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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh @[email protected] · 2026-03-19 · 06:00 UTC

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.
The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.
A quiet, shady spot with the most dramatic of views. Castle Terrace Gardens in 1945, H. D. Wyllie photograph. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.
Comparison of 1876 and 1967 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh showing the location of the Castle Terrace Gardens and then Car Park. Note in 1966 the Synod Hall building, formerly the New Edinburgh Theatre, had been demolished in expectation that a new opera house would be built in that location. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.
Copy of the 1938 police plan for parking in the centre of Edinburgh. The Scotsman, 24th March 1938
The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.
It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.
Photograph of a scale model of central Edinburgh produced to accompany The Abercrombie Report of 1949, showing grand plans for new urban motorways throughout the city centre. Look closely and you can see the lower deck roads inserted below Princes Street and the Mound! Notice also that Waverley Station has been put underground and that the entirety of Princes Street has been demolished and replaced with new city blocks complete with mezzanine-level walkways.
Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:
[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow
Artists impression of the approved scheme for East Princes Street Gardens car park. Scotsman, 20th September 1955.
The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.
Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.
A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.
Edinburgh’s first parking meter was installed in October 1960 outside the City Chambers; but it was at this time only for display purposes to show the curious public what they might look like. Photograph in Edinburgh: The Fabulous Fifties by Paul Harris, 1995
Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The building with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redevelopment.
The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.
Castle Terrace Gardens, looking north with King’s Stables Road below on the right. Probably 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP612535 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.
Invitation for tenders for the Castle Terrace Car Park, The Contract Journal, August 24th 1961
Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.
Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!
Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962
The destruction of Castle Terrace Garden, December 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611220 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.
Castle Terrace Gardens in January 1962, a few weeks after the trees were felled and the excavators moved in to start levelling the site. Scotsman, 11th January 1962
If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.
Castle Terrace car park struggles to emerge from the ground in July 1962. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611696 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.
August 10th 1964. Lord Provost Duncan M. Weatherstone opens the partially completed Car Park to a thoroughly disinterested looking audience of official onlookers. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP524936 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.
April 22nd 1965, a photo which apparently shows a full car park even though the majority of it was still not yet completed. Scotsman photograph.
It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!
In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.
Public Notice of 23rd April 1980 in the Scotsman confirming increased parking charges at Castle Terrace and other council-operated off-street car parks.
The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.
We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.
David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman
Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!
Castle Terrace Car Park from King’s Stables Road, 2015, by Jim Barton CC-by-SA-2.0 via Geograph.org.uk
NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.
An aerial photo of the Synod Hall gap site in 1989, 23 years after the block had been cleared in preparation for the Opera Hall that never was. Eventually the new Traverse Theatre and Saltire House would occupy the spot. Castle Terrace Car Park is on the left. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.
Castle Terrace Car Park looking towards its namesake, 2022. © Fiona Coutts via Britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh @[email protected] · 2026-03-19 · 06:00 UTC

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.
The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.
A quiet, shady spot with the most dramatic of views. Castle Terrace Gardens in 1945, H. D. Wyllie photograph. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.
Comparison of 1876 and 1967 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh showing the location of the Castle Terrace Gardens and then Car Park. Note in 1966 the Synod Hall building, formerly the New Edinburgh Theatre, had been demolished in expectation that a new opera house would be built in that location. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.
Copy of the 1938 police plan for parking in the centre of Edinburgh. The Scotsman, 24th March 1938
The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.
It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.
Photograph of a scale model of central Edinburgh produced to accompany The Abercrombie Report of 1949, showing grand plans for new urban motorways throughout the city centre. Look closely and you can see the lower deck roads inserted below Princes Street and the Mound! Notice also that Waverley Station has been put underground and that the entirety of Princes Street has been demolished and replaced with new city blocks complete with mezzanine-level walkways.
Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:
[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow
Artists impression of the approved scheme for East Princes Street Gardens car park. Scotsman, 20th September 1955.
The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.
Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.
A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.
Edinburgh’s first parking meter was installed in October 1960 outside the City Chambers; but it was at this time only for display purposes to show the curious public what they might look like. Photograph in Edinburgh: The Fabulous Fifties by Paul Harris, 1995
Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The building with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redevelopment.
The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.
Castle Terrace Gardens, looking north with King’s Stables Road below on the right. Probably 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP612535 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.
Invitation for tenders for the Castle Terrace Car Park, The Contract Journal, August 24th 1961
Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.
Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!
Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962
The destruction of Castle Terrace Garden, December 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611220 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.
Castle Terrace Gardens in January 1962, a few weeks after the trees were felled and the excavators moved in to start levelling the site. Scotsman, 11th January 1962
If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.
Castle Terrace car park struggles to emerge from the ground in July 1962. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611696 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.
August 10th 1964. Lord Provost Duncan M. Weatherstone opens the partially completed Car Park to a thoroughly disinterested looking audience of official onlookers. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP524936 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.
April 22nd 1965, a photo which apparently shows a full car park even though the majority of it was still not yet completed. Scotsman photograph.
It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!
In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.
Public Notice of 23rd April 1980 in the Scotsman confirming increased parking charges at Castle Terrace and other council-operated off-street car parks.
The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.
We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.
David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman
Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!
Castle Terrace Car Park from King’s Stables Road, 2015, by Jim Barton CC-by-SA-2.0 via Geograph.org.uk
NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.
An aerial photo of the Synod Hall gap site in 1989, 23 years after the block had been cleared in preparation for the Opera Hall that never was. Eventually the new Traverse Theatre and Saltire House would occupy the spot. Castle Terrace Car Park is on the left. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.
Castle Terrace Car Park looking towards its namesake, 2022. © Fiona Coutts via Britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh @[email protected] · 2026-03-19 · 06:00 UTC

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.
The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.
A quiet, shady spot with the most dramatic of views. Castle Terrace Gardens in 1945, H. D. Wyllie photograph. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.
Comparison of 1876 and 1967 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh showing the location of the Castle Terrace Gardens and then Car Park. Note in 1966 the Synod Hall building, formerly the New Edinburgh Theatre, had been demolished in expectation that a new opera house would be built in that location. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.
Copy of the 1938 police plan for parking in the centre of Edinburgh. The Scotsman, 24th March 1938
The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.
It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.
Photograph of a scale model of central Edinburgh produced to accompany The Abercrombie Report of 1949, showing grand plans for new urban motorways throughout the city centre. Look closely and you can see the lower deck roads inserted below Princes Street and the Mound! Notice also that Waverley Station has been put underground and that the entirety of Princes Street has been demolished and replaced with new city blocks complete with mezzanine-level walkways.
Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:
[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow
Artists impression of the approved scheme for East Princes Street Gardens car park. Scotsman, 20th September 1955.
The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.
Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.
A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.
Edinburgh’s first parking meter was installed in October 1960 outside the City Chambers; but it was at this time only for display purposes to show the curious public what they might look like. Photograph in Edinburgh: The Fabulous Fifties by Paul Harris, 1995
Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The building with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redevelopment.
The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.
Castle Terrace Gardens, looking north with King’s Stables Road below on the right. Probably 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP612535 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.
Invitation for tenders for the Castle Terrace Car Park, The Contract Journal, August 24th 1961
Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.
Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!
Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962
The destruction of Castle Terrace Garden, December 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611220 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.
Castle Terrace Gardens in January 1962, a few weeks after the trees were felled and the excavators moved in to start levelling the site. Scotsman, 11th January 1962
If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.
Castle Terrace car park struggles to emerge from the ground in July 1962. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611696 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.
August 10th 1964. Lord Provost Duncan M. Weatherstone opens the partially completed Car Park to a thoroughly disinterested looking audience of official onlookers. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP524936 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.
April 22nd 1965, a photo which apparently shows a full car park even though the majority of it was still not yet completed. Scotsman photograph.
It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!
In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.
Public Notice of 23rd April 1980 in the Scotsman confirming increased parking charges at Castle Terrace and other council-operated off-street car parks.
The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.
We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.
David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman
Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!
Castle Terrace Car Park from King’s Stables Road, 2015, by Jim Barton CC-by-SA-2.0 via Geograph.org.uk
NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.
An aerial photo of the Synod Hall gap site in 1989, 23 years after the block had been cleared in preparation for the Opera Hall that never was. Eventually the new Traverse Theatre and Saltire House would occupy the spot. Castle Terrace Car Park is on the left. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.
Castle Terrace Car Park looking towards its namesake, 2022. © Fiona Coutts via Britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh @[email protected] · 2026-03-19 · 06:00 UTC

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.
The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.
A quiet, shady spot with the most dramatic of views. Castle Terrace Gardens in 1945, H. D. Wyllie photograph. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.
Comparison of 1876 and 1967 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh showing the location of the Castle Terrace Gardens and then Car Park. Note in 1966 the Synod Hall building, formerly the New Edinburgh Theatre, had been demolished in expectation that a new opera house would be built in that location. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.
Copy of the 1938 police plan for parking in the centre of Edinburgh. The Scotsman, 24th March 1938
The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.
It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.
Photograph of a scale model of central Edinburgh produced to accompany The Abercrombie Report of 1949, showing grand plans for new urban motorways throughout the city centre. Look closely and you can see the lower deck roads inserted below Princes Street and the Mound! Notice also that Waverley Station has been put underground and that the entirety of Princes Street has been demolished and replaced with new city blocks complete with mezzanine-level walkways.
Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:
[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow
Artists impression of the approved scheme for East Princes Street Gardens car park. Scotsman, 20th September 1955.
The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.
Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.
A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.
Edinburgh’s first parking meter was installed in October 1960 outside the City Chambers; but it was at this time only for display purposes to show the curious public what they might look like. Photograph in Edinburgh: The Fabulous Fifties by Paul Harris, 1995
Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The building with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redevelopment.
The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.
Castle Terrace Gardens, looking north with King’s Stables Road below on the right. Probably 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP612535 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.
Invitation for tenders for the Castle Terrace Car Park, The Contract Journal, August 24th 1961
Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.
Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!
Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962
The destruction of Castle Terrace Garden, December 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611220 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.
Castle Terrace Gardens in January 1962, a few weeks after the trees were felled and the excavators moved in to start levelling the site. Scotsman, 11th January 1962
If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.
Castle Terrace car park struggles to emerge from the ground in July 1962. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611696 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.
August 10th 1964. Lord Provost Duncan M. Weatherstone opens the partially completed Car Park to a thoroughly disinterested looking audience of official onlookers. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP524936 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.
However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.
April 22nd 1965, a photo which apparently shows a full car park even though the majority of it was still not yet completed. Scotsman photograph.
It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!
In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.
Public Notice of 23rd April 1980 in the Scotsman confirming increased parking charges at Castle Terrace and other council-operated off-street car parks.
The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.
We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.
David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman
Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!
Castle Terrace Car Park from King’s Stables Road, 2015, by Jim Barton CC-by-SA-2.0 via Geograph.org.uk
NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.
An aerial photo of the Synod Hall gap site in 1989, 23 years after the block had been cleared in preparation for the Opera Hall that never was. Eventually the new Traverse Theatre and Saltire House would occupy the spot. Castle Terrace Car Park is on the left. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.
Castle Terrace Car Park looking towards its namesake, 2022. © Fiona Coutts via Britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

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#August10 #Buildings #CarParks #Cars #castleTerrace #Edinburgh #Infrastructure #JamesGowans #Parks #Tollcross #transport

#august10 #buildings #carparks #cars #castleterrace #edinburgh
David Boles @[email protected] · 2026-03-10 · 12:06 UTC

The First Thing They Burn: Why War Always Comes for Beauty

When the Mongol army sacked Baghdad in 1258, they did not stop at killing the Caliph. They threw the contents of the House of Wisdom into the Tigris. Manuscripts on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, and poetry turned the river black with ink for days. Killing people was not enough. What those people had made, what they had thought and dreamed and rendered into form, that had to be annihilated too. Kill a generation and you end a bloodline. Destroy what a generation built and you erase the proof that the bloodline mattered. This is strategy, not collateral damage. Invading armies have always understood something about beauty that peacetime democracies pretend not to know: beauty is power. A public display of beauty is a sovereignty claim, and no occupying force has ever been able to tolerate one.
The Testimony of Walls
When an army takes a city, the administrative buildings get repurposed. The granaries get seized. The roads still work. But a cathedral cannot serve a conqueror who worships a different god. A public statue celebrating a national hero cannot remain standing in a square patrolled by the forces that hero fought against. And a library full of a people’s philosophy, jurisprudence, and literature makes a case, just by sitting there on its shelves, that the conquered had minds worth preserving. That case has to be silenced.
The Nazis grasped this with clinical precision. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the regime’s art looting operation, was organized before the invasions were finished. It was catalogued and systematic. Over five million cultural objects were seized across occupied Europe. Paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Raphael ended up crated in salt mines or hanging in private collections. But for Jewish communities, the seizure of Torah scrolls, menorahs, and cultural artifacts did something beyond theft. If you take a people’s art, you remove the physical evidence that they existed as a civilization. You flatten them from a culture into a population, from citizens into bodies. Bodies are easier to dispose of than civilizations.
ISIS followed the same logic at Palmyra in 2015. The Temple of Baalshamin had stood for nearly two thousand years. It threatened no one. It held no weapons, commanded no strategic high ground, and generated no revenue for the Syrian state. But it was beautiful, and old, and it testified to a version of human civilization that predated the caliphate’s claim to be the sole legitimate ordering of human life. So they packed it with explosives and filmed the detonation for propaganda. They filmed it. The explosion was not a byproduct of the war. The explosion was the content.
The Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 spoke the same language. Mullah Omar initially said the statues would be preserved. Then the order reversed: destroy them. Artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, and dynamite were unleashed on sixth-century sandstone carvings. Those statues had survived over 1,400 years of Islamic governance in the region without incident. The destruction had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with demonstrating total authority, authority that extended beyond the living and reached backward into the inherited visual landscape of Afghan memory. If you can obliterate what a people have looked at for a millennium, you have announced a power that administration alone cannot claim.
Beauty as Collective Selfhood
So why does beauty threaten power? Strip away the geopolitics and the answer is startlingly intimate.
A fountain in a town square is not decoration. People sit near it, eat lunch beside it, talk beside it, propose marriage in front of it. Over decades, a public work of beauty weaves itself into the social fabric of a place. It accrues meaning the way a family home accrues meaning, not because of its market value but because of what happened there. The residents of Sarajevo did not love their National Library because it held books. They loved it because it was theirs, because its existence confirmed that Sarajevo was a city of readers, of thinkers, of people who built beautiful things and expected them to last. When Serbian forces shelled it in August 1992, destroying an estimated 1.5 million volumes and over 155,000 rare books and manuscripts, the target was never the building. The target was the idea of Sarajevo as a civilized place.
Beauty is identity made visible. A mural on a government building announces: we are the kind of people who commission murals. A concert hall full on a Tuesday night announces: we gather to hear music performed with skill, and we do it on a weeknight because it matters that much. Under occupation, every one of these announcements becomes defiance. They all say the same thing: we had a life before you arrived, and that life had grace.
Conquerors understand this instinctively. Occupation depends on the conquered internalizing a particular story: the old order was weak, corrupt, worthless, and the new order is the only legitimate reality. But every beautiful thing that predates the conquest talks back. Every church, every mosaic, every hand-carved doorframe contradicts the occupier’s narrative just by continuing to exist. Something fine was here before you, and it did not need you.
The American Erasure
Bring this logic home. The United States is not being invaded by a foreign army. But beauty is being removed from American public life through a mechanism that is slower and quieter than artillery while producing a structurally identical outcome: defunding.
The National Endowment for the Arts runs on a budget that, adjusted for inflation, has been shrinking for decades. In 2024 its allocation stood at roughly $207 million, which is approximately what the Department of Defense spends in under three hours. The NEA funds the infrastructure that makes beauty visible where people actually live: murals in post offices, sculptures in civic plazas, theater programs in rural communities, music education in public schools. Cut that funding and you do not inconvenience artists. You remove beauty from the spaces where ordinary people encounter it without paying admission.
Arts education in American public schools has been gutted with special thoroughness. Since the 1980s, school boards under budget pressure have treated music, visual art, drama, and dance as luxuries to be trimmed first. The framing is always fiscal: we cannot afford it. But the effect is ideological, and it compounds. A child who never learns to draw, who never stands on a stage, who never reads music, becomes an adult for whom beauty is something that happens elsewhere, to other people, in expensive places behind glass. Beauty turns into a class marker instead of a civic inheritance. The public square goes aesthetically bare, and nobody notices because nobody was taught to notice.
No conspiracy is required. Indifference operating over time is the peacetime equivalent of what artillery accomplishes in a week. The Mongols threw the books into the river. American school boards stopped buying them. The destination is the same: a population severed from its own capacity to create, recognize, and demand beauty.
The Deeper Threat
Beneath the political, there is a still more fundamental reason beauty makes power nervous. Beauty tells the truth. Not factual truth in the journalistic sense, but existential truth: that human life has dimensions which cannot be quantified, administered, or optimized. A Rothko painting produces no revenue. A Beethoven string quartet contributes nothing to GDP. A poem by Wislawa Szymborska will never improve worker productivity. These things assert, simply by existing, that the economic vocabulary fails to describe what it means to be alive.
Authoritarians have always known this. Stalin did not go after Shostakovich because the symphonies were bad. He went after him because the symphonies were good, because they carried an emotional truth that exceeded the party’s official version of reality and, by exceeding it, exposed it as insufficient. Mao’s Cultural Revolution did not target art by accident. Art is where a culture keeps its unauthorized thoughts, its unofficial feelings, its capacity for complexity that slogans cannot hold. The Red Guards who smashed temple carvings and burned classical texts were doing what the Mongols had done in Baghdad seven centuries earlier: destroying the evidence that human experience is richer than any ideology can contain.
Beauty is an argument for human dignity. A carved stone lintel above a doorway in a medieval village means that someone, centuries ago, decided it was worth spending hours making that doorway more than functional. That impulse, the impulse to ornament, is the fundamental assertion of human worth. We are not creatures that only eat, sleep, reproduce, and die. We are creatures that decorate our world because the world, and our brief presence in it, deserves decoration.
Destroy the ornamentation, by bombs or by budget cuts, and you deny the premise. The invading army denies it with fire. The indifferent legislature denies it with a line item. And the child who graduates from an American high school without ever having held a paintbrush has received the same message the people of Palmyra received when the temple came down: beauty is not for you.
The Preservation Imperative
When a government defunds the arts, it is declaring what kind of citizens it wants: consumers instead of creators, audiences instead of participants, workers instead of whole human beings. When an army shells a library, it makes the same declaration with more efficient tools. The scale differs. The intent rhymes.
Preserving beauty, then, is a form of resistance, and it always has been. A community that maintains a public mural, a school that fights to keep a music program, a city that funds a free museum day, these are acts of civilizational self-defense, whether the people performing them think of it that way or not.
The people who rebuilt the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia understood. Croat forces destroyed the bridge in 1993, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture that had spanned the Neretva River since 1566. Its reconstruction, completed in 2004, was not an engineering project. It was a rebuttal. You may destroy what we build, but we will build it again, because the building is the point.
In the American context, every fight over arts funding is a fight over something much larger than a budget line. Do we believe beauty belongs in public life, or are we content to let it retreat behind gallery walls and subscription paywalls? Does a child in rural Nebraska deserve the same access to the experience of beauty as a child on the Upper East Side? What kind of civilization do we intend to be?
The armies that burn the beautiful things know exactly what they are destroying. The rest of us should start asking whether we know what we are losing.
#afghan #annihilation #art #beauty #danger #destruction #palmyra #persia #temple #testimony #usa #war

