Your Hometown For Pulp

[Badger]

Re: Your Hometown For Pulp

 

My hometown is just a small town in VA. At the 20-40s it was slowly moving from a farming community to a textile/furniture industry. My maternal grandparents were having childrens 3-10 (of 11, my mother was the last in 1941). My paternal grandparents were growing up at this time, they were still on the farms. They would marry in mid-30s. And have their 3 kids. My father is same age as mom. Not really all that interesting really. I think it was WW2 post-war when we reached our height in manufacturing. Now we are basically a ghost town.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: Your Hometown For Pulp

 

For my adopted hometown:

 

http://westword.com/Issues/2006-03-30/news/feature.html

 

The article is mostly about efforts to change Denver's blue laws and abolish the dreaded 3.2 beer. But starting on the second page there's some good stuff on prohibition in Denver and the day prohibition was lifted.

[Sociotard]

Re: Your Hometown For Pulp

 

Moscow, Idaho? Well, there would've still been a lot of mining in nearby cities, especially silver and precious stones. Moscow itself put most of its economy in farming wheat and other grains. The towns most distinctive feature is the University, which opened in 1892.

 

In 1906 (too early for Pulp, but whatever) the administration building caught fire. Arson was suspected but never proven.

 

In 1938 Elanor Roosevelt spoke at the memorial Gym, wich was built as a memorial to the students who died in WW1

 

IIRC, during the pulp era, the largest school would've been Agriculture.

 

EDIT: originally wrote 1838, but 1938 is correct. thanks to Basil for the correction.

[GhostDancer]

There's so much to say about Detroit, Michigan, that I'll limit myself to notes about Pulp Era Detroit that are less well known, in several tiny increments.

Detroit's second City Hall was built in 1871, demolished in 1961.  A flowerbed in the front lawn spelled out, "Welcome, Thrice Welcome."  A dungeon town lockup was under it.  Among other statues and adornments, four 14-foot sandstone maidens watched Detroit from a 110' elevation.  Each weighed 10 tons.  Art held a lyre, with a palette at her feet.  Commerce wielded a mercurial staff.  Justice was armed with scales.  Industry carried tools and gears.

 

These statues and other items from Old City Hall are now housed in Fort Wayne, Detroit.  

 

In a modern setting, if your story included a restoration of the statues, would Detroit restoration accelerate?

 

[GhostDancer]

 

Detroit Union Depot, 1893-1974

Stonework bas-relief ornamentation included baskets of fruit supported by dragons whose bodies twisted and turned into vines, leaves and scrolls.

 

One of the rail lines was the Wabash Cannonball express to and from here to St. Louis.  Enjoy Jonny Cash's performance of the song- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZiQ89_s67Q

 

In 1951, an aluminum sculpture by Marshall Fredericks was added, Romance of Transportation, now housed in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore.

 

 

In your story, why do the tower clock faces Roman numerals read "IIII" instead of "IV?"

[GhostDancer]

Detroit: The Majestic Building, 1896-1961

Opulent, 50,000 feet of marble, much of it in swirled panels of black, brown and green.  19' hall ceilings, mahogany and glass doors.

 

Mabley's department store checkout transaction- "The purchaser at any counter on the ground floor sees his good handed to a small boy who sits in a little pulpit over the head and just back of the saleswoman.  There, they are deftly done up and the money tossed into a small box and dropped into a brass pipe through which it is shot by compressed air into the cashier's domain in the basement.  Down there, change is quickly made by expert fingers, returned to the pipe and shot back.  Several girls will be employed to make change, and the process is carried out more quickly than it can be described so that the wait of the customer is extremely short."  -The Detroit Free Press

 

[GhostDancer]

Detroit: The Cadillac Chair, 1901-1941

Bicentennial monument cut from a solid block of Lake Superior red stone.  Six feet high, seven tons, originally named the Chair of Justice.  The limestone was not very durable.

 

In your story, does the Chair's original name refer to a special ability?

 

[GhostDancer]

City of Detroit III - Queen of the Great Lakes, 1912-1956

Most expensive, largest, most luxurious lake vessel afloat when it was built.  Five stories, 455' steel hull, ~30' diameter paddle wheels with 8' wide paddles.  

Capacity: 5,000 day passengers, usually carrying far fewer, no more than 1,500 on overnight voyages.

