One of my favorite blogs to check every day is
Shorpy.com, a photo blog with images that range from the 19th through the mid 20th century. The photos hail from all over the country, as best I can tell. Some are of individual people, while others might feature historic downtown city scapes, or great historic building interiors. Just the other day (and you have to read frequently to catch everything, as there are sometimes four or five posts a day) they posted a great image of a late Victorian hotel in Tampa, Florida. The post is titled "Magic Kingdom".
Now I don't know about you, but I find the thought of staying in such a place pretty magical myself. Today it is still standing (thankfully!) but is now used by the University of Tampa, as well as housing a museum. It is now on my so-called bucket list of historic places I would like to someday visit.
The only problem is that I would really like to see it when it first opened, when it was a luxury hotel. I would love to take tea in the dining room, sitting in the French chairs that Mr. Platt and his wife (the owners) brought back with them from Europe. Such an adventure - which is obviously a dream - is the sort of thing I love to think about, calling such dreams my back in time bucket list. Meaning that if I could magically float through time and space, this lovely hotel would be one of my stops.
I know that such a list is silly, but I suspect that a lot of you have them. After all, don't all history nuts occasionally comment "Oh, if I could go back in time and see it for myself!"? My list is a long one, full of exciting internationally significant events, elegent 19th century hotels, and quirky mid-century tourist destinations. Among the rather diverse and sometimes peculiar things I'd love to go back in time and see are:
Prince Albert's 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition
The first of the grand old world's fairs, this expostion has been remembered in countless movies and books. I suspect, however, that none of them capture half of the magic of the real thing. These expositions were such amazing conglamarations of the odd, the advanced, and the beautiful. Chicago 1893, St. Louis 1904, Chicago 1933....I'd love to have seen them all.
Disneyland, c. 1960
This one might surprise you, but truthfully, there's nothing more American than Disney. I've been to Disney World twice, and though it's not high on my list to see again at the moment, I really did enjoy it. I've never been to the original, though. Can't you just picture me flying through the sky with Peter Pan in my stiffly crinolined skirt, circa 1960?
The U.S. Capitol Dome under construction.
As a Gilded Age nut, I tend to shy away from too much Civil War history, which is, in my opinion, drastically overdone. And while I would never have wanted to have seen the war firsthand, I do sometimes wish that I could go back in time and pop magically in and out of Washington D.C., where the U.S. Capitol's big dome was then under construction. It must have been so neat to see that dome being built.
Drayton Hall, 1800
I've had the pleasure of visiting Drayton Hall in South Carolina now twice. It is a magical National Trust property that provides wonderful insight into the Carolina Gold rice culture of the early 19th century. You can just feel the grandeur of the time seeping out of the walls of this old beauty, which is still breathtaking today. I can hardly imagine, though, how much more grand it would have been in its hayday. Sigh.
So now that you've seen some of my back in time bucket list, what's on yours?
2 comments:
I would have liked to have been there for great discoveries, like landing at Australia and cataloging all the unique wildlife for the very first time with Captain James Cook in 1770, or to have been there at the disovery (by outsiders, because of courselocals knew all about it) of the remains of Macchu Picchu with Hiram Bingham in 1911. I missed my calling. I should have been an adventurer.
I've not been inside the Tampa Bay Hotel, but I have been there 'way back in the late '70s - early '80s when it was sitting derelict and bereft, surrounded by chain link fence in a futile attempt to keep vandals out. I, too, wish I could have seen it in it's glory days.
One of my favorite historical, just-for-fun novels (Ever After by Elswyth Thane) mentions it briefly as some of the characters stayed there while their family members waited to ship out to Cuba in the Spanish-American War.
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