#afghan #annihilation #art #beauty #danger #destruction
cmrosens @[email protected] · 2026-03-02 · 10:30 UTC

A Very Queer March – Itch Bundle
Buy 63 items for $60 Regularly ~$249 Save 75%!
A bundle of queer books for March just dropped! Check out this bundle hosted by Niranjan with content from 43 creators, totalling 63 titles.
The bundle of 63 titles is available for $60, which is a saving of 75%. (It would be $249 to buy all the books individually at their usual markup.)
You can also click on the covers of books that particularly interest you to buy them individually, or get them in the bundle for just less than $1 each.
This contains titles by authors who have appeared here in Author Spotlights!
Check out Spotlight posts by Katta Kis, Merlina Garance, Shane Blackheart, Odessa Silver, and H.S. Kallinger, all highlighting their work. I’ve also interviewed Amara Lynn previously on queer superheroes, and you can also check out my podcast episode with L.B. Shimaira. If that tempts you, go grab the bundle, or get their work separately.
All these eBooks are DRM free, which means you can download them, send them to your choice of eReader, and gift them to someone else to do the same.
A Very Queer March Bundle Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com
Includes the Following Titles:
Best Friends Bury Bodies by C.M. Rosens with Bisexual, Gay, Aro, Poly, and Sapphic rep
When a search for a missing music star leads to murder, how far will his old friends – and old flame – go?
The Day We Ate Grandad by C.M. Rosens with Pansexual, Bisexual, Polyam, Gay, Ace and Aro rep
What’s family without a little sacrifice?
Like Salt And Whisky by Merlina Garance with genderqueer and trans rep
A nostalgic second chance queer romance between a heartbroken man and his long lost childhood best friend who might just be the love of his life.
Paris at Nightfall by Merlina Garance with gay rep
“In an early 20th century Paris emptied of its population and surveilled by the Army, two men are trying to survive.
Would that include falling in love?”
My Lord by L. B. Shimaira with Bi, pan, polyam rep
“A queer, polyamorous, slow-burn erotic gothic horror novel.
Meya is Lord Deminas’ latest chambermaid and favourite source of blood to drink. To avoid being his next servant to vanish, she must uncover all of Castle Tristanja’s dark secrets.”
Love at the Rock Show by Katta Kis with pansexual and other queer reps
“A burnt-out former pop star
A sweet, broke psychic… who hates him
The festival tour that changes everything “
No Love in LA by Katta Kis with queer and non-binary rep
“A heavy metal goddess with a crush on…
The stern goth who hates her…
The spark that ignites them both. “
Moth Pit by Amara Lynn with nonbinary, demi, and bi rep
A non-binary/male mothman romance.
Moth Woods by Amara Lynn with pansexual and genderfluid rep
A mothman x Flatwoods Monster West Virginia romance
A Demon to Save Me by H.S. Kallinger with Pansexual, bisexual, nonbinary trans, intersex, gay, lesbian, and demiromantic rep
Coming of age as a queer, neurodivergent, empathic dhampir is complicated enough without accidentally adding a demon into the mix.
Everything Is Wonderful Now by Shane Blackheart with Trans, poly, and disability/mental illness rep
When Dark is good and Light is evil…
Open Wound by Shane Blackheart with Trans, nonbinary, ace/aro, poly, disability, and mental illness rep
Vexis is something much more frightening and ancient than an angel or a demon…
Of Spells and Love by Odessa Silver with Aro/Ace rep
Will Noemi find peace within herself, or sink deeper into the depths?
Fimbulvinter’s Fires by A.M. Weald with gay and nonbinary rep
A heart-pounding yet tender tale of compassion, survival, and the lengths we’ll go to protect those we love.
Emergence by A.M. Weald with Achilean, Poly, Bi rep
A cozy post-apocalyptic queer romance where friends separated by sealed underground pods finally get the chance to meet.
Well of Souls by Harmonia Grey with trans and bi rep
A queer reimagining of the Eurydice and Orpheus tragic myth.
Errant Wings by S. Jean with gay rep
Errant Wings is the story of Asher who grows angel wings instead of the devil wings he expects, and now has to contend with his entire life in disarray and a city that wants to force him to live his life their way.
Once Upon a Wave of Witches by Helen Whistberry with ace, nonbinary, and lesbian rep
Join Beatrice and Amelia, two ladies of a certain age, on a wild adventure as they take to the skies and plunge into the depths of the sea to save a friend and break a curse. A unique and uplifting fantasy tale!
Doce Drosera by anita with lesbian, POC, and fat rep
Doce Drosera follows the lesbian biologist Vanessa travelling to the same region her situationship Mirella disappeared one month earlier. The grieving and Mirella’s haunting presence pushes Vanessa towards a twisted fate in the heart of the forest.
Higanbana by Jake Vanguard with gay, bi, trans, and depression rep
A young man trapped in an abusive relationship finds a fallen angel – will they save each other from their demon or will they drag each other deeper into Hell?
Impostor (Children of Lorcan Book 2) by J. M. Rose with Achillean, Bi, Poly, and Aroace rep
Nikolai Petrov hates lies.
The Nightstalker’s Mark by Joachim Heijndermans with lesbian, transgender, and blindness rep
After work, hospital worker Adrianne steals blood from the blood bank to provide for her lover, the vampire Carm.
Return the Rose by Joachim Heijndermans with lesbian rep and magical gender changing
The Beauty that had broken the Beast’s spell is now queen…yet she still yearns for the creature he was, consumed by erotic memories and desperate to have her beautiful beast returned to her.
Dark Heart of Ilmoure by Cara N. Delaney with Lesbian and bisexual rep
Iris Grey returns to her hometown hoping to heal old wounds. Instead, she finds a cold welcome, a family keeping secrets, and a sinister plot at the heart of the town.
Reborn in Ash by Gabrielle Steele with Non Binary, Demi, and Sapphic rep
Reborn in Ash is a dark epic fantasy where a thief discovers she can use newly-returned magic, but when she accidentally kills a man with it, she’s dragged into the service of the king and must train alongside other emerging mages – hard to do when she’s vowed to never care about anyone again.
Children by Bjørn Larssen with gay, aro/ace rep
Defy the Gods. Forge your destiny. A grimdark Norse mythology retelling.
Fruits of the Gods by William C. Tracy with sapphic and trans rep
Two sisters escape confinement, learn seasonal fruit magic, and plot to overthrow a corrupt government!
My Heart is Human by William C. Tracy with Gay and trans rep
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The Salt in the Sea by J.D. Rivers with achillean rep
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Lightbringer by J.D. Rivers with achilean rep
In a lonely valley where darkness laps at the ragged shore of reality, there rests a village where the people are reborn each time they die.
Gift of Darkness by C.L. Carhart with lesbian and bisexual rep
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Gift of Wind by C.L. Carhart with bisexual rep
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The Selkie and the Minstrel by Elis Madsen with ace, gay, lesbian, and nonbinary rep
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Our Simulated Selves by Nikki Null with Trans rep
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Vengeance Is Our Legacy by MC Burnell/ Jeremy Rayne with gay rep
They hated each other on sight but became best friends over the course of the adventure they didn’t want to have together.
The Exile and His Fool by MC Burnell/ Jeremy Rayne with gay rep
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A Life in Too Many Margins by S. E. Thomson with Trans, ace, queer, disabled, autistic, and ADHD rep
A fictional memoir of a quadruply-marginalized disaster-human with zero chill. A book for anyone who ever felt like too much or not enough.
Alchemy of Chaos by Ruth Miranda with queer, sapphic, gay, and bi rep
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Crystal Gunslinger – The Obsidian Outlaws by O.Z Laws with Bi and Trans rep
A Dark Fantasy Western Adventure
Yes, Captain by O.Z Laws with trans and lesbian rep
A short, sweet, and smutty story set among the stars.
A Stellar Spy by Maya Darjani with Bisexual rep
A futuristic, magic-fueled homage to the great classics of the spy genre: the cerebral musings of John le Carre with the excitement of The Americans.
The Star-Crossed Empire by Maya Darjani with Acespec rep
For fans of Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber, and KB Wagers. Get swept away into a lush and romantic space opera that transcends time, untangles court intrigue, and spans the entire Galactic Whorl.
UNGRATEFUL by mk zariel with trans and lesbian rep
poetry against queer assimilationism. anthems for the trans imagination. a rant about middle school boys. a six-year-old’s obsession with dragons. a lovesong for trans people at magic the gathering tournaments. a prose poem reminding us that assimilation is a problem. a reminder that computers are actually very gay. a trans-assimilationist dystopia. and hope.
UNTIMEZONE by mk zariel with trans and neuroqueer rep
i want to be reminded why i came out
The Towers of Nine by Alyssa Louttit with Aro, Ace, Lesbian, Gay and Pansexual rep
Serafina Stewart’s here to become a real witch and it’s going to take far more than ghosts and spiders to make her give up.
To Target the Heart by Aldrea Alien with Gay, PoC rep
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To Poison a Prince by Aldrea Alien with Gay, PoC, and other queer rep
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A Study on Magic and Crystals by May Barros with Aro/ace, demi, agender, alloaro, autistic, adhd, queerplatonic, and poly rep
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Amara e Luiza are two witches that live in a queerplatonic relationship.
Lost Blades by Liz Sauco with Ace and gay rep
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Colors of Magic by Liz Sauco with Ace, gay, bi, and lesbian rep
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Book 1 of the Revenant Records”
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Sequel to Structural Integrity
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Colliding Forces by Niranjan with Gay, BI, Aro, mental health/illness rep
His clock is ticking, and his only way out are the aliens who think him an enemy
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Tom MacInnes @[email protected] · 2026-02-04 · 18:09 UTC

Places, Everyone!…Music Venue #23/25: The First Avenue Nightclub in Minneapolis, Minnesota

I have always loved living near the water. That is funny to say because I am not a mariner, nor do I like most seafood and I have never learned how to swim. And yet, there is just something about being by water that soothes my soul. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that I was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. My entire childhood was framed by the sea, the smell of fish, the taste and feel of the salt air, the sound of the foghorn and the various shades of blue that the ocean liked to drape itself in depending on its mood.
As I matured, I moved inland to Ontario. I now live on the shores of Lake Ontario. While not as vast a body of water as the one I grew up beside, Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes and is still of a size suitable for influencing the type of weather we receive. In my town of Cobourg, Ontario, we have a beautiful beach. I have often found myself at this beach. On such occasions I have been prone to gazing out across the water. On a clear day you can see the smoke from the factories that line the American side of the Lake in Rochester, New York. A few years ago, for a mini family vacation, we decided to circumnavigate Lake Ontario to, quite literally, see what was on the other side. Rochester turned out to be the American version of my neighbouring Ontario city, Oshawa; big enough to have some interesting spots but small enough to see most of what merits seeing in a day or two. Just before leaving Rochester, we stopped at their version of a beautiful beach so that I could gaze across Lake Ontario to see if I could see our home. I could not. But I waved anyway and off we drove to Niagara Falls and back into Ontario.
Your author, in Rochester, NY, waving across Lake Ontario to Canada.
The next obvious iteration of that trip would be to circumnavigate all five Great Lakes. That would take us to such well known cities as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Minneapolis and then off to Duluth on the western tip of Lake Superior, before heading back across the border into Canada at Thunder Bay. In order to do that trip properly, we would need approximately two weeks, which is a lot of time to spend driving in a car beside the water. But I would happily do it because of the siren song of the Lakes and of how familiar and comfortable life would seem in towns and cities whose citizens are lucky enough to be lulled to sleep each night by the sound of waves lapping onto their shores. As a family, our journey would undoubtedly be filled with eating at Lakeside patios, hiking on trails that border the water and staying at accommodations that had a “water view”. Many of those cities mentioned earlier have lots to offer in the way of museums, sporting teams, world class restaurants and excellent shopping. But for me, if I was making this trip purely based upon my own selfish desires, the trip would be one built completely around music. I would visit the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. From there, it would be Motown in Detroit and the Blues filled venues of Chicago. And as I left Chicago and began heading north, up the western coast of Lake Michigan, I would veer slightly west and make sure that I hit the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul in which there exists, as many of you may know, a rich musical history that features many noteworthy local artists and bands such as The Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum, Semisonic, Babes in Toyland, Sugar, Morris Day and the Time and, of course, a certain someone you may have heard of called Prince
The music scene in Minneapolis is strong and varied, featuring acts that gained fame, most notably, in the genres of rock, punk/hardcore, pop and funk. Despite the diversity in musical interests held by musicians in the Twin Cities, one of the things that they all had in common was that they inevitably ended up playing at a musical venue known (by various names throughout its history) as The First Avenue Nightclub. If you have watched the movie Purple Rain featuring Prince and Morris Day and the Time then you have seen the inside of The First Avenue Nightclub because that was where all of the battle of the bands scenes were filmed. More recently, if you happened to watch a video of Bruce Springsteen debuting a song “The Streets of MInneapolis” that he had written about the government-initiated violence that is currently plaguing the city then, you have seen the inside of The First Avenue Nightclub because that was where the Boss played that night. Just about every artist and band of note that have toured through the Twin Cities played on the stage at First Avenue. From a historical and cultural perspective, it is fair to say that The First Avenue Nightclub holds the same level of significance as other nightclubs such as The Whiskey a go-go in Los Angeles and CBGBs in New York, just to mention two other iconic venues.