Grand Salon

Palm Court

Gothic Room men's smoking lounge, for those timorous of the opposite sex.  You can visit part of it at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle, a Detroit river island.

Forward Gallery

 

Should your story have a murder mystery on a ship or train, or both?

 

[Doc Shadow]

I usually set mine in a pulp era Hudson City. Just adapting "Justice, Not Law" for the early 30s.

 

Here's the paradigm for the Doc Hawkstar campaign. It includes the changes for Hudson City.

 

 

Doc Hawkstar paradigm.doc

[Basic204]

Is their any pulp information on bronx New York ?

[GhostDancer]

Pulp Era Detroit Prohibition

 

Prohibition definitely affected the way Detroiters drank. They drank much, much more. In 1918 before prohibition, Detroit had 2,334 liquor-serving establishments. During the height of prohibition, 1925, Detroit had 15,000 establishments that served alcohol. Some estimates of speakeasies ranged as high as 25,000. And unlike the taverns of old, women were as likely to be guests as men. Free Press columnist Malcolm Bingay wrote what has now become a famous sarcasm: “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink in Detroit unless you walked at least 10 feet and told the busy bartender what you wanted in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.” The competition over turf caused the deaths of untold numbers of people — police, gangsters, and civilians.

No part of town was more “wide open” than Hamtramck. Hamtramck historian Greg Kowalski notes, “Vice was so rampant that the Wayne County prosecutor asked the governor to send in the state police to take control of law enforcement. In 1923, the state police conducted nearly 200 raids in the small city. … On one small street block, Charest between Holbrook and Evaline, six houses nearly side by side were raided.”

By May of 1929, The New York Times published a full-page article headlined “Our ‘Rum Capital’: An Amazing Picture,” stating “The manufacture and the sale of automobiles in Detroit involves nearly $2 billion annually and the chemical industry is rated at about $90 million. Between the two stands Detroit’s illegal liquor traffic, estimated at $215 million.”  -Drinking in Detroit's History, by Michael Jackman, for Detroit Metro Times

[SKJAM!]

Is their any pulp information on bronx New York ?

You can start here with the Bronx Historical Society's website.

 

http://www.bronxhistoricalsociety.org/bxbrief.html

 

One possible plot hook is the opening of Yankee Stadium in 1923.

 

Quite a bit of pulp stories were set in NYC, many of them in the Bronx.

[csyphrett]

Winston-Salem was the home of Reynolds Tobacco for at this point. The Reynolds Building was based on the Empire State Building. Wake Forest and Salem College as well as Wachovia Bank were going concerns. Dorothy Duke was in charge of  the Reynolds money at this point I think. Duke University, Tanglewood Park, and other places in Winston and the state owe something to her philantrophy.

Furniture and textiles were side economies in the nearby Thomasville and Greensboro.

Agriculture other than tobacco is also going concerns.

Manly Wade Wellman who lived in NC based Silver John in the Smokey Mountains and Appalachia in this period.

CES 

[Clonus]

In 1929, Sexsmith Alberta, having attained a population of 250, incorporated as a village in the middle of what was at the time, the farthest north farmland in North America.  Although the winters were long and cold, the long summer days gave it a much faster growing season than you'd see in points further south  It was primarily important as the place where local farmers would come in to deliver their wheat to the set of grain elevators on the railroad tracks parallel to the town's main street.  Later on it was to It was a fast growing community at the time and played host to several grain elevators, the Sexsmith Train Station, Bird's Grocery, MacEwan Hardware, and the Weicker Hotel (which started to serve alcohol in 1923 with the repeal of Alberta's own prohibition law).  The most notable citizen in town was Johanna Haakstaad, a midwife who ran a "maternity home", so Sexsmith was always playing host to a few unwed mothers-to-be.  It also had a blacksmith's shop that at that point probably had a sideline in auto-repair.  In the 20s, local law enforcement was provided by the Alberta Provincial Police, except for one R.C.M.P. sergeant based in Grande Prairie, 12 miles away whose job was to keep an eye on problems that arose in the nearby Indian reservations.  In 1932 the APP was shut down because of the province's budgetary problems and general police authority went to the Mounties who then stationed a sergeant and three constables in Grande Prairie.  

