Trying to make sense of my surroundings, and myself, in an ever-changing city. Dreamer and imagineer.
Memorial Device: Alternative National Treasure
Looking at this George Washington Wilson pic of the Ca d'Oro Building, I'd often wondered about the golden horse further down the street. I was off!
Over in the West End last evening for a music thing and, with an hour to kill, followed the route I used to walk to work in my first job, 40 years ago, at Glasgow Uni - from the corner of Kersland Street, down Vinicombe, along Cranworth Street, to Cresswell Lane.
Opened in 1927, by travelling Lancashire show family, the Greens, who had relocated to Glasgow's Vinegar Hill, it advertised itself as Europe's largest cinema.
Opened in 1927 by eccentric city showbiz entrepreneur A.E. Pickard, the White Elephant was all things to all people, combining cinema, ballroom, restaurant, and dedicated on-site car park (a far-sighted but fairly futile move when very few Glaswegians owned a car).
Run by the Green family, the Lancashire showfolk who would later go on to build Green's Playhouse (which became the Apollo), one can only imagine what our Glaswegian forebears made of the scene.
Set up by schoolteacher and folk singer, Matt McGinn, he was once quoted as saying: "My job here is not to tell the kids to do this or do that, but to be there if they want help. Another important, if unofficial job, is to give them lights for their fags."
erect, at their own expense, six of their lamps in various parts of the city, for the purpose of automatically supplying hot water, tea, coffee etc., on the penny-in-the-slot principle.'
Born into the dying days of Native culture, as the ‘white man’s’ appetite for land pushed further and further west, in 1890, Charging Thunder joined the Ghost Dance cult.
The Breton boys were, for many Scots, the first and only 'Frenchies' we'd ever met, and they are the reason why we always think of a typical Frenchman as wearing a beret and a stripey Breton jersey.