The First Avenue Nightclub was originally built to serve as a Greyhound bus terminal. When it turned into a music venue, the bus terminal’s large waiting room transformed into the dance floor and stage area. The former bus terminal restaurant was made into a second, smaller club called 7th Street Entry. It was in this smaller venue that newer, local bands cut their teeth and honed their skills before graduating to the main room in the First Avenue side of the club. As mentioned earlier, as the bus terminal became a music venue, there were several periods of transition that saw name changes, ownership changes, as well as stylistic changes when it came to the music played there. In the 1970s, the club was most initially successful as a discotheque. As the 1970s ended and the national music scene began to change with it, Minneapolis became known as the new home of funk, featuring acts such as Morris Day and the Time, producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and a diminutive young man named Prince Rogers Nelson, who exploded onto the world’s stage simply as Prince. Prince had a recording studio in Minneapolis known as Paisley Park where he would create all manner of songs with his band The Revolution. Whenever Prince wanted to give his new music a test run in front of a live audience, he would call up the folks who ran The First Avenue Nightclub and request the use of their stage. Thus, for a while, it was quite common for patrons to arrive for a regular evening of dancing and fun, only to have Prince and the Revolution suddenly appear on stage as a surprise act. It was also quite common for Prince to come to the club incognito to watch other bands, especially the emerging harcore/punk bands such as Husker Du and The Replacements. Thus, it was during the time when Prince began to gain fame on a national level that some would compare to Michael Jackson himself that he pitched a movie based loosely on his life called Purple Rain. Once given the go ahead for filming, it was a no brainer to have the live musical scenes filmed at The First Avenue Nightclub. Among the videos that I will soon post below, I will include a couple from the movie. The success of Purple Rain proved to be both a blessing and a curse for those who lived in Minneapolis and viewed First Avenue as their own private musical oasis. The blessing was that it brought fans of the movie from all over the world to Minneapolis so that they could visit the club, take photos and souvenirs from it and hopefully meet the increasingly reclusive Prince. The curse was that fans of the movie from all over the world came to Minneapolis to go to the club simply because of what they saw on film. They often had no interest in the local bands who might be playing on any given night, nor did they care about the history of the building or its cultural place in the heart of the community. In fact, First Avenue became such a tourist destination that local patrons began staying away in disgust. Luckily/sadly, as curses and blessings tend to go, the situation at The First Avenue Nightclub began to stabilize after Prince became more reclusive and his career entered a period of commercial decline prior to his death. In reality, Prince had simply recoiled away from the enormous attention he was receiving and shifted his focus to his home life and his studio work. There is indeed a price to be paid for fame. Like most people and/or trends that explode onto the national scene, the Minnesota scene in general, and Prince specifically, both ebbed into the background of the world’s consciousness. After the dizzying heights of Prince and The Revolution, Minneapolis became known for its punk/hardcore scene with The Replacements and Husker Du. From there, some rock-oriented bands like Semisonic and Soul Asylum became the standard bearers for the city’s musical scene.
Prince, onstage at the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue, in a scene from the film Purple Rain.
Today, Minneapolis is known for the violence that is plaguing the city under the bootheels of an organization known as I.C.E. Not surprisingly, while neighbours were helping neighbours and entire communities were rallying to defend each other and stand up to the scourge of I.C.E., it was a music concert that helped buoy the spirits of a citizenry under siege. Tom Morello, one of the founders of legendary rock band Rage Against the Machine, stepped up and helped to organize a fundraiser for the city. This concert took place at the only place it could have, really and that was The First Avenue Nightclub, the home of Minneapolis’ musical heart. Morello played, as did members of punk band Rise Against, as did, of course, the man himself, Bruce Springsteen. His song, “The Streets of Minneapolis” has instantly risen to the top of the music charts and is helping to give hope to a downtrodden nation that perhaps, just perhaps, the people do have some semblance of power and that the rise of authoritarianism may be halted yet. Time will tell. But if that proves to be the case then a lot of credit must go to those who took to the stage of The First Avenue Nightclub in support of those standing tall in the streets of Minneapolis.
Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello perform on the First Avenue stage in Minneapolis at the anti-I.C.E. music benefit concert.
Sometimes a song is just a song and music is simply the background soundtrack to the kindling of new romance or the drowning of old sorrows. But much like the sound of the sea is for me, music is something that is generally woven in the fabric of our beings and into the culture of the places in which it is played. Venues like The First Avenue Nightclub tend to be far more than bricks and mortar and, instead, serve as town squares, of a sort, where people who care about that place come to gather and talk and celebrate and share in what it means to live where they do. Venues such as First Avenue and 7th Street Entry are often the heartbeats of their communities. It is in that light that I would like to travel around the Great Lakes, all the way to Minneapolis and St. Paul. I would not go there as a Prince-crazed tourist but instead, to soak in a tiny bit of the atmosphere of a place that has borne witness to so many truly extraordinary events. I hold a lot of respect for the sea and I do so as well for those places where history has unfolded in ways that time will never forget. For that reason, my Great Lakes odyssey will be one marked by music and, in doing so, I will find myself where I want to be….not far from the water, surrounded by music. Sounds like paradise to me.
Below, I am going to provide links to several notable live performances held at The First Avenue Nightclub. In many cases, these videos are parts of larger sets or, in some cases, an entire concert. As always, you can choose to watch as much or as little as you like. By searching on YouTube, you can easily find all sorts of additional material, including many full length concerts, documentaries and so on. I will start you off as follows and you can go from there as you see fit.
-The link to the video that shows Tom Morello and band playing “Killing In The Name” at the beginning of the recent Minneapolis anti-I.C.E. benefit concert can be found here. Morello gives an excellent rally-the-troops speech off of the top. The audience participation is excellent. This is definitely a meaningful moment for all involved. It is much more than a simple rock concert song being played. ***Highly recommended viewing!!!
-The link to a video that shows Prince in 1983 in his prime performing the song “Little Red Corvette” can be found here. The video quality isn’t the best because of poor lighting for most of the song but the sound quality is fine. Enjoy a superstar going full throttle in his local club.
-The link to a video showing The Replacements performing “Takin’ a Ride” on the 7th Street Entry stage can be found here. Excellent video quality for fans of a punk band just hitting its stride. This video is one of six in a complete musical set that was performed that night.
-The link to a video that shows Husker Du performing “Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” on the same 7th Street Entry stage as The Replacements, who they followed that same night, can be found here. Excellent historical moment in the story of punk and hardcore.
-The link to a video by Echo and the Bunnymen performing “Killing Moon” can be found here. Terrific sound quality on this one! They may not be a Minnesota band but, what the heck, it’s “Killing Moon” so, there you go.
-The link to a video by Trampled By Turtles performing “Midnight On The Interstate” can be found here. This is a lovely, sweet song which stands in contrast to much of what I have posted so far. This video was part of a live album the band recorded that night from the stage of First Avenue. If you don’t know the band, this video is an excellent entry point.
-The link to the video by Morris Day and the Time called “Jungle Love” can be found here. This clip is from the movie Purple Rain and shows the band performing on the stage at First Avenue.
-The link to the video by Prince of the song “Purple Rain” can be found here. This, too, is taken from the movie Purple Rain and shows the inside of the First Avenue Nightclub.
-And finally, while there are thousands of videos that you can watch by searching on YouTube for “Live from First Avenue”, I will close with a final one that is the current, most popular performance from the iconic stage of The First Avenue Nightclub and that is the one by Bruce Springsteen of his new song “The Streets of Minneapolis” which can be found here. If there was ever a case of a song being more than a song and a moment being more than a regular moment then this performance is it. Well done Bruce! Well done people of Minneapolis!
-If you want to learn more about the First Avenue Nightclub or if you may even want to visit it one day, the link to its official website can be found here.

***As always, all original content contained within this post remains the sole property of the author. No portion of this post shall be reblogged, copied or shared in any manner without the express written consent of the author. ©2026 http://www.tommacinneswriter.com
#FirstAvenueNightClub #HuskerDu #Minneapolis #Music #PlacesEveryone #Prince #TheReplacements

#thereplacements #prince #placeseveryone #music #minneapolis #huskerdu
woollypigs @[email protected] · 2026-01-23 · 17:01 UTC

Where are the anthem?
Don't me wrong I love a good banger of a tune, but where are they? I don't like the "clubbing" part of the dance, rave, trance, house scene. The sweaty, dark room and high as a kite on something synthetic, never been my cuppa and I can't dance for the life of me anyway. But I loved to end the working week by putting on BBC Radio One's Essential Selection hosted by Pete Tong, as I drove home from work.
When I watch a live set from the BoilerRoom, Cream (when it was around still), Ibiza, Miami etc. - I tend to put these tunes on when needing to do some tedious work or cleaning the HQ. I truly do like the "modern" dance/rave music, some good DJs and artists out there for sure - I see people who are at least 30+ years younger than me, enjoying themselves dancing to some good tunes.
The only time I see the audience really go mad and dance their socks of is when the DJ drops in a bit of Saltwater by Chicane, Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London, Insomnia by Faithless, Children by Robert Miles, Sandstorm by Darude to name but a few anthems into their live set. You know music that's 25-30 years old, and just one note from these send goosebumps all over my body. And often turning it to 11 isn't enough ;) Else it just looks like a normal night out, for a bit of a boogie, don't the youth have any anthems?
#PeteTong #WelcomeToTheWeekend #Anthems #Music #Dance #Rave #Trance #Club

#petetong #welcometotheweekend #anthems #music #dance #rave
woollypigs @[email protected] · 2026-01-23 · 17:01 UTC

Where are the anthem?
Don't me wrong I love a good banger of a tune, but where are they? I don't like the "clubbing" part of the dance, rave, trance, house scene. The sweaty, dark room and high as a kite on something synthetic, never been my cuppa and I can't dance for the life of me anyway. But I loved to end the working week by putting on BBC Radio One's Essential Selection hosted by Pete Tong, as I drove home from work.
When I watch a live set from the BoilerRoom, Cream (when it was around still), Ibiza, Miami etc. - I tend to put these tunes on when needing to do some tedious work or cleaning the HQ. I truly do like the "modern" dance/rave music, some good DJs and artists out there for sure - I see people who are at least 30+ years younger than me, enjoying themselves dancing to some good tunes.
The only time I see the audience really go mad and dance their socks of is when the DJ drops in a bit of Saltwater by Chicane, Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London, Insomnia by Faithless, Children by Robert Miles, Sandstorm by Darude to name but a few anthems into their live set. You know music that's 25-30 years old, and just one note from these send goosebumps all over my body. And often turning it to 11 isn't enough ;) Else it just looks like a normal night out, for a bit of a boogie, don't the youth have any anthems?
#PeteTong #WelcomeToTheWeekend #Anthems #Music #Dance #Rave #Trance #Club

#petetong #welcometotheweekend #anthems #music #dance #rave
woollypigs @[email protected] · 2026-01-23 · 17:01 UTC

Where are the anthem?
Don't me wrong I love a good banger of a tune, but where are they? I don't like the "clubbing" part of the dance, rave, trance, house scene. The sweaty, dark room and high as a kite on something synthetic, never been my cuppa and I can't dance for the life of me anyway. But I loved to end the working week by putting on BBC Radio One's Essential Selection hosted by Pete Tong, as I drove home from work.
When I watch a live set from the BoilerRoom, Cream (when it was around still), Ibiza, Miami etc. - I tend to put these tunes on when needing to do some tedious work or cleaning the HQ. I truly do like the "modern" dance/rave music, some good DJs and artists out there for sure - I see people who are at least 30+ years younger than me, enjoying themselves dancing to some good tunes.
The only time I see the audience really go mad and dance their socks of is when the DJ drops in a bit of Saltwater by Chicane, Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London, Insomnia by Faithless, Children by Robert Miles, Sandstorm by Darude to name but a few anthems into their live set. You know music that's 25-30 years old, and just one note from these send goosebumps all over my body. And often turning it to 11 isn't enough ;) Else it just looks like a normal night out, for a bit of a boogie, don't the youth have any anthems?
#PeteTong #WelcomeToTheWeekend #Anthems #Music #Dance #Rave #Trance #Club

#petetong #welcometotheweekend #anthems #music #dance #rave
woollypigs @[email protected] · 2026-01-23 · 17:01 UTC

Where are the anthem?
Don't me wrong I love a good banger of a tune, but where are they? I don't like the "clubbing" part of the dance, rave, trance, house scene. The sweaty, dark room and high as a kite on something synthetic, never been my cuppa and I can't dance for the life of me anyway. But I loved to end the working week by putting on BBC Radio One's Essential Selection hosted by Pete Tong, as I drove home from work.
When I watch a live set from the BoilerRoom, Cream (when it was around still), Ibiza, Miami etc. - I tend to put these tunes on when needing to do some tedious work or cleaning the HQ. I truly do like the "modern" dance/rave music, some good DJs and artists out there for sure - I see people who are at least 30+ years younger than me, enjoying themselves dancing to some good tunes.
The only time I see the audience really go mad and dance their socks of is when the DJ drops in a bit of Saltwater by Chicane, Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London, Insomnia by Faithless, Children by Robert Miles, Sandstorm by Darude to name but a few anthems into their live set. You know music that's 25-30 years old, and just one note from these send goosebumps all over my body. And often turning it to 11 isn't enough ;) Else it just looks like a normal night out, for a bit of a boogie, don't the youth have any anthems?
#PeteTong #WelcomeToTheWeekend #Anthems #Music #Dance #Rave #Trance #Club

#club #trance #rave #dance #music #anthems
woollypigs @[email protected] · 2026-01-23 · 17:01 UTC

Where are the anthem?
Don't me wrong I love a good banger of a tune, but where are they? I don't like the "clubbing" part of the dance, rave, trance, house scene. The sweaty, dark room and high as a kite on something synthetic, never been my cuppa and I can't dance for the life of me anyway. But I loved to end the working week by putting on BBC Radio One's Essential Selection hosted by Pete Tong, as I drove home from work.
When I watch a live set from the BoilerRoom, Cream (when it was around still), Ibiza, Miami etc. - I tend to put these tunes on when needing to do some tedious work or cleaning the HQ. I truly do like the "modern" dance/rave music, some good DJs and artists out there for sure - I see people who are at least 30+ years younger than me, enjoying themselves dancing to some good tunes.
The only time I see the audience really go mad and dance their socks of is when the DJ drops in a bit of Saltwater by Chicane, Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London, Insomnia by Faithless, Children by Robert Miles, Sandstorm by Darude to name but a few anthems into their live set. You know music that's 25-30 years old, and just one note from these send goosebumps all over my body. And often turning it to 11 isn't enough ;) Else it just looks like a normal night out, for a bit of a boogie, don't the youth have any anthems?
#PeteTong #WelcomeToTheWeekend #Anthems #Music #Dance #Rave #Trance #Club

#petetong #welcometotheweekend #anthems #music #dance #rave
Sky Dancing @[email protected] · 2026-01-14 · 17:52 UTC

Wednesday Reads: Minneapolis is Ground Zero for Trump’s Military Takeover
Good Day!!
Before I get going with today’s news, I want to share this disturbing, but absolutely essential piece by Robert Reich: You could be next. This is personal.
If agents of the federal government can murder a 37-year-old woman in broad daylight who, as videotapes show, was merely trying to get out of their way, they can murder you.
Even if Trump and his vice president and his secretary of homeland security all claim, contrary to the videotapes, that Renee Nicole Good was trying to kill an agent who acted in self-defense, they could make up the same about you.
Even if Trump describes her as a “professional agitator” and his goons call her a “domestic terrorist,” they could say the same about you regardless of your political views or activism. If you have left-wing political views and are an activist, you’re in greater danger.

Renee Good

How can we believe what the FBI turns up in its investigation, when the FBI is working for Trump and is headed by one of his goons, and is investigating possible connections between Renee Good and groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration enforcement?
What credence can we give federal officials who are blocking local and state investigators from reviewing evidence they’re collecting?
You could be murdered because Trump’s attorney general has defined “domestic terrorism” to include impeding law enforcement officers. What if you’re merely standing in the way — in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or maybe you’re engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience?
In October, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials say she “rammed” the car. Her lawyers say she was sideswiped by it.
The agent then got out of his car and shot her five times. She survived. The Justice Department then charged her with assaulting a federal officer.
You could be next. All of us need to realize this. The people who are being assaulted and murdered are abiding the law….
Trump could just as well arrest and expel permanent residents who voice support for, say, transgender people or DEI or “woke” or anything else the regime finds “anti-American” and offensive.
What’s to stop the Trump regime from arresting you for, say, advocating the replacement of Republicans in Congress in 2026 and electing a Democrat to the presidency in 2028? [….]
What’s at stake isn’t just American democracy. It’s also your safety and security and that of your friends and loved ones. This is personal — to every one of us.
A dictatorship knows no bounds.
These are the facts of life in the U.S. now. We are all at risk. Trump can order his goons to any city or state and they will run wild because Trump and Vance have told them they have “absolute immunity.” You can be dragged from your car and beaten–even killed and Trump will celebrate you for it.
Admittedly, those of us who are white are less at risk, but the murder of Renee Good shows that we are not immune from the ICE reign of terror. Trump now has his private army–comparable to Hitler’s SS. They report to him, not to Congress or the American people.
What’s happening in Minnesota now could happen to any of us, particularly those of us who live in blue states or cities. At The New York Times, Thomas Fuller and Jazmine Ulloa write (gift link): ‘Like a Military Occupation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents in Minneapolis.
The video shows a young employee in a reflective vest being hauled away by federal agents from the entrance of a Target store in a Minneapolis suburb.
“I’m a U.S. citizen!” the worker shouted as the armed agents shoved him into an S.U.V. after he had directed expletives at one. “U.S. citizen! U.S. citizen!”
In and around Minneapolis in recent days — in quiet residential neighborhoods and busy shopping districts, at gas station and big box store parking lots — similar chaotic scenes are unfolding, an escalation of tensions between residents and federal agents as the Trump administration intensifies its immigration crackdown in Minnesota after the killing of Renee Good by an immigration officer last week.
“It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” said State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat whose district includes Richfield, where the Target employee and another colleague were seized on Thursday.
Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.
Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.
The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.
Video of the Target arrests:

ICE kidnapping two U.S. citizens from a Target in Richfield, Minnesota. I recognize their head dickhead, Greg Bovino, showed up for the festivities. I’m grateful that there were people there that spoke up and got their names before they could be disappeared. #FuckICE #FuckGregBovino #Minnesota
— SaltyBitchables (@saltybitchables.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T00:41:52.931Z

Back to the NYT story:
Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.
Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.
The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.
Local concerns over the federal government grew on Tuesday when six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of Ms. Good and questions over whether the shooter would be investigated.
Use the gift link to read more. There are lots of photos too.
Also from The New York Times, by Ernesto Londoño: Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

Joseph H. Thompson

Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that Mr. Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies. The fraud cases, which involve schemes to cheat safety net programs, were the chief reason the Trump administration cited for its immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are American citizens of Somali origin.
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” Mr. O’Hara said.
The other senior career prosecutors who resigned include Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Mr. Jacobs had been Mr. Thompson’s deputy overseeing the fraud investigation, which began in 2022. Mr. Calhoun-Lopez was the chief of the violent and major crimes unit.
A bit more:
Tuesday’s resignations followed tumultuous days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as prosecutors there and in Washington struggled to manage the outrage over Ms. Good’s killing, which set off angry protests in Minnesota and across the nation.
After Ms. Good was shot, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told her staff that she would not consider opening an investigation into whether the agent had violated federal law, according to three current and former department officials who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the situation. At least four prosecutors who had already intended to quit or retire signaled they would accelerate their departures, those officials said.

Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement that “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE agent.
Instead, the Justice Department launched an investigation to examine ties between Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, and several groups that have been monitoring and protesting the conduct of immigration agents in recent weeks. Shortly after Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, referred to Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist.”

Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Justine McDaniel at The Washington Post: George Floyd family lawyer will represent relatives of ICE shooting victim.
A week after37-year old Renée Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer near her Minneapolis home, her partner, parents and four siblings have hired an attorney who represented the family of George Floyd to file a claim against federal officials.

“What happened to Renée is wrong, contrary to established policing practices and procedures, and should never happen in today’s America,” Chicago-based law firm Romanucci & Blandin said in a statement to The Washington Post. The statement said Good’s family wants “to honor her life with progress toward a kinder and more civil America. They do not want her used as a political pawn, but rather as an agent of peace for all.”

One of the firm’s founding partners, Antonio M. Romanucci, a civil rights lawyer, was among those who represented relatives of George Floyd after he was killed in 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. That legal team’s lawsuit against the city and the four officers involved resulted in a record $27 million settlement for Floyd’s family in 2021, the largest of its kind involving police misconduct.

The case involved Floyd’s relatives challenging law enforcement’s portrayal of him and even commissioning an independent autopsy. Chauvin was ultimately convicted of murdering Floyd the same year, sentenced to 22½ years in prison and later pleaded guilty to a separate federal charge that he violated Floyd’s federal civil rights.

Becca and Renee Good

Good’s shooting, on a residential street where neighbors were monitoring and protesting immigration enforcement activity, has similarly stirred national outrage on the left and the right. Since the fatal encounter on Wednesday, federal officials have sent additional ICE officers to the city, leading to a number of violent encounters publicized on social media and accusations that the operation to detainundocumented immigrants has become more ofan armed occupation.

“It absolutely is escalating considerably over the last week here and it was already quite intense before that,” said State Rep. Mike Howard (D), who represents the suburb of Richfield. “We’ve seen many many examples of an escalating level of violence from federal immigrant officials, in particular targeting citizens, not just immigrants.”
“We’ve seen agents break windows of cars and pull observers out of vehicles, pepper spraying cars and individuals who are literally just exercising their constitutional rights to observe or protest. We had an incident outside of one of our high schools … where chemical irritants were utilized right as school was getting out,” Howard said. “It’s really honestly an hour-by-hour type of incursion, if you will, in a lot of our communities.”

More significant news stories:
Pete Hegseth is trying to crack down on reporters who receive leaks from the DOD.
The Guardian: FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move.
The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.
Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The Post is “reviewing and monitoring the situation”, a source at the newspaper said.
“It’s a clear and appalling sign that this administration will set no limits on its acts of aggression against an independent press,” Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, told the Guardian.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said in a post on X that the raid was conducted by the justice department and FBI at the request of the “department of war”, the Trump administration’s informal name for the department of defense.

Hannah Natanson

The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation. Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
The reporter’s home and devices were searched, and her Garmin watch, phone, and two laptop computers, one belonging to her employer, were seized, the newspaper said. It added that agents told Natanson she was not the focus of the probe, and was not accused of any wrongdoing.
A warrant obtained by the Post cited an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland with a top secret security clearance who has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports.
Natanson, the Post said, covers the federal workforce and has been a part of the newspaper’s “most high-profile and sensitive coverage” during the first year of the second Trump administration.
Democrats are hoping to flip an Alaska Senate seat.
Politico: Peltola raises $1.5M in first 24 hours of Alaska Senate bid.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola raked in $1.5 million in the first 24 hours of her bid to unseat GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska, a sizable haul to kick off what will likely be a costly battle for Democrats to flip a Senate seat squarely in Trump terrain.
Peltola’s day-one haul was fueled by small-dollar donors from across Alaska, including fisherman, silversmiths and train conductors, according to information her campaign shared first with POLITICO. Ninety-six percent of those contributions were $100 or less.

“In just 24 hours, Alaskans made it clear that we’re ready to put Alaska first,” Peltola said in a statement. “I’m grateful and honored for this incredible support from people who are ready to take on the special interests and DC people and focus on what matters: fish, family, and freedom.”

Former Rep. Mary Petola

Peltola raised more in one day than the roughly $1.2 million that Sullivan brought in over the third quarter of last year, according to federal campaign finance filings. Sullivan had yet to post his fourth-quarter fundraising report as of Tuesday night, but the Republican was sitting on nearly $4.8 million in cash on hand to start the last three months of the year.

Her total was likely padded by messages from prominent Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who blasted out emails Monday asking their supporters to split donations between their political arms and Peltola.
Her campaign said it also recruited more than 500 volunteers in its first day.

The New York Times: Senator Says Prosecutors Are Investigating Her After Video About Illegal Orders.
Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan says she has learned that federal prosecutors are investigating her after she took part in a video urging military service members to resist illegal orders.

Senator Elissa Slotkin

Ms. Slotkin, a Democrat, said in an interview on Monday that she found out about the inquiry from the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime ally of President Trump’s. In an email sent to the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, Ms. Pirro’s office requested an interview with the senator or her private counsel.
A spokesman for Ms. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny any investigation, and it is unclear exactly what officials have identified as a possible crime related to the video.
Ms. Slotkin organized the video, which Mr. Trump and other administration officials have described as “seditious,” along with five other Democratic lawmakers who are also military veterans. Its message that military officers are obligated to ignore illegal orders is a fundamental principle of military law.
The investigation by Ms. Pirro’s office is the latest escalation in a campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to exact retribution on those he views as enemies seeking to undermine his administration or his authority as commander in chief.
Tom Tillis isn’t running for reelection, so now he feels free to criticize Trump.
Paul Kane at The Washington Post: Thom Tillis wants you to know something: ‘I’m sick of stupid.’

Sen. Thom Tillis is getting some things off his political chest.
The North Carolina Republican, who decided to oppose President Donald Trump’s massive policy bill last summer and not run for reelection this year, has stepped up his criticism of White House advisers and other Republicans whom he accuses of not serving Trump’s best interests.

Senator Tom Tillis

On Sunday night, Tillis leaped out as the first Republican to bash the Justice Department’s investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell. He declared he won’t support any Fed nominees until the central bank’s long-standing independence is fully restored.

That came after Thursday’s significant symbolic victory in getting unanimous Senate support to display a plaque honoring the police who defended the Capitol during the 2021 insurrection, overriding the efforts of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to keep the plaque hidden.

And last Wednesday, Tillis delivered a more-than-1,500-word stem-winder on the Senate floor denouncing Trump’s advisers for egging him on with the idea that the U.S. military could take over Greenland.

“I am sick of stupid,” Tillis said.

Early Tuesday afternoon, facing questions about the fallout from the Powell investigation, Tillis said his problems are with the Trump advisers who entertain these positions, not the president himself.

“Who on earth believes that the president could possibly have the depth of expertise to make some of these detailed decisions that he’s making? So, of course, it’s his advisers,” Tillis told a group of reporters in an interview just off the Senate floor.
It would have been nice if he’d spoken up sooner, but better late than never.
Those are my recommended read for today. What stories are you following?

#AlaskaSenateSeat #BeccaGood #BorderPatrol #DonaldTrump #ElissaSlotkin #GeorgeFloyd #GregBovino #HannahNatanson #ICEThugs #JosephHThompson #MaryPetola #Minneapolis #Minnesota #PeteHegseth #ReneeGood #TomTillis #TrumpSPersonalArmy #WashingtonPost

#alaskasenateseat #beccagood #borderpatrol #donaldtrump #elissaslotkin #georgefloyd
Sky Dancing @[email protected] · 2026-01-14 · 17:52 UTC

Wednesday Reads: Minneapolis is Ground Zero for Trump’s Military Takeover
Good Day!!
Before I get going with today’s news, I want to share this disturbing, but absolutely essential piece by Robert Reich: You could be next. This is personal.
If agents of the federal government can murder a 37-year-old woman in broad daylight who, as videotapes show, was merely trying to get out of their way, they can murder you.
Even if Trump and his vice president and his secretary of homeland security all claim, contrary to the videotapes, that Renee Nicole Good was trying to kill an agent who acted in self-defense, they could make up the same about you.
Even if Trump describes her as a “professional agitator” and his goons call her a “domestic terrorist,” they could say the same about you regardless of your political views or activism. If you have left-wing political views and are an activist, you’re in greater danger.

Renee Good

How can we believe what the FBI turns up in its investigation, when the FBI is working for Trump and is headed by one of his goons, and is investigating possible connections between Renee Good and groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration enforcement?
What credence can we give federal officials who are blocking local and state investigators from reviewing evidence they’re collecting?
You could be murdered because Trump’s attorney general has defined “domestic terrorism” to include impeding law enforcement officers. What if you’re merely standing in the way — in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or maybe you’re engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience?
In October, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials say she “rammed” the car. Her lawyers say she was sideswiped by it.
The agent then got out of his car and shot her five times. She survived. The Justice Department then charged her with assaulting a federal officer.
You could be next. All of us need to realize this. The people who are being assaulted and murdered are abiding the law….
Trump could just as well arrest and expel permanent residents who voice support for, say, transgender people or DEI or “woke” or anything else the regime finds “anti-American” and offensive.
What’s to stop the Trump regime from arresting you for, say, advocating the replacement of Republicans in Congress in 2026 and electing a Democrat to the presidency in 2028? [….]
What’s at stake isn’t just American democracy. It’s also your safety and security and that of your friends and loved ones. This is personal — to every one of us.
A dictatorship knows no bounds.
These are the facts of life in the U.S. now. We are all at risk. Trump can order his goons to any city or state and they will run wild because Trump and Vance have told them they have “absolute immunity.” You can be dragged from your car and beaten–even killed and Trump will celebrate you for it.
Admittedly, those of us who are white are less at risk, but the murder of Renee Good shows that we are not immune from the ICE reign of terror. Trump now has his private army–comparable to Hitler’s SS. They report to him, not to Congress or the American people.
What’s happening in Minnesota now could happen to any of us, particularly those of us who live in blue states or cities. At The New York Times, Thomas Fuller and Jazmine Ulloa write (gift link): ‘Like a Military Occupation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents in Minneapolis.
The video shows a young employee in a reflective vest being hauled away by federal agents from the entrance of a Target store in a Minneapolis suburb.
“I’m a U.S. citizen!” the worker shouted as the armed agents shoved him into an S.U.V. after he had directed expletives at one. “U.S. citizen! U.S. citizen!”
In and around Minneapolis in recent days — in quiet residential neighborhoods and busy shopping districts, at gas station and big box store parking lots — similar chaotic scenes are unfolding, an escalation of tensions between residents and federal agents as the Trump administration intensifies its immigration crackdown in Minnesota after the killing of Renee Good by an immigration officer last week.
“It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” said State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat whose district includes Richfield, where the Target employee and another colleague were seized on Thursday.
Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.
Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.
The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.
Video of the Target arrests:

ICE kidnapping two U.S. citizens from a Target in Richfield, Minnesota. I recognize their head dickhead, Greg Bovino, showed up for the festivities. I’m grateful that there were people there that spoke up and got their names before they could be disappeared. #FuckICE #FuckGregBovino #Minnesota
— SaltyBitchables (@saltybitchables.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T00:41:52.931Z

Back to the NYT story:
Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.
Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.
The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.
Local concerns over the federal government grew on Tuesday when six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of Ms. Good and questions over whether the shooter would be investigated.
Use the gift link to read more. There are lots of photos too.
Also from The New York Times, by Ernesto Londoño: Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

Joseph H. Thompson

Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that Mr. Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies. The fraud cases, which involve schemes to cheat safety net programs, were the chief reason the Trump administration cited for its immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are American citizens of Somali origin.
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” Mr. O’Hara said.
The other senior career prosecutors who resigned include Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Mr. Jacobs had been Mr. Thompson’s deputy overseeing the fraud investigation, which began in 2022. Mr. Calhoun-Lopez was the chief of the violent and major crimes unit.
A bit more:
Tuesday’s resignations followed tumultuous days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as prosecutors there and in Washington struggled to manage the outrage over Ms. Good’s killing, which set off angry protests in Minnesota and across the nation.
After Ms. Good was shot, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told her staff that she would not consider opening an investigation into whether the agent had violated federal law, according to three current and former department officials who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the situation. At least four prosecutors who had already intended to quit or retire signaled they would accelerate their departures, those officials said.

Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement that “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE agent.
Instead, the Justice Department launched an investigation to examine ties between Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, and several groups that have been monitoring and protesting the conduct of immigration agents in recent weeks. Shortly after Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, referred to Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist.”

Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Justine McDaniel at The Washington Post: George Floyd family lawyer will represent relatives of ICE shooting victim.
A week after37-year old Renée Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer near her Minneapolis home, her partner, parents and four siblings have hired an attorney who represented the family of George Floyd to file a claim against federal officials.

“What happened to Renée is wrong, contrary to established policing practices and procedures, and should never happen in today’s America,” Chicago-based law firm Romanucci & Blandin said in a statement to The Washington Post. The statement said Good’s family wants “to honor her life with progress toward a kinder and more civil America. They do not want her used as a political pawn, but rather as an agent of peace for all.”

One of the firm’s founding partners, Antonio M. Romanucci, a civil rights lawyer, was among those who represented relatives of George Floyd after he was killed in 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. That legal team’s lawsuit against the city and the four officers involved resulted in a record $27 million settlement for Floyd’s family in 2021, the largest of its kind involving police misconduct.

The case involved Floyd’s relatives challenging law enforcement’s portrayal of him and even commissioning an independent autopsy. Chauvin was ultimately convicted of murdering Floyd the same year, sentenced to 22½ years in prison and later pleaded guilty to a separate federal charge that he violated Floyd’s federal civil rights.

Becca and Renee Good

Good’s shooting, on a residential street where neighbors were monitoring and protesting immigration enforcement activity, has similarly stirred national outrage on the left and the right. Since the fatal encounter on Wednesday, federal officials have sent additional ICE officers to the city, leading to a number of violent encounters publicized on social media and accusations that the operation to detainundocumented immigrants has become more ofan armed occupation.

“It absolutely is escalating considerably over the last week here and it was already quite intense before that,” said State Rep. Mike Howard (D), who represents the suburb of Richfield. “We’ve seen many many examples of an escalating level of violence from federal immigrant officials, in particular targeting citizens, not just immigrants.”
“We’ve seen agents break windows of cars and pull observers out of vehicles, pepper spraying cars and individuals who are literally just exercising their constitutional rights to observe or protest. We had an incident outside of one of our high schools … where chemical irritants were utilized right as school was getting out,” Howard said. “It’s really honestly an hour-by-hour type of incursion, if you will, in a lot of our communities.”

More significant news stories:
Pete Hegseth is trying to crack down on reporters who receive leaks from the DOD.
The Guardian: FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move.
The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.
Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The Post is “reviewing and monitoring the situation”, a source at the newspaper said.
“It’s a clear and appalling sign that this administration will set no limits on its acts of aggression against an independent press,” Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, told the Guardian.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said in a post on X that the raid was conducted by the justice department and FBI at the request of the “department of war”, the Trump administration’s informal name for the department of defense.

Hannah Natanson

The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation. Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
The reporter’s home and devices were searched, and her Garmin watch, phone, and two laptop computers, one belonging to her employer, were seized, the newspaper said. It added that agents told Natanson she was not the focus of the probe, and was not accused of any wrongdoing.
A warrant obtained by the Post cited an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland with a top secret security clearance who has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports.
Natanson, the Post said, covers the federal workforce and has been a part of the newspaper’s “most high-profile and sensitive coverage” during the first year of the second Trump administration.
Democrats are hoping to flip an Alaska Senate seat.
Politico: Peltola raises $1.5M in first 24 hours of Alaska Senate bid.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola raked in $1.5 million in the first 24 hours of her bid to unseat GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska, a sizable haul to kick off what will likely be a costly battle for Democrats to flip a Senate seat squarely in Trump terrain.
Peltola’s day-one haul was fueled by small-dollar donors from across Alaska, including fisherman, silversmiths and train conductors, according to information her campaign shared first with POLITICO. Ninety-six percent of those contributions were $100 or less.

“In just 24 hours, Alaskans made it clear that we’re ready to put Alaska first,” Peltola said in a statement. “I’m grateful and honored for this incredible support from people who are ready to take on the special interests and DC people and focus on what matters: fish, family, and freedom.”

Former Rep. Mary Petola

Peltola raised more in one day than the roughly $1.2 million that Sullivan brought in over the third quarter of last year, according to federal campaign finance filings. Sullivan had yet to post his fourth-quarter fundraising report as of Tuesday night, but the Republican was sitting on nearly $4.8 million in cash on hand to start the last three months of the year.

Her total was likely padded by messages from prominent Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who blasted out emails Monday asking their supporters to split donations between their political arms and Peltola.
Her campaign said it also recruited more than 500 volunteers in its first day.

The New York Times: Senator Says Prosecutors Are Investigating Her After Video About Illegal Orders.
Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan says she has learned that federal prosecutors are investigating her after she took part in a video urging military service members to resist illegal orders.