 

http://sexsmith.ca/st/wp-content/images/history_old-town-drawing.jpg

[jlv61560]

I'll bump this one again:  I was born in Honolulu, back when it was still a territory (though just barely), but we left there in 1963, so I don't really remember much about the place.  Instead I'll talk about El Paso, Texas (where I was mostly raised) in the 1920's. 

 

El Paso, for those who don't know, is located where the borders of Texas, New Mexico and old Mexico all pretty much meet.  The city wraps around the end of Franklin Mountain between the mountain and the river and across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico.  A much smaller place then than it was even when I was growing up, it was mostly centered around the old downtown area, where electrical trolley lines remained in use into the 1950s.  The central park area was a dusty plaza where you could still meet old western ranchers, cowboys and retired gunslingers in the 1920s.  Prohibition didn't have much effect on El Paso, since Juarez was literally right across the river and even then, before all the New Mexico farmers dropped the water levels to nearly nothing, it was easy enough to ford the river if you wanted to avoid the bridge and just ride over to a cantina.  Law and order was still a bit iffy, and mobsters never got much of a foothold in El Paso since smuggling booze wasn't really worthwhile across the border there given the logistics of getting it anywhere else, and no one actually needed anything smuggled there since they could just go over and get it themselves.  Which is not to say there wasn't crime -- but perhaps surprisingly, it tended to read more like a Louis L'Amour novel than a Dashiell Hammett novel.  El Paso's big claim to fame (other than being founded in 1581, making it the second oldest city in North America) was the railroad stop which was just about halfway between Houston and LA.  There wasn't a ton of major manufacturing there at the time, though the ASARCO plant was opening around that time to smelt the ores being mined up in New Mexico (and down in old Mexico, for that matter), and most of the local economy was still based on either ranching or farming (mostly orchards and nut farms down in the Rio Grande valley -- which still does all of that today).  The population was probably about half Latino and half Caucasion, with very few Black people living there at the time (slavery was never a productive economic system in the west, even under the Confederacy, and so there just weren't a lot of slaves/former slaves in the area -- especially since, when they left the old slave states, they tended to move north to the more industrialized states where the jobs were).  The local terrain and weather are straight out of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, so if you've seen any of those movies, you know just what the El Paso area looked like back in the day (and still, to a large extent, does).  During heavy rains, the streets flooded and if you were caught in a gully during a rainstorm (even one not particularly close to you) there was a distinct chance of being drowned or killed by large logs or rocks being washed into you by the runoff (still true today, by the way -- stay out of gullies if you see a rainstorm hitting a nearby mountain or mesa top out there).

 

There were very few high-rise buildings (which I'll define as a building higher than four stories) in El Paso in the 1920s, with some more of them being built towards the end of the Roaring Twenties.  Some streets were paved, most were not, and even the downtown area tended to be dusty most of the time.  Automobiles were in use in the area, though still considered somewhat of a novelty by most people given the quality of the local roads outside of town until the mid-30's or so.  Cars tended to be older and more robust models like the "T" (easy to fix, and easy to tow home with a horse if necessary) for a while longer than they were elsewhere in the US.  It wasn't until the late 40's and '50s that El Paso became more "LA-like" in terms of cars and roads and high school kids, yada, yada, yada.  Probably a good half of the construction at the beginning of the era was adobe with most of the remainder being load-bearing walls with timber supports.  As I noted, it wasn't until the late 20's-early 30's that downtown started to get more multiple story buildings higher than three or four stories built.  In other ways, the town was fairly mainstream, though, with electricity, running water, telephones and radios arriving and entering use along the same lines as they did in other cities of the day.  Woolworth and Kresge and Sears all had stores downtown, as did many other major chains of the era. 

