mobsters and a double-crossing dame and is waiting in his cheap small-town hotel room for two hit-men to find and kill him. Director Robert Siodmak took the original Ernest Hemingway short story as his opening point and cleverly developed it through an elaborate series of flashbacks. Ava Gardner, in an early role, makes an excellent Film Noir ‘femme fatale’.

The Postman Always Rings Twice – 1946

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Tainted love, moral weakness, betrayal and murder – you just know it has to be Film Noir. In this classic example of the genre, Nick Smith, the middle-aged proprietor of a roadside restaurant, hires drifter Frank Chambers as a handyman. The drifter eventually begins a steamy affair with Nick’s beautiful wife Cora, who talks Frank into helping her kill Nick, by “accident.” Of course in Film Noir nothing ever goes according to plan and the lovers find their feelings for each other tested and found wanting in unexpected ways.

Gilda – 1946

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Down in Argentina, small-time crooked gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is saved from a gunman by sinister Ballin Mundson, who later makes Johnny his right-hand man. True to the Film Noir ethos, their friendship is based on a mutual lack of scruples. The relationship heads for the rocks when Mundsons new wife Gilda (Rita Hayworth) appears on the scene. Johnny once knew femme-fatale Gilda and still feels both attraction and hatred towards her. Their relationship is a battlefield of warring emotions that becomes even more explosive after Mundson disappears in mysterious circumstances, leaving Gilda and Farrell free to marry. This incendiary situation finally explodes when the supposed dead-man turns up again looking for revenge.

The Third Man – 1949

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This classic Film Noir movie is set in the shadowy streets of post-war Vienna, a ruined city where nothing (and no-one) is quite what they seem. An American pulp-fiction writer (Joseph Cotton) arrives to discover that a friend of his, Harry Lime, has died under mysterious circumstances. Or has he ? The ensuing mystery entangles Cotton in his friend’s black-market dealings, with the multinational police, and with his mysterious Czech girlfriend. Demonstrating that a movie is always improved by memorable music the haunting ‘Harry Lime’ theme, played on the zither, sticks in the memory long after the end credits.

Sunset Boulevard – 1950

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Down-on-his-luck Hollywood scriptwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) takes on the job of writing a screenplay for forgotten silent movie actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). She is a former matinee idol, long past her former glories and living as a recluse in a ramshackle Hollywood mansion with her butler Max, who was once her director and husband. The penniless scriptwriter finds himself seduced into becoming her gigolo, has his moral integrity tested and found wanting in true Film Noir fashion, and is a witness and unwilling participant in her descent into murder and madness.

The Big Heat – 1956

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The ‘golden age’ of Film Noir was arguably the 1940s but there were still plenty of examples of the genre being made in the 1950s. In this film, detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is assigned to the routine investigation of a police sergeant’s suicide but when a ‘B-girl’ claiming to have evidence is found murdered, Bannion’s superiors order him off the case. Stubbornly Bannion pushes back at reputed mob boss Lagana, who fanatically keeps his home life free of “dirt.” The result is that a bomb meant for Bannion kills his wife, turning him into a vigilante bent on revenge at all costs and alone against a corrupt city except for Debby, the disfigured ex-mistress of a sadistic mobster. Love it or hate it, you’re not likely to come across many nice people in Film Noir.