Senator Elissa Slotkin

Ms. Slotkin, a Democrat, said in an interview on Monday that she found out about the inquiry from the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime ally of President Trump’s. In an email sent to the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, Ms. Pirro’s office requested an interview with the senator or her private counsel.
A spokesman for Ms. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny any investigation, and it is unclear exactly what officials have identified as a possible crime related to the video.
Ms. Slotkin organized the video, which Mr. Trump and other administration officials have described as “seditious,” along with five other Democratic lawmakers who are also military veterans. Its message that military officers are obligated to ignore illegal orders is a fundamental principle of military law.
The investigation by Ms. Pirro’s office is the latest escalation in a campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to exact retribution on those he views as enemies seeking to undermine his administration or his authority as commander in chief.
Tom Tillis isn’t running for reelection, so now he feels free to criticize Trump.
Paul Kane at The Washington Post: Thom Tillis wants you to know something: ‘I’m sick of stupid.’

Sen. Thom Tillis is getting some things off his political chest.
The North Carolina Republican, who decided to oppose President Donald Trump’s massive policy bill last summer and not run for reelection this year, has stepped up his criticism of White House advisers and other Republicans whom he accuses of not serving Trump’s best interests.

Senator Tom Tillis

On Sunday night, Tillis leaped out as the first Republican to bash the Justice Department’s investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell. He declared he won’t support any Fed nominees until the central bank’s long-standing independence is fully restored.

That came after Thursday’s significant symbolic victory in getting unanimous Senate support to display a plaque honoring the police who defended the Capitol during the 2021 insurrection, overriding the efforts of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to keep the plaque hidden.

And last Wednesday, Tillis delivered a more-than-1,500-word stem-winder on the Senate floor denouncing Trump’s advisers for egging him on with the idea that the U.S. military could take over Greenland.

“I am sick of stupid,” Tillis said.

Early Tuesday afternoon, facing questions about the fallout from the Powell investigation, Tillis said his problems are with the Trump advisers who entertain these positions, not the president himself.

“Who on earth believes that the president could possibly have the depth of expertise to make some of these detailed decisions that he’s making? So, of course, it’s his advisers,” Tillis told a group of reporters in an interview just off the Senate floor.
It would have been nice if he’d spoken up sooner, but better late than never.
Those are my recommended read for today. What stories are you following?

#AlaskaSenateSeat #BeccaGood #BorderPatrol #DonaldTrump #ElissaSlotkin #GeorgeFloyd #GregBovino #HannahNatanson #ICEThugs #JosephHThompson #MaryPetola #Minneapolis #Minnesota #PeteHegseth #ReneeGood #TomTillis #TrumpSPersonalArmy #WashingtonPost

#washingtonpost #trumpspersonalarmy #tomtillis #reneegood #petehegseth #minnesota
bok @[email protected] · 2025-12-29 · 19:25 UTC

#Reading in Week Fifty-Two of 2025 | Dec 22–28 | ~2600 words | ~15,000 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━
●●●○○ Seeds of Futurity - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
“Edward Barnett could discern one unalterable fact: that civilization and humanity were dying. The reasons were as simple as reasons can be in affairs human: too many metal servants, too little work, and absolutely no ambition.” Most people weren't having children, but a few did, though they tired of them soon, and they were turned over to robots to raise.
Edward acquired over a hundred children under a year old, and turned them over to a mute robot caretaker on an isolated island. In eight years, forty were left. Harsh, but only the strong and healthy would suit his needs.
The survivors created their own social structure, self-sufficient, unburdened by the knowledge of the dying world. When they were twenty, Edward gassed them unconscious, loaded them into the suspension room on the ship he'd had robots make them, and set out to find a suitable world. There he unloaded them, leaving before they awakened. Let them build a new world, innocent as babes. Maybe they'd do better.
●●●◐○ The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1951
The gnoles, who lived on the other side of the forest, had a bad reputation. No human went there. But Mortensen wasn't merely human, he was a salesman. A young, go-getting salesman, who thought it likely that even gnoles had need of the ropes and twines and threads his firm sold. So he decided to peddle his wares on the other side of the forest.
But, though the showing of samples went well initially, gnoles are not humans, and cultures vary, and Mortensen made a major misstep. Ah, well, such is life. Also death.
●●●◐○ Operation Time Search - Andre Norton (nov) 1969
Scientists at a college in Ohio had developed a time viewer. They were pointing it at a nearby structure of the Mound Builders, hoping to see some natives of the ancient culture. The scientists had fenced the mound off to keep modern folk away. That made an activist think the college was planning to expand its facilities and destroy the mound, so he sent in a friend, an ex-soldier photographer, to get evidence; Ray was caught in the beam when the scientists increased the its intensity, and it opened a door to the past, before overloading and shutting down.
Ray ended up at the edge of a vast forest, where he was picked up by an Atlantean hunting party, perhaps a hundred thousand years in his past. Mu, a continent six times larger than Australia, filled much of the Pacific; it was the mother culture, and had sent out colonies to Uighur (Asia), Mayax (South America), and most importantly, Atlantis (4×AU).
Atlantis had turned against Mu, rejecting the Living Flame it worshiped in favor of Ba-Al, a bull-headed dark god. Taken to an Atlantean ship, Ray escaped with the help of Murian Cho's mind powers, and the pair was rescued by Murians. They were taken home (undergoing a battle on the way — war between Mu and Atlantis had yet to break out, but there were increasing clashes between isolated ships), and Ray was introduced to Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, and through her, the Re Mu, ruler of the land.
The Re Mu and the priests of the Living Flame realized that they could use Ray in their struggle, and (not totally of his own will) he was sent to Atlantis. All this time, scientists back in Ray's future had been trying to reopen the time portal, and had used mechanized telepathy to try to call Ray back to the transition site.
There follows adventures in the enemy's capital city, struggle and triumph, a new friend, a failure, and a twist ending.⁰
●●●◐○ The Feminine Metamorphosis - David H. Keller (nvt) 1929
Martha Belzer, number two in the research department at Aviation Consolidated, had for a year stood in for the sick Chief of Research, who's just died. She did not get his job. The company president is blunt: “You were not promoted because you were a woman.” Belzer quietly sends out letters to nine of her friends, women of science and business from all over the United States.
Patricia Powers, only child of the richest man in the country, auctions off all of her late father's stocks to other financiers, raising three billion dollars. Belzer, Powers, and a dozen other notable women take vacations abroad; all suffer fatal accidents, with the bodies not being found.
A hospital is opened in China. The staff is uniformly female, and the hospital pays Chinese men $100 in gold each if they allow one testicle to be removed. (This is described obliquely enough that, if you were a kid reading this, you might not know what was happening.) These are processed and the extract is sent to Paris, where a women's college has been founded; it has extensive medical facilities attached.
Three years later, a new crop of men begin to appear on Wall Street and in other centers of power. They are clannish, well-dressed, brilliant, and have no interest in playing golf or joining the usual men's clubs, though they do supposedly play cards at their new, well-guarded Bridge Club building. They are quickly becoming wealthy and powerful.
It's clear what's going on. The author repeatedly says that women are as smart as men, as hard-working, and if anything better at keeping track of many things at once. The detective on the case (Taine of the Secret Service, whom Keller featured in a series) is hired by worried men on Wall Street who want to know who these new rivals are. Taine is casually but not nastily racist (he uses the "weak gap in armor" term for Chinese people), but seems to acknowledge female equality for most of the story.
This novelette is like a lesbian pulp romance where all goes well for most of the story, only for the sapphic lovers to suffer at the end for Hayes–Code-like reasons. Here, too, the women who thought they'd gamed the system suffer a fall at the end, which doesn't seem to flow from what's gone before.
Everett F. Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years calls this “A bad story,” saying it's “One of Keller's idiosyncratic stories in which he apparently recognizes a social problem, but then distorts reactions to it in a very offensive way.”
Yes, there's blather at the end where Taine says “You went on with your plans, but you forgot God,” and we see that the new-men had extensive, mad-scientist plans. Taine subsequently reveals that the ex-women overlooked something that is already starting to kill them. But for the bulk of the story, I felt that the tone of the work was okay, especially for its time, and the tale doesn't seem anti-feminist to me. Though I may well be blind.
This story is from Gynomorphs, edited by Jean Marie Stine. The 2005 anthology collects three vintage tales from 1929, 1935, and 1938 about female-to-male transitions in pulp scifi. #trans
●●●○○ 1632 and Beyond, Issue #1 - Bjorn Hasseler, ed. (mag) 2023
This first issue of the followup magazine to The Grantville Gazette contains five short stories (four Ring of Fire, one Assiti Shard, specifically Ship People) and a nonfiction piece, plus some other bits. Counts as five shorts; I'll ignore the fact article.
"An Exchange of Favours" by Jody Lynn Nye
Barely a tale, this novel excerpt sees the daughter of an Earl rich in sheep, but poor in cash, come to the big city to plead (unsuccessfully) for a break on her father's taxes. She gets involved with the Grantville delegation currently locked in the Tower of London. (It's a genteel imprisonment, and visitors are allowed.)
"On the Jerichow Road" by S.M. Stirling, Virginia DeMarce
A middle-aged herbalist salesman and a young man on his way to enroll at the University in Jena discuss county politics, and may get the town of Jericho to change things with how it's (not) represented in the new parliament.
"Ill-Met in the Marshes" by Garrett W. Vance
A Japanese couple from a previous story, currently in Thailand, makes preparations to move to Grantville, but not before a local gang of thieves tries to make them pay.
"Indian Tea" by Chuck Thompson
An old Grantville man breaks his sick friend out of a care home to help him give his old manual farm equipment to a down-timer young man so he can get his village's crops harvested even though most of the healthy young men were lost in the war. He also introduces his uptime friend to a yaupon holly bush on his property, whose leaves can be made into a sort of tea.
"Into The Dark" by Iver P. Cooper is set in a Shard where a 2030s luxury cruise liner ends up back in time just after Alexander the Great died, and gets involved in Mediterranean politics. Uptimers also founded a country, New America, on Trinidad, the go-to place in Shard/RoF tales to build your first oil wells. Here, a young ship's carpenter into caving is recruited to find some caves with bat guano deposits, needed to produce saltpeter for black powder. Also fertilizer, as well as other things.
"Farm Equipment That Came Through the Ring of Fire" - George Grant
A fact article that discusses what it says on the tin. "Fact" because Grantville is based on Mannington, a real town in West Virginia, and the author drove around seeing what horse-powered equipment was available.
●●●●○ Zabrina Meets the Retro Club - Maddi Gonzalez (comic) 2025
I did not expect this when I got around to the next epub-split piece from Starstuff. This is not a text story, it's a ten-page comic about a girl (maybe ten?) meeting some online friends for the first time in real-life at the new MALL (Multimedia Augmented Liminal Locations).
One of her friends shows up as a small robot, which Zabrina doesn't realize until the end is an animatronic tele-puppet that allows Dina to interact in the real world, even though she's too ill to do so in her real body.
●●●●○ A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
Carr was a detective, hired by the ex-husband of Evelyn Cordew, the era's major screen star. He was meant to retrieve blackmail materials from Dr. Emil Slyker, a consulting psychologist (if you believe his sketchy diploma). Carr had schmoozed Slyker for hours at his club, and had won an invitation to his private office.
Slyker, more than a bit drunk, went on and on about the psychological troubles of his patients, including at last Evelyn. Then Slyker hit a button, trapping Carr in the special chair he was sitting in. Slyker revealed that he didn't possess blackmail materials, so much as ghosts.
These stabilized ectoplasmic envelopes, expressed by patients under emotional circumstances, Slyker detached with special silver shears. These gossamer shed-skins of people could be saved, and reanimated. In the required darkness, Slyker was preparing to do this, when Carr heard someone sneak into the office. He heard Slyker struggling. Then things got weird…
●●○○○ The Gardener's Pitch - Michael Shotter (ss) 2020
Having read four of the eight tales in the Shards collection, I think can say this of Shotter's characters: you don't want to be one, or meet one. Nasty things happen. In this case a young gardener (with aspirations toward landscape architecture) with a hard-luck past is looking for work, and encounters a house whose grounds need it. He sketches some possibilities, then the owner arrives home and asks who he is.
After turning down Ortin's pitch, the just-arrived-home homeowner pulls into his garage, and Ortin glimpses what he thinks is a noose. He feels obliged to see if the homeowner is suicidal, so he sneaks up to the garage window. Turns out it's not a noose. But Ortin's curiosity ends up revealing auto-erotic asphyxiation, murder, snuff films, more. Not a fun story.
●●●◐○ Frolic - Cammie Conte (nvt) 2018
Iris¹ and Sandy, just graduated from high school, spend a week with "Aunt Judith" (an older friend of Iris's mother) in the country. After dinner one warm evening, the three were sitting on the deck, when Judith suggested the pair take a dip in the pool. The girls said they'd get their swimsuits, and Judith said the closest neighbor was a mile away, and they needn't bother. But that first night they did. The next night, however, with more encouragement from Judith…
After the second swim, before Sandy and Iris could get dressed again, Judith asked them to help her make a pie, so for ten minutes they worked naked in the kitchen. Aunt Judith seemed to enjoy the view. The next day a neighbor couple visited, and the discussion that ensued echoed Aunt Judith's pro-nudity, pro-sensuality views, leading to them encouraging Sandy and Iris to kiss each other, which the friends did. Later, after the girls had gone to their room, leaving the Stevens couple and Judith alone, the girls dared each other to cross to the bathroom topless so that the older trio would see them.
Judith continued encouraging nudity and sexuality, and the next day the girls ended up masturbating next to each other in the guest room's queen bed, then taking a nude hike and doing it again in a clearing. When they returned hours later, Judith was hosting a party on the deck with three neighboring couples, and Sandy was daring enough to just walk onto the deck nude, with Iris slowly following. The girls had nude barbecue with the clothed guests, and later played lawn darts naked.
As a naturist tale, this is more soft erotica. Judith is encouraging Iris and Sandy to be nude, and to sexually play with each other. Other guests do the same in a more low-key fashion, but nobody besides the girls get nude. The first time the girls got naked, Aunt Judith even felt their breasts: “Look at how firm they are.” The girls have sex a couple of times (that we see) in a clearing when they went hiking, but the description is kept on a softcore level.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week Fifty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
308+10 ss | 30+2 nvt | 12+0 nva | 123+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━
[0] Interestingly, Ray tells the Murians that there are legends of Atlantis in his time (a land “said to have vanished beneath the seas in tidal waves and earthquakes because of the wickedness of its people”), but no one believed the legend. Ray says he's never heard of Mu. But he learns that Murians also have legends of an ancient land lost to death and disaster because of human greed and lust: Hyperborea.
[1] Not actually the character's name. Henceforth, if I have to read a first-person viewpoint that never tells me the narrator's name, I'll make up one that starts with "I" for the "I did this" and "I said that" story.
━━━━━━━━━━
Light-reading week. Norton's is the only real novel. The other two calendar-top-line (usually where longer works go) works are a magazine I'd already read off-calendar, and an additional short story. At least two of the stories this week are novelettes.