 

There was a small college (the Texas College of Mines) built up on the slopes of Mount Franklin (the major mountain that comes right down to the river on the western side of town and serves as the end of the Rocky Mountains before the Sierra Madres pick up a mile or so south of the river -- thus the name of the town; "El Paso del Norte," "The Pass of the North").  TCM would eventually become The University of Texas at El Paso, but for now was mostly a school for mining engineers and geologists.  One of the school's major claims to fame (to this day) is the architecture of the builidngs is based on the architecture of Nepal, and all the buildings (four buildings, in the 1920s) have a faint Nepalese look to them.  Indian tribes in the local area included the Ysleta Indian tribe (a small Pueblo Indian group) and the Apaches who lived north of the city in New Mexico in the mountains where it was cooler and wetter (and south of the city in the mountains of Mexico in "rancherios").  For the most part, they were merely poor now, though some of the older men remembered their days of youth forty years earlier when "lifting some hair" was considered quite the thing to do in some social circles, and their run-ins with the cavalry (both US and Mexican) were the stuff of legends.  The Lincoln County War was fought only a few dozen miles north of El Paso, and Billy the Kid was actually put on trial in Las Cruces (before escaping), a small New Mexican town about 45 miles north of El Paso along the Rio Grande.

 

El Paso would make a good place for passing through for scenery and descriptive purposes, and could easily serve as a setting for a scenario or two -- especially if you were using the "modern western" pulp style for a while.  Criminal activity would probably revolve more around the classic cattle rustlin'/horse thievin' sort of things with the occasional bank robbery thrown in.  There was a small military post (Fort Bliss, still extant -- and quite large -- today) which was an old cavalry post and kind of a sleepy place, at least until about 1938 or so.  It was still there mostly to keep an eye on things in old Mexico (the Villa raid up into New Mexico was only four years prior to 1920, and Fort Bliss was used by General Pershing to stage his campaign against Pancho Villa from) so while there is a possibility of some international intrigue, given that Mexico wasn't much of a threat to the United States, it might not amount to much (though a few Nazis in the 30's could always enliven things).  Weird Science probably wouldn't work too well either, unless an evil mastermind needed an old abandoned mine to work from and the characters show up in El Paso to hunt him out of the mountains around there.  Archaeology, on the other hand, has enormous potential -- especially given the legends of lost gold and lost mines that abound in the area, and the old mission sites (which could potentially contain clues, of course) that exist in the city and it's vicinity both north and south of the border.  Horror campaigns could do a lot worse than take a look at an old Call of Cthulhu scenario entitled "The Secret of Castro Negro" for inspiration for the American Southwest.  Set in the area around Silver City up in the Gila Forest and Animas Mountains area, it would be easy enough to move closer to El Paso if that was desirable for some reason, though frankly its location works really well where it is.  Air adventures would work well in terms of actual mechanics -- the weather is nearly always clear, and in the winter can be quite cold, with very little humidity and lots of relatively flat ground to land planes on.  Mind you, if you're not careful, you'll break an axle or lose a wheel on all the rocks and what not, but you can at least walk away from the wreck if you have any luck and skill at all.  It would be hard to conceal a secret air base, though again, those old abandoned mines (some of them surprisingly large considering the technology when they were built) could be reconfigured for aircraft use and would at least keep the ground support activities out of the open.  The runways would still tend to be pretty visible from the air though -- there's nothing much you can use to conceal them out there, and they'd get marked up pretty fast when you leveled them and removed the rocks, creosote bushes, and cactus from the runway, to say nothing of the wheel marks when the planes touch down.

 

Hopefully someone finds this useful.

[Boll Weevil]

Re: Your Hometown For Pulp Now if that ain't a great plot seed, I don't know what is! Speaking of which, I highly recommend the documentary Dark Days (2000) about squatters living in an abandoned New York City subway tunnel. It's not pulp, but has all kinds of campaign potential...

As a lifelong Cincinnati resident, I have based all of my campaigns here. We do have the Hall of Justice, after all  . In Cincy, you can take tours of haunted places as well as a really cool tour of the old subway tunnels. In the pulp era (ok, today too...things move in geologic time here), Cincinnati was extremely conservative and very Catholic - especially on the West Side. To that end, the good Catholic boys would go across the river to Newport (KY) for their gambling, drinking and the ladies. If you ever visit Newport, stop by The Syndicate for a tour of the old speakeasy tour. 

[shadowcat1313]

My Hometown for Pulp: going to have to do some research on this one... but considering I am from a town called Normal...  lets start with the founding of State Farm Insurance... Al Capone was known to spend time in the area too.

[JmOz]

The town I work in, Minot ND was known as Little Chicago...I think it would work well

 

http://www.minotmemories.com/2011/10/little-chicago.html

[Barwickian]

Which home town? York, where I was born and grew up; Dubai, where I live, or...