#reading #bokbooks #trans #books
bok @[email protected] · 2025-12-29 · 19:25 UTC

#Reading in Week Fifty-Two of 2025 | Dec 22–28 | ~2600 words | ~15,000 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━
●●●○○ Seeds of Futurity - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
“Edward Barnett could discern one unalterable fact: that civilization and humanity were dying. The reasons were as simple as reasons can be in affairs human: too many metal servants, too little work, and absolutely no ambition.” Most people weren't having children, but a few did, though they tired of them soon, and they were turned over to robots to raise.
Edward acquired over a hundred children under a year old, and turned them over to a mute robot caretaker on an isolated island. In eight years, forty were left. Harsh, but only the strong and healthy would suit his needs.
The survivors created their own social structure, self-sufficient, unburdened by the knowledge of the dying world. When they were twenty, Edward gassed them unconscious, loaded them into the suspension room on the ship he'd had robots make them, and set out to find a suitable world. There he unloaded them, leaving before they awakened. Let them build a new world, innocent as babes. Maybe they'd do better.
●●●◐○ The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1951
The gnoles, who lived on the other side of the forest, had a bad reputation. No human went there. But Mortensen wasn't merely human, he was a salesman. A young, go-getting salesman, who thought it likely that even gnoles had need of the ropes and twines and threads his firm sold. So he decided to peddle his wares on the other side of the forest.
But, though the showing of samples went well initially, gnoles are not humans, and cultures vary, and Mortensen made a major misstep. Ah, well, such is life. Also death.
●●●◐○ Operation Time Search - Andre Norton (nov) 1969
Scientists at a college in Ohio had developed a time viewer. They were pointing it at a nearby structure of the Mound Builders, hoping to see some natives of the ancient culture. The scientists had fenced the mound off to keep modern folk away. That made an activist think the college was planning to expand its facilities and destroy the mound, so he sent in a friend, an ex-soldier photographer, to get evidence; Ray was caught in the beam when the scientists increased the its intensity, and it opened a door to the past, before overloading and shutting down.
Ray ended up at the edge of a vast forest, where he was picked up by an Atlantean hunting party, perhaps a hundred thousand years in his past. Mu, a continent six times larger than Australia, filled much of the Pacific; it was the mother culture, and had sent out colonies to Uighur (Asia), Mayax (South America), and most importantly, Atlantis (4×AU).
Atlantis had turned against Mu, rejecting the Living Flame it worshiped in favor of Ba-Al, a bull-headed dark god. Taken to an Atlantean ship, Ray escaped with the help of Murian Cho's mind powers, and the pair was rescued by Murians. They were taken home (undergoing a battle on the way — war between Mu and Atlantis had yet to break out, but there were increasing clashes between isolated ships), and Ray was introduced to Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, and through her, the Re Mu, ruler of the land.
The Re Mu and the priests of the Living Flame realized that they could use Ray in their struggle, and (not totally of his own will) he was sent to Atlantis. All this time, scientists back in Ray's future had been trying to reopen the time portal, and had used mechanized telepathy to try to call Ray back to the transition site.
There follows adventures in the enemy's capital city, struggle and triumph, a new friend, a failure, and a twist ending.⁰
●●●◐○ The Feminine Metamorphosis - David H. Keller (nvt) 1929
Martha Belzer, number two in the research department at Aviation Consolidated, had for a year stood in for the sick Chief of Research, who's just died. She did not get his job. The company president is blunt: “You were not promoted because you were a woman.” Belzer quietly sends out letters to nine of her friends, women of science and business from all over the United States.
Patricia Powers, only child of the richest man in the country, auctions off all of her late father's stocks to other financiers, raising three billion dollars. Belzer, Powers, and a dozen other notable women take vacations abroad; all suffer fatal accidents, with the bodies not being found.
A hospital is opened in China. The staff is uniformly female, and the hospital pays Chinese men $100 in gold each if they allow one testicle to be removed. (This is described obliquely enough that, if you were a kid reading this, you might not know what was happening.) These are processed and the extract is sent to Paris, where a women's college has been founded; it has extensive medical facilities attached.
Three years later, a new crop of men begin to appear on Wall Street and in other centers of power. They are clannish, well-dressed, brilliant, and have no interest in playing golf or joining the usual men's clubs, though they do supposedly play cards at their new, well-guarded Bridge Club building. They are quickly becoming wealthy and powerful.
It's clear what's going on. The author repeatedly says that women are as smart as men, as hard-working, and if anything better at keeping track of many things at once. The detective on the case (Taine of the Secret Service, whom Keller featured in a series) is hired by worried men on Wall Street who want to know who these new rivals are. Taine is casually but not nastily racist (he uses the "weak gap in armor" term for Chinese people), but seems to acknowledge female equality for most of the story.
This novelette is like a lesbian pulp romance where all goes well for most of the story, only for the sapphic lovers to suffer at the end for Hayes–Code-like reasons. Here, too, the women who thought they'd gamed the system suffer a fall at the end, which doesn't seem to flow from what's gone before.
Everett F. Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years calls this “A bad story,” saying it's “One of Keller's idiosyncratic stories in which he apparently recognizes a social problem, but then distorts reactions to it in a very offensive way.”
Yes, there's blather at the end where Taine says “You went on with your plans, but you forgot God,” and we see that the new-men had extensive, mad-scientist plans. Taine subsequently reveals that the ex-women overlooked something that is already starting to kill them. But for the bulk of the story, I felt that the tone of the work was okay, especially for its time, and the tale doesn't seem anti-feminist to me. Though I may well be blind.
This story is from Gynomorphs, edited by Jean Marie Stine. The 2005 anthology collects three vintage tales from 1929, 1935, and 1938 about female-to-male transitions in pulp scifi. #trans
●●●○○ 1632 and Beyond, Issue #1 - Bjorn Hasseler, ed. (mag) 2023
This first issue of the followup magazine to The Grantville Gazette contains five short stories (four Ring of Fire, one Assiti Shard, specifically Ship People) and a nonfiction piece, plus some other bits. Counts as five shorts; I'll ignore the fact article.
"An Exchange of Favours" by Jody Lynn Nye
Barely a tale, this novel excerpt sees the daughter of an Earl rich in sheep, but poor in cash, come to the big city to plead (unsuccessfully) for a break on her father's taxes. She gets involved with the Grantville delegation currently locked in the Tower of London. (It's a genteel imprisonment, and visitors are allowed.)
"On the Jerichow Road" by S.M. Stirling, Virginia DeMarce
A middle-aged herbalist salesman and a young man on his way to enroll at the University in Jena discuss county politics, and may get the town of Jericho to change things with how it's (not) represented in the new parliament.
"Ill-Met in the Marshes" by Garrett W. Vance
A Japanese couple from a previous story, currently in Thailand, makes preparations to move to Grantville, but not before a local gang of thieves tries to make them pay.
"Indian Tea" by Chuck Thompson
An old Grantville man breaks his sick friend out of a care home to help him give his old manual farm equipment to a down-timer young man so he can get his village's crops harvested even though most of the healthy young men were lost in the war. He also introduces his uptime friend to a yaupon holly bush on his property, whose leaves can be made into a sort of tea.
"Into The Dark" by Iver P. Cooper is set in a Shard where a 2030s luxury cruise liner ends up back in time just after Alexander the Great died, and gets involved in Mediterranean politics. Uptimers also founded a country, New America, on Trinidad, the go-to place in Shard/RoF tales to build your first oil wells. Here, a young ship's carpenter into caving is recruited to find some caves with bat guano deposits, needed to produce saltpeter for black powder. Also fertilizer, as well as other things.
"Farm Equipment That Came Through the Ring of Fire" - George Grant
A fact article that discusses what it says on the tin. "Fact" because Grantville is based on Mannington, a real town in West Virginia, and the author drove around seeing what horse-powered equipment was available.
●●●●○ Zabrina Meets the Retro Club - Maddi Gonzalez (comic) 2025
I did not expect this when I got around to the next epub-split piece from Starstuff. This is not a text story, it's a ten-page comic about a girl (maybe ten?) meeting some online friends for the first time in real-life at the new MALL (Multimedia Augmented Liminal Locations).
One of her friends shows up as a small robot, which Zabrina doesn't realize until the end is an animatronic tele-puppet that allows Dina to interact in the real world, even though she's too ill to do so in her real body.
●●●●○ A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
Carr was a detective, hired by the ex-husband of Evelyn Cordew, the era's major screen star. He was meant to retrieve blackmail materials from Dr. Emil Slyker, a consulting psychologist (if you believe his sketchy diploma). Carr had schmoozed Slyker for hours at his club, and had won an invitation to his private office.
Slyker, more than a bit drunk, went on and on about the psychological troubles of his patients, including at last Evelyn. Then Slyker hit a button, trapping Carr in the special chair he was sitting in. Slyker revealed that he didn't possess blackmail materials, so much as ghosts.
These stabilized ectoplasmic envelopes, expressed by patients under emotional circumstances, Slyker detached with special silver shears. These gossamer shed-skins of people could be saved, and reanimated. In the required darkness, Slyker was preparing to do this, when Carr heard someone sneak into the office. He heard Slyker struggling. Then things got weird…
●●○○○ The Gardener's Pitch - Michael Shotter (ss) 2020
Having read four of the eight tales in the Shards collection, I think can say this of Shotter's characters: you don't want to be one, or meet one. Nasty things happen. In this case a young gardener (with aspirations toward landscape architecture) with a hard-luck past is looking for work, and encounters a house whose grounds need it. He sketches some possibilities, then the owner arrives home and asks who he is.
After turning down Ortin's pitch, the just-arrived-home homeowner pulls into his garage, and Ortin glimpses what he thinks is a noose. He feels obliged to see if the homeowner is suicidal, so he sneaks up to the garage window. Turns out it's not a noose. But Ortin's curiosity ends up revealing auto-erotic asphyxiation, murder, snuff films, more. Not a fun story.
●●●◐○ Frolic - Cammie Conte (nvt) 2018
Iris¹ and Sandy, just graduated from high school, spend a week with "Aunt Judith" (an older friend of Iris's mother) in the country. After dinner one warm evening, the three were sitting on the deck, when Judith suggested the pair take a dip in the pool. The girls said they'd get their swimsuits, and Judith said the closest neighbor was a mile away, and they needn't bother. But that first night they did. The next night, however, with more encouragement from Judith…
After the second swim, before Sandy and Iris could get dressed again, Judith asked them to help her make a pie, so for ten minutes they worked naked in the kitchen. Aunt Judith seemed to enjoy the view. The next day a neighbor couple visited, and the discussion that ensued echoed Aunt Judith's pro-nudity, pro-sensuality views, leading to them encouraging Sandy and Iris to kiss each other, which the friends did. Later, after the girls had gone to their room, leaving the Stevens couple and Judith alone, the girls dared each other to cross to the bathroom topless so that the older trio would see them.
Judith continued encouraging nudity and sexuality, and the next day the girls ended up masturbating next to each other in the guest room's queen bed, then taking a nude hike and doing it again in a clearing. When they returned hours later, Judith was hosting a party on the deck with three neighboring couples, and Sandy was daring enough to just walk onto the deck nude, with Iris slowly following. The girls had nude barbecue with the clothed guests, and later played lawn darts naked.
As a naturist tale, this is more soft erotica. Judith is encouraging Iris and Sandy to be nude, and to sexually play with each other. Other guests do the same in a more low-key fashion, but nobody besides the girls get nude. The first time the girls got naked, Aunt Judith even felt their breasts: “Look at how firm they are.” The girls have sex a couple of times (that we see) in a clearing when they went hiking, but the description is kept on a softcore level.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week Fifty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
308+10 ss | 30+2 nvt | 12+0 nva | 123+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━
[0] Interestingly, Ray tells the Murians that there are legends of Atlantis in his time (a land “said to have vanished beneath the seas in tidal waves and earthquakes because of the wickedness of its people”), but no one believed the legend. Ray says he's never heard of Mu. But he learns that Murians also have legends of an ancient land lost to death and disaster because of human greed and lust: Hyperborea.
[1] Not actually the character's name. Henceforth, if I have to read a first-person viewpoint that never tells me the narrator's name, I'll make up one that starts with "I" for the "I did this" and "I said that" story.
━━━━━━━━━━
Light-reading week. Norton's is the only real novel. The other two calendar-top-line (usually where longer works go) works are a magazine I'd already read off-calendar, and an additional short story. At least two of the stories this week are novelettes.

#reading #bokbooks #trans #books
bok @[email protected] · 2025-12-29 · 19:25 UTC

#Reading in Week Fifty-Two of 2025 | Dec 22–28 | ~2600 words | ~15,000 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━
●●●○○ Seeds of Futurity - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
“Edward Barnett could discern one unalterable fact: that civilization and humanity were dying. The reasons were as simple as reasons can be in affairs human: too many metal servants, too little work, and absolutely no ambition.” Most people weren't having children, but a few did, though they tired of them soon, and they were turned over to robots to raise.
Edward acquired over a hundred children under a year old, and turned them over to a mute robot caretaker on an isolated island. In eight years, forty were left. Harsh, but only the strong and healthy would suit his needs.
The survivors created their own social structure, self-sufficient, unburdened by the knowledge of the dying world. When they were twenty, Edward gassed them unconscious, loaded them into the suspension room on the ship he'd had robots make them, and set out to find a suitable world. There he unloaded them, leaving before they awakened. Let them build a new world, innocent as babes. Maybe they'd do better.
●●●◐○ The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1951
The gnoles, who lived on the other side of the forest, had a bad reputation. No human went there. But Mortensen wasn't merely human, he was a salesman. A young, go-getting salesman, who thought it likely that even gnoles had need of the ropes and twines and threads his firm sold. So he decided to peddle his wares on the other side of the forest.
But, though the showing of samples went well initially, gnoles are not humans, and cultures vary, and Mortensen made a major misstep. Ah, well, such is life. Also death.
●●●◐○ Operation Time Search - Andre Norton (nov) 1969
Scientists at a college in Ohio had developed a time viewer. They were pointing it at a nearby structure of the Mound Builders, hoping to see some natives of the ancient culture. The scientists had fenced the mound off to keep modern folk away. That made an activist think the college was planning to expand its facilities and destroy the mound, so he sent in a friend, an ex-soldier photographer, to get evidence; Ray was caught in the beam when the scientists increased the its intensity, and it opened a door to the past, before overloading and shutting down.
Ray ended up at the edge of a vast forest, where he was picked up by an Atlantean hunting party, perhaps a hundred thousand years in his past. Mu, a continent six times larger than Australia, filled much of the Pacific; it was the mother culture, and had sent out colonies to Uighur (Asia), Mayax (South America), and most importantly, Atlantis (4×AU).
Atlantis had turned against Mu, rejecting the Living Flame it worshiped in favor of Ba-Al, a bull-headed dark god. Taken to an Atlantean ship, Ray escaped with the help of Murian Cho's mind powers, and the pair was rescued by Murians. They were taken home (undergoing a battle on the way — war between Mu and Atlantis had yet to break out, but there were increasing clashes between isolated ships), and Ray was introduced to Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, and through her, the Re Mu, ruler of the land.
The Re Mu and the priests of the Living Flame realized that they could use Ray in their struggle, and (not totally of his own will) he was sent to Atlantis. All this time, scientists back in Ray's future had been trying to reopen the time portal, and had used mechanized telepathy to try to call Ray back to the transition site.
There follows adventures in the enemy's capital city, struggle and triumph, a new friend, a failure, and a twist ending.⁰
●●●◐○ The Feminine Metamorphosis - David H. Keller (nvt) 1929
Martha Belzer, number two in the research department at Aviation Consolidated, had for a year stood in for the sick Chief of Research, who's just died. She did not get his job. The company president is blunt: “You were not promoted because you were a woman.” Belzer quietly sends out letters to nine of her friends, women of science and business from all over the United States.
Patricia Powers, only child of the richest man in the country, auctions off all of her late father's stocks to other financiers, raising three billion dollars. Belzer, Powers, and a dozen other notable women take vacations abroad; all suffer fatal accidents, with the bodies not being found.
A hospital is opened in China. The staff is uniformly female, and the hospital pays Chinese men $100 in gold each if they allow one testicle to be removed. (This is described obliquely enough that, if you were a kid reading this, you might not know what was happening.) These are processed and the extract is sent to Paris, where a women's college has been founded; it has extensive medical facilities attached.
Three years later, a new crop of men begin to appear on Wall Street and in other centers of power. They are clannish, well-dressed, brilliant, and have no interest in playing golf or joining the usual men's clubs, though they do supposedly play cards at their new, well-guarded Bridge Club building. They are quickly becoming wealthy and powerful.
It's clear what's going on. The author repeatedly says that women are as smart as men, as hard-working, and if anything better at keeping track of many things at once. The detective on the case (Taine of the Secret Service, whom Keller featured in a series) is hired by worried men on Wall Street who want to know who these new rivals are. Taine is casually but not nastily racist (he uses the "weak gap in armor" term for Chinese people), but seems to acknowledge female equality for most of the story.
This novelette is like a lesbian pulp romance where all goes well for most of the story, only for the sapphic lovers to suffer at the end for Hayes–Code-like reasons. Here, too, the women who thought they'd gamed the system suffer a fall at the end, which doesn't seem to flow from what's gone before.
Everett F. Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years calls this “A bad story,” saying it's “One of Keller's idiosyncratic stories in which he apparently recognizes a social problem, but then distorts reactions to it in a very offensive way.”
Yes, there's blather at the end where Taine says “You went on with your plans, but you forgot God,” and we see that the new-men had extensive, mad-scientist plans. Taine subsequently reveals that the ex-women overlooked something that is already starting to kill them. But for the bulk of the story, I felt that the tone of the work was okay, especially for its time, and the tale doesn't seem anti-feminist to me. Though I may well be blind.
This story is from Gynomorphs, edited by Jean Marie Stine. The 2005 anthology collects three vintage tales from 1929, 1935, and 1938 about female-to-male transitions in pulp scifi. #trans
●●●○○ 1632 and Beyond, Issue #1 - Bjorn Hasseler, ed. (mag) 2023
This first issue of the followup magazine to The Grantville Gazette contains five short stories (four Ring of Fire, one Assiti Shard, specifically Ship People) and a nonfiction piece, plus some other bits. Counts as five shorts; I'll ignore the fact article.
"An Exchange of Favours" by Jody Lynn Nye
Barely a tale, this novel excerpt sees the daughter of an Earl rich in sheep, but poor in cash, come to the big city to plead (unsuccessfully) for a break on her father's taxes. She gets involved with the Grantville delegation currently locked in the Tower of London. (It's a genteel imprisonment, and visitors are allowed.)
"On the Jerichow Road" by S.M. Stirling, Virginia DeMarce
A middle-aged herbalist salesman and a young man on his way to enroll at the University in Jena discuss county politics, and may get the town of Jericho to change things with how it's (not) represented in the new parliament.
"Ill-Met in the Marshes" by Garrett W. Vance
A Japanese couple from a previous story, currently in Thailand, makes preparations to move to Grantville, but not before a local gang of thieves tries to make them pay.
"Indian Tea" by Chuck Thompson
An old Grantville man breaks his sick friend out of a care home to help him give his old manual farm equipment to a down-timer young man so he can get his village's crops harvested even though most of the healthy young men were lost in the war. He also introduces his uptime friend to a yaupon holly bush on his property, whose leaves can be made into a sort of tea.
"Into The Dark" by Iver P. Cooper is set in a Shard where a 2030s luxury cruise liner ends up back in time just after Alexander the Great died, and gets involved in Mediterranean politics. Uptimers also founded a country, New America, on Trinidad, the go-to place in Shard/RoF tales to build your first oil wells. Here, a young ship's carpenter into caving is recruited to find some caves with bat guano deposits, needed to produce saltpeter for black powder. Also fertilizer, as well as other things.
"Farm Equipment That Came Through the Ring of Fire" - George Grant
A fact article that discusses what it says on the tin. "Fact" because Grantville is based on Mannington, a real town in West Virginia, and the author drove around seeing what horse-powered equipment was available.
●●●●○ Zabrina Meets the Retro Club - Maddi Gonzalez (comic) 2025
I did not expect this when I got around to the next epub-split piece from Starstuff. This is not a text story, it's a ten-page comic about a girl (maybe ten?) meeting some online friends for the first time in real-life at the new MALL (Multimedia Augmented Liminal Locations).
One of her friends shows up as a small robot, which Zabrina doesn't realize until the end is an animatronic tele-puppet that allows Dina to interact in the real world, even though she's too ill to do so in her real body.
●●●●○ A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
Carr was a detective, hired by the ex-husband of Evelyn Cordew, the era's major screen star. He was meant to retrieve blackmail materials from Dr. Emil Slyker, a consulting psychologist (if you believe his sketchy diploma). Carr had schmoozed Slyker for hours at his club, and had won an invitation to his private office.
Slyker, more than a bit drunk, went on and on about the psychological troubles of his patients, including at last Evelyn. Then Slyker hit a button, trapping Carr in the special chair he was sitting in. Slyker revealed that he didn't possess blackmail materials, so much as ghosts.
These stabilized ectoplasmic envelopes, expressed by patients under emotional circumstances, Slyker detached with special silver shears. These gossamer shed-skins of people could be saved, and reanimated. In the required darkness, Slyker was preparing to do this, when Carr heard someone sneak into the office. He heard Slyker struggling. Then things got weird…
●●○○○ The Gardener's Pitch - Michael Shotter (ss) 2020
Having read four of the eight tales in the Shards collection, I think can say this of Shotter's characters: you don't want to be one, or meet one. Nasty things happen. In this case a young gardener (with aspirations toward landscape architecture) with a hard-luck past is looking for work, and encounters a house whose grounds need it. He sketches some possibilities, then the owner arrives home and asks who he is.
After turning down Ortin's pitch, the just-arrived-home homeowner pulls into his garage, and Ortin glimpses what he thinks is a noose. He feels obliged to see if the homeowner is suicidal, so he sneaks up to the garage window. Turns out it's not a noose. But Ortin's curiosity ends up revealing auto-erotic asphyxiation, murder, snuff films, more. Not a fun story.
●●●◐○ Frolic - Cammie Conte (nvt) 2018
Iris¹ and Sandy, just graduated from high school, spend a week with "Aunt Judith" (an older friend of Iris's mother) in the country. After dinner one warm evening, the three were sitting on the deck, when Judith suggested the pair take a dip in the pool. The girls said they'd get their swimsuits, and Judith said the closest neighbor was a mile away, and they needn't bother. But that first night they did. The next night, however, with more encouragement from Judith…
After the second swim, before Sandy and Iris could get dressed again, Judith asked them to help her make a pie, so for ten minutes they worked naked in the kitchen. Aunt Judith seemed to enjoy the view. The next day a neighbor couple visited, and the discussion that ensued echoed Aunt Judith's pro-nudity, pro-sensuality views, leading to them encouraging Sandy and Iris to kiss each other, which the friends did. Later, after the girls had gone to their room, leaving the Stevens couple and Judith alone, the girls dared each other to cross to the bathroom topless so that the older trio would see them.
Judith continued encouraging nudity and sexuality, and the next day the girls ended up masturbating next to each other in the guest room's queen bed, then taking a nude hike and doing it again in a clearing. When they returned hours later, Judith was hosting a party on the deck with three neighboring couples, and Sandy was daring enough to just walk onto the deck nude, with Iris slowly following. The girls had nude barbecue with the clothed guests, and later played lawn darts naked.
As a naturist tale, this is more soft erotica. Judith is encouraging Iris and Sandy to be nude, and to sexually play with each other. Other guests do the same in a more low-key fashion, but nobody besides the girls get nude. The first time the girls got naked, Aunt Judith even felt their breasts: “Look at how firm they are.” The girls have sex a couple of times (that we see) in a clearing when they went hiking, but the description is kept on a softcore level.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week Fifty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
308+10 ss | 30+2 nvt | 12+0 nva | 123+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━
[0] Interestingly, Ray tells the Murians that there are legends of Atlantis in his time (a land “said to have vanished beneath the seas in tidal waves and earthquakes because of the wickedness of its people”), but no one believed the legend. Ray says he's never heard of Mu. But he learns that Murians also have legends of an ancient land lost to death and disaster because of human greed and lust: Hyperborea.
[1] Not actually the character's name. Henceforth, if I have to read a first-person viewpoint that never tells me the narrator's name, I'll make up one that starts with "I" for the "I did this" and "I said that" story.
━━━━━━━━━━
Light-reading week. Norton's is the only real novel. The other two calendar-top-line (usually where longer works go) works are a magazine I'd already read off-calendar, and an additional short story. At least two of the stories this week are novelettes.

#reading #bokbooks #trans #books
bok @[email protected] · 2025-12-29 · 19:25 UTC

#Reading in Week Fifty-Two of 2025 | Dec 22–28 | ~2600 words | ~15,000 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━
●●●○○ Seeds of Futurity - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
“Edward Barnett could discern one unalterable fact: that civilization and humanity were dying. The reasons were as simple as reasons can be in affairs human: too many metal servants, too little work, and absolutely no ambition.” Most people weren't having children, but a few did, though they tired of them soon, and they were turned over to robots to raise.
Edward acquired over a hundred children under a year old, and turned them over to a mute robot caretaker on an isolated island. In eight years, forty were left. Harsh, but only the strong and healthy would suit his needs.
The survivors created their own social structure, self-sufficient, unburdened by the knowledge of the dying world. When they were twenty, Edward gassed them unconscious, loaded them into the suspension room on the ship he'd had robots make them, and set out to find a suitable world. There he unloaded them, leaving before they awakened. Let them build a new world, innocent as babes. Maybe they'd do better.
●●●◐○ The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1951
The gnoles, who lived on the other side of the forest, had a bad reputation. No human went there. But Mortensen wasn't merely human, he was a salesman. A young, go-getting salesman, who thought it likely that even gnoles had need of the ropes and twines and threads his firm sold. So he decided to peddle his wares on the other side of the forest.
But, though the showing of samples went well initially, gnoles are not humans, and cultures vary, and Mortensen made a major misstep. Ah, well, such is life. Also death.
●●●◐○ Operation Time Search - Andre Norton (nov) 1969
Scientists at a college in Ohio had developed a time viewer. They were pointing it at a nearby structure of the Mound Builders, hoping to see some natives of the ancient culture. The scientists had fenced the mound off to keep modern folk away. That made an activist think the college was planning to expand its facilities and destroy the mound, so he sent in a friend, an ex-soldier photographer, to get evidence; Ray was caught in the beam when the scientists increased the its intensity, and it opened a door to the past, before overloading and shutting down.
Ray ended up at the edge of a vast forest, where he was picked up by an Atlantean hunting party, perhaps a hundred thousand years in his past. Mu, a continent six times larger than Australia, filled much of the Pacific; it was the mother culture, and had sent out colonies to Uighur (Asia), Mayax (South America), and most importantly, Atlantis (4×AU).
Atlantis had turned against Mu, rejecting the Living Flame it worshiped in favor of Ba-Al, a bull-headed dark god. Taken to an Atlantean ship, Ray escaped with the help of Murian Cho's mind powers, and the pair was rescued by Murians. They were taken home (undergoing a battle on the way — war between Mu and Atlantis had yet to break out, but there were increasing clashes between isolated ships), and Ray was introduced to Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, and through her, the Re Mu, ruler of the land.
The Re Mu and the priests of the Living Flame realized that they could use Ray in their struggle, and (not totally of his own will) he was sent to Atlantis. All this time, scientists back in Ray's future had been trying to reopen the time portal, and had used mechanized telepathy to try to call Ray back to the transition site.
There follows adventures in the enemy's capital city, struggle and triumph, a new friend, a failure, and a twist ending.⁰
●●●◐○ The Feminine Metamorphosis - David H. Keller (nvt) 1929
Martha Belzer, number two in the research department at Aviation Consolidated, had for a year stood in for the sick Chief of Research, who's just died. She did not get his job. The company president is blunt: “You were not promoted because you were a woman.” Belzer quietly sends out letters to nine of her friends, women of science and business from all over the United States.
Patricia Powers, only child of the richest man in the country, auctions off all of her late father's stocks to other financiers, raising three billion dollars. Belzer, Powers, and a dozen other notable women take vacations abroad; all suffer fatal accidents, with the bodies not being found.
A hospital is opened in China. The staff is uniformly female, and the hospital pays Chinese men $100 in gold each if they allow one testicle to be removed. (This is described obliquely enough that, if you were a kid reading this, you might not know what was happening.) These are processed and the extract is sent to Paris, where a women's college has been founded; it has extensive medical facilities attached.
Three years later, a new crop of men begin to appear on Wall Street and in other centers of power. They are clannish, well-dressed, brilliant, and have no interest in playing golf or joining the usual men's clubs, though they do supposedly play cards at their new, well-guarded Bridge Club building. They are quickly becoming wealthy and powerful.
It's clear what's going on. The author repeatedly says that women are as smart as men, as hard-working, and if anything better at keeping track of many things at once. The detective on the case (Taine of the Secret Service, whom Keller featured in a series) is hired by worried men on Wall Street who want to know who these new rivals are. Taine is casually but not nastily racist (he uses the "weak gap in armor" term for Chinese people), but seems to acknowledge female equality for most of the story.
This novelette is like a lesbian pulp romance where all goes well for most of the story, only for the sapphic lovers to suffer at the end for Hayes–Code-like reasons. Here, too, the women who thought they'd gamed the system suffer a fall at the end, which doesn't seem to flow from what's gone before.
Everett F. Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years calls this “A bad story,” saying it's “One of Keller's idiosyncratic stories in which he apparently recognizes a social problem, but then distorts reactions to it in a very offensive way.”
Yes, there's blather at the end where Taine says “You went on with your plans, but you forgot God,” and we see that the new-men had extensive, mad-scientist plans. Taine subsequently reveals that the ex-women overlooked something that is already starting to kill them. But for the bulk of the story, I felt that the tone of the work was okay, especially for its time, and the tale doesn't seem anti-feminist to me. Though I may well be blind.
This story is from Gynomorphs, edited by Jean Marie Stine. The 2005 anthology collects three vintage tales from 1929, 1935, and 1938 about female-to-male transitions in pulp scifi. #trans
●●●○○ 1632 and Beyond, Issue #1 - Bjorn Hasseler, ed. (mag) 2023
This first issue of the followup magazine to The Grantville Gazette contains five short stories (four Ring of Fire, one Assiti Shard, specifically Ship People) and a nonfiction piece, plus some other bits. Counts as five shorts; I'll ignore the fact article.
"An Exchange of Favours" by Jody Lynn Nye
Barely a tale, this novel excerpt sees the daughter of an Earl rich in sheep, but poor in cash, come to the big city to plead (unsuccessfully) for a break on her father's taxes. She gets involved with the Grantville delegation currently locked in the Tower of London. (It's a genteel imprisonment, and visitors are allowed.)
"On the Jerichow Road" by S.M. Stirling, Virginia DeMarce
A middle-aged herbalist salesman and a young man on his way to enroll at the University in Jena discuss county politics, and may get the town of Jericho to change things with how it's (not) represented in the new parliament.
"Ill-Met in the Marshes" by Garrett W. Vance
A Japanese couple from a previous story, currently in Thailand, makes preparations to move to Grantville, but not before a local gang of thieves tries to make them pay.
"Indian Tea" by Chuck Thompson
An old Grantville man breaks his sick friend out of a care home to help him give his old manual farm equipment to a down-timer young man so he can get his village's crops harvested even though most of the healthy young men were lost in the war. He also introduces his uptime friend to a yaupon holly bush on his property, whose leaves can be made into a sort of tea.
"Into The Dark" by Iver P. Cooper is set in a Shard where a 2030s luxury cruise liner ends up back in time just after Alexander the Great died, and gets involved in Mediterranean politics. Uptimers also founded a country, New America, on Trinidad, the go-to place in Shard/RoF tales to build your first oil wells. Here, a young ship's carpenter into caving is recruited to find some caves with bat guano deposits, needed to produce saltpeter for black powder. Also fertilizer, as well as other things.
"Farm Equipment That Came Through the Ring of Fire" - George Grant
A fact article that discusses what it says on the tin. "Fact" because Grantville is based on Mannington, a real town in West Virginia, and the author drove around seeing what horse-powered equipment was available.
●●●●○ Zabrina Meets the Retro Club - Maddi Gonzalez (comic) 2025
I did not expect this when I got around to the next epub-split piece from Starstuff. This is not a text story, it's a ten-page comic about a girl (maybe ten?) meeting some online friends for the first time in real-life at the new MALL (Multimedia Augmented Liminal Locations).
One of her friends shows up as a small robot, which Zabrina doesn't realize until the end is an animatronic tele-puppet that allows Dina to interact in the real world, even though she's too ill to do so in her real body.
●●●●○ A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
Carr was a detective, hired by the ex-husband of Evelyn Cordew, the era's major screen star. He was meant to retrieve blackmail materials from Dr. Emil Slyker, a consulting psychologist (if you believe his sketchy diploma). Carr had schmoozed Slyker for hours at his club, and had won an invitation to his private office.
Slyker, more than a bit drunk, went on and on about the psychological troubles of his patients, including at last Evelyn. Then Slyker hit a button, trapping Carr in the special chair he was sitting in. Slyker revealed that he didn't possess blackmail materials, so much as ghosts.
These stabilized ectoplasmic envelopes, expressed by patients under emotional circumstances, Slyker detached with special silver shears. These gossamer shed-skins of people could be saved, and reanimated. In the required darkness, Slyker was preparing to do this, when Carr heard someone sneak into the office. He heard Slyker struggling. Then things got weird…
●●○○○ The Gardener's Pitch - Michael Shotter (ss) 2020
Having read four of the eight tales in the Shards collection, I think can say this of Shotter's characters: you don't want to be one, or meet one. Nasty things happen. In this case a young gardener (with aspirations toward landscape architecture) with a hard-luck past is looking for work, and encounters a house whose grounds need it. He sketches some possibilities, then the owner arrives home and asks who he is.
After turning down Ortin's pitch, the just-arrived-home homeowner pulls into his garage, and Ortin glimpses what he thinks is a noose. He feels obliged to see if the homeowner is suicidal, so he sneaks up to the garage window. Turns out it's not a noose. But Ortin's curiosity ends up revealing auto-erotic asphyxiation, murder, snuff films, more. Not a fun story.
●●●◐○ Frolic - Cammie Conte (nvt) 2018
Iris¹ and Sandy, just graduated from high school, spend a week with "Aunt Judith" (an older friend of Iris's mother) in the country. After dinner one warm evening, the three were sitting on the deck, when Judith suggested the pair take a dip in the pool. The girls said they'd get their swimsuits, and Judith said the closest neighbor was a mile away, and they needn't bother. But that first night they did. The next night, however, with more encouragement from Judith…
After the second swim, before Sandy and Iris could get dressed again, Judith asked them to help her make a pie, so for ten minutes they worked naked in the kitchen. Aunt Judith seemed to enjoy the view. The next day a neighbor couple visited, and the discussion that ensued echoed Aunt Judith's pro-nudity, pro-sensuality views, leading to them encouraging Sandy and Iris to kiss each other, which the friends did. Later, after the girls had gone to their room, leaving the Stevens couple and Judith alone, the girls dared each other to cross to the bathroom topless so that the older trio would see them.
Judith continued encouraging nudity and sexuality, and the next day the girls ended up masturbating next to each other in the guest room's queen bed, then taking a nude hike and doing it again in a clearing. When they returned hours later, Judith was hosting a party on the deck with three neighboring couples, and Sandy was daring enough to just walk onto the deck nude, with Iris slowly following. The girls had nude barbecue with the clothed guests, and later played lawn darts naked.
As a naturist tale, this is more soft erotica. Judith is encouraging Iris and Sandy to be nude, and to sexually play with each other. Other guests do the same in a more low-key fashion, but nobody besides the girls get nude. The first time the girls got naked, Aunt Judith even felt their breasts: “Look at how firm they are.” The girls have sex a couple of times (that we see) in a clearing when they went hiking, but the description is kept on a softcore level.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week Fifty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
308+10 ss | 30+2 nvt | 12+0 nva | 123+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━
[0] Interestingly, Ray tells the Murians that there are legends of Atlantis in his time (a land “said to have vanished beneath the seas in tidal waves and earthquakes because of the wickedness of its people”), but no one believed the legend. Ray says he's never heard of Mu. But he learns that Murians also have legends of an ancient land lost to death and disaster because of human greed and lust: Hyperborea.
[1] Not actually the character's name. Henceforth, if I have to read a first-person viewpoint that never tells me the narrator's name, I'll make up one that starts with "I" for the "I did this" and "I said that" story.
━━━━━━━━━━
Light-reading week. Norton's is the only real novel. The other two calendar-top-line (usually where longer works go) works are a magazine I'd already read off-calendar, and an additional short story. At least two of the stories this week are novelettes.