 

Yeah, let's have Mombasa, where my wife's family lives and where we have our retirement home. I have a 1938 guidebook to Mombasa, with the bus and ferry timetables from 1941 tucked inside. That gives me the pre-independence street names.

 

 

Too long, didnt read: Ivory trade, slavers, great white hunters, shipwrecks, ruined cities, man-eating lions, colonial murder mystery, monkeys, black mambas, caves, secret tunnels.

 

Mombasa is an island nestled in inlets off the Indian Ocean, between Kenya and Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika). Most of the local stone (and hence building material) is coral.

 

In the Pulp Era, Mombasa's 16th century Portuguese castle, Fort Jesus, has been wrested from the hands of the Mazrui governors who ruled Mombasa under the Sultanate of Oman, as independents and under Zanzibar. Under the Mazrui's it was a focal point of the slave trade to Zanzibar - that was stamped out by the British, who now keep the fort as a prison for both criminals and political prisoners (those opposed to British colonial rule). Legend has it there's a hidden tunnel from the fort to a promontory on the south of the island. Fort Jesus lies on the east of the island, facing the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese built a second fort, Fort St Joseph, on the ruins of an earlier Arab fort, but by the 20th century only ruind remain. Offshore from Fort Jesus is the wreck of a 17th century Portuguese frigate.

 

Old Town is ancient. The Arab geographer Al Idrisi mentions it in 1151AD; Ibn Battuta (the Arab Marco Polo) visited it briefly in the 14th century, and praised its beautiful wooden mosques. Arab traders began settling in East Africa from at least the 10th century; by the 13th century they were building settlements. Their descendents are the Waswahili, the People of the Coast, of mixed Arab and African descent. The whole coast is littered with ruined Swahili towns (of which more later), but the major trade centres of Lamu, Mombasa and Zanzibar survive. Old Town, like the Stone Towns of Lamu and Zanzibar, is full of narrow streets, overhung with wooden balconies, with ancient, beautifully carved wooden doorways centuries old leading into the houses. Dhows from Oman and Arabia call at Old Town Port, on the north east of the island, linking Mombasa with the Sultanate and through it Persia and India.

The British use the new (in the 1930s) port at Kilindini, on the south west. From there passengers and goods are offloaded onto the East African Railway, which leads to Nairobi (with an extension into Uganda). Construction of the railway, in the 1890s, was hampered by the man-eating lions of the Tsavo, the Ghost and the Darkness (hold on, we get far pulpier than that). Mombasa in the 1930s is home to 43,252 people (1931 census).

 

Two ferries link the island with the South Coast; two bridges give road links to the North Coast. Near the Nyali bridge, by a baobob tree, is the grave of Sheikh Mvita, legendary founder of Mombasa. At an annual festival, people lay bread, betel nuts and money on the grave, before dancing round it to the beat of drums and singing traditional songs. After that, the offerings on the grave are distributed to the poor.

 

Heading south, across the Likoni Ferry, the road to Tanganyika, just a few miles away, lies the village of Shimoni, where spider-infested caves were once used to hold slaves bound for Zanzibar. From Shimoni, it's a short dhow trip across to Wassini Island, where a coral forest grows inland and the villagers fish for cattle in the mangrove forest (really, they do - years ago one of the fishermen decided to herd cows. He brought some across from the mainland, but when he died the herd went feral. Now, on high feasts, the fishermen take their nets into the forest to see of they can catch a cow.)

 

 

 

Heading north from Mombasa (past our house), you get to Takaungu, where the Great White Hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford's character in Out of Africa) had his home. Past that, you're in the mamba zone, with both black and green mambas, then at the monkey infested ruined city of Gedi (sometimes spelt Gede), an ancient, abandoned Swahili trading town in a coastal jungle infested with monkeys. Beyond that, Malindi, where Vasco de Gama made landfall. And slightly north of that, the site where one of the Chinese admiral Zheng He's ships was wrecked in the 15th century. To this day, some people claim descent from shipwrecked Chinese sailors.

 

 

It's also on this coast that Juanita Carberry claims her mother hid the gun used in the most famous murder of the Happy Valley Set - a group of Upper Class Twit colonists near Nyeri, much further inland, who drank and shagged each other crazy, until Sir 'Jock' Delves Broughton shot Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Errol, in 1941.

 

Was this a competition? Do I win?