#books #trans #bokbooks #reading
bok @[email protected] · 2025-12-29 · 19:25 UTC

#Reading in Week Fifty-Two of 2025 | Dec 22–28 | ~2600 words | ~15,000 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━
●●●○○ Seeds of Futurity - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
“Edward Barnett could discern one unalterable fact: that civilization and humanity were dying. The reasons were as simple as reasons can be in affairs human: too many metal servants, too little work, and absolutely no ambition.” Most people weren't having children, but a few did, though they tired of them soon, and they were turned over to robots to raise.
Edward acquired over a hundred children under a year old, and turned them over to a mute robot caretaker on an isolated island. In eight years, forty were left. Harsh, but only the strong and healthy would suit his needs.
The survivors created their own social structure, self-sufficient, unburdened by the knowledge of the dying world. When they were twenty, Edward gassed them unconscious, loaded them into the suspension room on the ship he'd had robots make them, and set out to find a suitable world. There he unloaded them, leaving before they awakened. Let them build a new world, innocent as babes. Maybe they'd do better.
●●●◐○ The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1951
The gnoles, who lived on the other side of the forest, had a bad reputation. No human went there. But Mortensen wasn't merely human, he was a salesman. A young, go-getting salesman, who thought it likely that even gnoles had need of the ropes and twines and threads his firm sold. So he decided to peddle his wares on the other side of the forest.
But, though the showing of samples went well initially, gnoles are not humans, and cultures vary, and Mortensen made a major misstep. Ah, well, such is life. Also death.
●●●◐○ Operation Time Search - Andre Norton (nov) 1969
Scientists at a college in Ohio had developed a time viewer. They were pointing it at a nearby structure of the Mound Builders, hoping to see some natives of the ancient culture. The scientists had fenced the mound off to keep modern folk away. That made an activist think the college was planning to expand its facilities and destroy the mound, so he sent in a friend, an ex-soldier photographer, to get evidence; Ray was caught in the beam when the scientists increased the its intensity, and it opened a door to the past, before overloading and shutting down.
Ray ended up at the edge of a vast forest, where he was picked up by an Atlantean hunting party, perhaps a hundred thousand years in his past. Mu, a continent six times larger than Australia, filled much of the Pacific; it was the mother culture, and had sent out colonies to Uighur (Asia), Mayax (South America), and most importantly, Atlantis (4×AU).
Atlantis had turned against Mu, rejecting the Living Flame it worshiped in favor of Ba-Al, a bull-headed dark god. Taken to an Atlantean ship, Ray escaped with the help of Murian Cho's mind powers, and the pair was rescued by Murians. They were taken home (undergoing a battle on the way — war between Mu and Atlantis had yet to break out, but there were increasing clashes between isolated ships), and Ray was introduced to Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, and through her, the Re Mu, ruler of the land.
The Re Mu and the priests of the Living Flame realized that they could use Ray in their struggle, and (not totally of his own will) he was sent to Atlantis. All this time, scientists back in Ray's future had been trying to reopen the time portal, and had used mechanized telepathy to try to call Ray back to the transition site.
There follows adventures in the enemy's capital city, struggle and triumph, a new friend, a failure, and a twist ending.⁰
●●●◐○ The Feminine Metamorphosis - David H. Keller (nvt) 1929
Martha Belzer, number two in the research department at Aviation Consolidated, had for a year stood in for the sick Chief of Research, who's just died. She did not get his job. The company president is blunt: “You were not promoted because you were a woman.” Belzer quietly sends out letters to nine of her friends, women of science and business from all over the United States.
Patricia Powers, only child of the richest man in the country, auctions off all of her late father's stocks to other financiers, raising three billion dollars. Belzer, Powers, and a dozen other notable women take vacations abroad; all suffer fatal accidents, with the bodies not being found.
A hospital is opened in China. The staff is uniformly female, and the hospital pays Chinese men $100 in gold each if they allow one testicle to be removed. (This is described obliquely enough that, if you were a kid reading this, you might not know what was happening.) These are processed and the extract is sent to Paris, where a women's college has been founded; it has extensive medical facilities attached.
Three years later, a new crop of men begin to appear on Wall Street and in other centers of power. They are clannish, well-dressed, brilliant, and have no interest in playing golf or joining the usual men's clubs, though they do supposedly play cards at their new, well-guarded Bridge Club building. They are quickly becoming wealthy and powerful.
It's clear what's going on. The author repeatedly says that women are as smart as men, as hard-working, and if anything better at keeping track of many things at once. The detective on the case (Taine of the Secret Service, whom Keller featured in a series) is hired by worried men on Wall Street who want to know who these new rivals are. Taine is casually but not nastily racist (he uses the "weak gap in armor" term for Chinese people), but seems to acknowledge female equality for most of the story.
This novelette is like a lesbian pulp romance where all goes well for most of the story, only for the sapphic lovers to suffer at the end for Hayes–Code-like reasons. Here, too, the women who thought they'd gamed the system suffer a fall at the end, which doesn't seem to flow from what's gone before.
Everett F. Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years calls this “A bad story,” saying it's “One of Keller's idiosyncratic stories in which he apparently recognizes a social problem, but then distorts reactions to it in a very offensive way.”
Yes, there's blather at the end where Taine says “You went on with your plans, but you forgot God,” and we see that the new-men had extensive, mad-scientist plans. Taine subsequently reveals that the ex-women overlooked something that is already starting to kill them. But for the bulk of the story, I felt that the tone of the work was okay, especially for its time, and the tale doesn't seem anti-feminist to me. Though I may well be blind.
This story is from Gynomorphs, edited by Jean Marie Stine. The 2005 anthology collects three vintage tales from 1929, 1935, and 1938 about female-to-male transitions in pulp scifi. #trans
●●●○○ 1632 and Beyond, Issue #1 - Bjorn Hasseler, ed. (mag) 2023
This first issue of the followup magazine to The Grantville Gazette contains five short stories (four Ring of Fire, one Assiti Shard, specifically Ship People) and a nonfiction piece, plus some other bits. Counts as five shorts; I'll ignore the fact article.
"An Exchange of Favours" by Jody Lynn Nye
Barely a tale, this novel excerpt sees the daughter of an Earl rich in sheep, but poor in cash, come to the big city to plead (unsuccessfully) for a break on her father's taxes. She gets involved with the Grantville delegation currently locked in the Tower of London. (It's a genteel imprisonment, and visitors are allowed.)
"On the Jerichow Road" by S.M. Stirling, Virginia DeMarce
A middle-aged herbalist salesman and a young man on his way to enroll at the University in Jena discuss county politics, and may get the town of Jericho to change things with how it's (not) represented in the new parliament.
"Ill-Met in the Marshes" by Garrett W. Vance
A Japanese couple from a previous story, currently in Thailand, makes preparations to move to Grantville, but not before a local gang of thieves tries to make them pay.
"Indian Tea" by Chuck Thompson
An old Grantville man breaks his sick friend out of a care home to help him give his old manual farm equipment to a down-timer young man so he can get his village's crops harvested even though most of the healthy young men were lost in the war. He also introduces his uptime friend to a yaupon holly bush on his property, whose leaves can be made into a sort of tea.
"Into The Dark" by Iver P. Cooper is set in a Shard where a 2030s luxury cruise liner ends up back in time just after Alexander the Great died, and gets involved in Mediterranean politics. Uptimers also founded a country, New America, on Trinidad, the go-to place in Shard/RoF tales to build your first oil wells. Here, a young ship's carpenter into caving is recruited to find some caves with bat guano deposits, needed to produce saltpeter for black powder. Also fertilizer, as well as other things.
"Farm Equipment That Came Through the Ring of Fire" - George Grant
A fact article that discusses what it says on the tin. "Fact" because Grantville is based on Mannington, a real town in West Virginia, and the author drove around seeing what horse-powered equipment was available.
●●●●○ Zabrina Meets the Retro Club - Maddi Gonzalez (comic) 2025
I did not expect this when I got around to the next epub-split piece from Starstuff. This is not a text story, it's a ten-page comic about a girl (maybe ten?) meeting some online friends for the first time in real-life at the new MALL (Multimedia Augmented Liminal Locations).
One of her friends shows up as a small robot, which Zabrina doesn't realize until the end is an animatronic tele-puppet that allows Dina to interact in the real world, even though she's too ill to do so in her real body.
●●●●○ A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
Carr was a detective, hired by the ex-husband of Evelyn Cordew, the era's major screen star. He was meant to retrieve blackmail materials from Dr. Emil Slyker, a consulting psychologist (if you believe his sketchy diploma). Carr had schmoozed Slyker for hours at his club, and had won an invitation to his private office.
Slyker, more than a bit drunk, went on and on about the psychological troubles of his patients, including at last Evelyn. Then Slyker hit a button, trapping Carr in the special chair he was sitting in. Slyker revealed that he didn't possess blackmail materials, so much as ghosts.
These stabilized ectoplasmic envelopes, expressed by patients under emotional circumstances, Slyker detached with special silver shears. These gossamer shed-skins of people could be saved, and reanimated. In the required darkness, Slyker was preparing to do this, when Carr heard someone sneak into the office. He heard Slyker struggling. Then things got weird…
●●○○○ The Gardener's Pitch - Michael Shotter (ss) 2020
Having read four of the eight tales in the Shards collection, I think can say this of Shotter's characters: you don't want to be one, or meet one. Nasty things happen. In this case a young gardener (with aspirations toward landscape architecture) with a hard-luck past is looking for work, and encounters a house whose grounds need it. He sketches some possibilities, then the owner arrives home and asks who he is.
After turning down Ortin's pitch, the just-arrived-home homeowner pulls into his garage, and Ortin glimpses what he thinks is a noose. He feels obliged to see if the homeowner is suicidal, so he sneaks up to the garage window. Turns out it's not a noose. But Ortin's curiosity ends up revealing auto-erotic asphyxiation, murder, snuff films, more. Not a fun story.
●●●◐○ Frolic - Cammie Conte (nvt) 2018
Iris¹ and Sandy, just graduated from high school, spend a week with "Aunt Judith" (an older friend of Iris's mother) in the country. After dinner one warm evening, the three were sitting on the deck, when Judith suggested the pair take a dip in the pool. The girls said they'd get their swimsuits, and Judith said the closest neighbor was a mile away, and they needn't bother. But that first night they did. The next night, however, with more encouragement from Judith…
After the second swim, before Sandy and Iris could get dressed again, Judith asked them to help her make a pie, so for ten minutes they worked naked in the kitchen. Aunt Judith seemed to enjoy the view. The next day a neighbor couple visited, and the discussion that ensued echoed Aunt Judith's pro-nudity, pro-sensuality views, leading to them encouraging Sandy and Iris to kiss each other, which the friends did. Later, after the girls had gone to their room, leaving the Stevens couple and Judith alone, the girls dared each other to cross to the bathroom topless so that the older trio would see them.
Judith continued encouraging nudity and sexuality, and the next day the girls ended up masturbating next to each other in the guest room's queen bed, then taking a nude hike and doing it again in a clearing. When they returned hours later, Judith was hosting a party on the deck with three neighboring couples, and Sandy was daring enough to just walk onto the deck nude, with Iris slowly following. The girls had nude barbecue with the clothed guests, and later played lawn darts naked.
As a naturist tale, this is more soft erotica. Judith is encouraging Iris and Sandy to be nude, and to sexually play with each other. Other guests do the same in a more low-key fashion, but nobody besides the girls get nude. The first time the girls got naked, Aunt Judith even felt their breasts: “Look at how firm they are.” The girls have sex a couple of times (that we see) in a clearing when they went hiking, but the description is kept on a softcore level.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week Fifty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
308+10 ss | 30+2 nvt | 12+0 nva | 123+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━
[0] Interestingly, Ray tells the Murians that there are legends of Atlantis in his time (a land “said to have vanished beneath the seas in tidal waves and earthquakes because of the wickedness of its people”), but no one believed the legend. Ray says he's never heard of Mu. But he learns that Murians also have legends of an ancient land lost to death and disaster because of human greed and lust: Hyperborea.
[1] Not actually the character's name. Henceforth, if I have to read a first-person viewpoint that never tells me the narrator's name, I'll make up one that starts with "I" for the "I did this" and "I said that" story.
━━━━━━━━━━
Light-reading week. Norton's is the only real novel. The other two calendar-top-line (usually where longer works go) works are a magazine I'd already read off-calendar, and an additional short story. At least two of the stories this week are novelettes.

#reading #bokbooks #trans #books
Pagan Essentials @[email protected] · 2025-12-01 · 13:50 UTC
💫Setting Up Your First Altar: A Guide to Sacred Space Creation
Congratulations, fledgling witch! Taking the step to create your first altar is a profound and exciting moment. An altar isn’t just a decoration; it’s the heart of your personal practice—a dedicated, sacred space where you connect with the divine, focus your energy, and work your magic.
Don’t worry about needing expensive, fancy tools right away. The most important ingredients are intention, reverence, and personal meaning.
Let’s dive into the practical steps of setting up your very own sacred space.
1. 📍 Choosing Your Location
The location is crucial because it influences the energy of your space.
- Privacy is Key: Choose a spot where you feel comfortable and won’t be constantly interrupted or scrutinized. This allows you to relax and focus. A quiet corner of your bedroom, a sturdy bookshelf, or a cabinet top works well.
- A Solid Foundation: The surface should be stable and able to hold your tools safely (especially if you plan on using candles or water).
- Consider the Directions: In many traditions, the altar is oriented to the North (representing Earth and stability). However, you can also place it in a direction that aligns with your specific intent (e.g., East for new beginnings, West for emotional work).
✨ Pro-Tip: A small, portable altar in a box or on a tray is an excellent solution for witches who need to keep their practice discreet
2. 🧹 Cleansing the Space
Before you place any items, you need to clear the existing energy and consecrate the area.
- Physical Cleanse: Start with a good old-fashioned cleaning. Dust the surface and wipe it down.
- Energetic Cleanse: Use a method that resonates with you:
  * Smudging: Gently wave the smoke of sage, cedar, or palo santo over the area.
  * Sound: Ring a bell or clap your hands firmly around the space to break up stagnant energy.
  * Visualization: Imagine a bright, cleansing white or violet light washing over the surface.
  * Salt Water: Wipe the surface with water that has a pinch of sea salt dissolved in it.
3. 🗺️ Understanding Altar Layout (The Four Quarters)
A traditional altar layout often symbolizes the meeting point between the spiritual and physical worlds, usually structured around the four elements (or Quarters):

Direction-Element-Altar Placement-Common Tools/Symbols
East-Air-Upper-Right/Front-Incense, Feathers, Wand
South-Fire-Lower-Right/Front-Candles, Lighter/Matches
West-Water-Lower-Left/Back-Chalice, Bowl of Water, Shells
North-Earth-Upper-Left/Back- Crystals, Salt, Pentacles, Plants

In the Center of the altar is where you place the most sacred items, often representing the Divine (God/Goddess) or the Fifth Element: Spirit/Aether. This is also where you’ll usually place your working tools.
4. 🛠️ Essential Items for Your First Altar
You don’t need to buy everything at once! Start with personal, meaningful items.
- Altar Cloth: A piece of fabric (any color you like!) to protect the surface and define the space.
- Representations of the Divine: A statue, a picture, a natural object (like a stone or branch), or even two candles (one for the God, one for the Goddess/Divine Feminine/Masculine).
- Candle: A simple, white candle is perfect for invoking Fire and Spirit. Always use a proper candle holder for safety!
- Incense Holder & Incense: To represent the element of Air.
- Chalice or Bowl: A small cup or bowl for Water.
- Pentacle/Offering Plate: A flat dish, piece of wood, or store-bought pentacle to represent Earth. This is also where you can place offerings or charge smaller items.
- Personal Items: A meaningful crystal, a favorite piece of jewelry, a leaf you found on a walk—items that make the space feel uniquely yours.
5. 🧘 Activating Your Space
Once everything is placed, take a moment to stand before your altar and feel the energy.
1. Light your candle and incense.
2. State your intention for the altar out loud (e.g., “I dedicate this space to my highest spiritual growth and magical practice”).
3. Perform a simple centering or grounding exercise.
4. Touch each object, reinforcing its purpose and meaning to you.
Your altar is now active! It is a place of power, reflection, and transformation. Use it often. The more you interact with it, the stronger its energy will become.
What’s Next?
Don’t be afraid to change your altar as your practice evolves or with the changing seasons!
Do you have questions about specific altar tools like the Athame or Boline? Let me know what you’d like to learn about next!

#altar #magick #magickalTools #witchTools #witchcraft #witchcrafttips
#witchcrafttips #witchcraft #witchtools #magickaltools #magick #altar
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected] · 2025-11-28 · 14:20 UTC

Carnal Savagery – Crypt of Decay Review
By Steel Druhm
Advanced scientific studies indicate that the style of metal known as “Swedeath” will not die and may, in fact, be incapable of being killed. The foundation created by Entombed and Dismember in the early 90s cemented the “Stockholm Sound” so deeply in musical bedrock that forecasters predict it could function like an everflowing stream for untold aeons. Enter Sweden’s Carnal Savagery. This gruesome duo have gone in big on the Swedeath formula, releasing 6 albums of it since 2020, all of which pay loving homage to the genre’s forefathers. Crypt of Decay is their 7th album in 5 years, so clearly, they just can’t stop spewing this fetid gunk into the world at a reckless pace. What does the new material sound like? Well, DisEntombed, of course. It’s got exactly zero new ideas, even less innovation, and you’ll be subjected to endlessly recycled ideas all powered by the force of the HM-2 pedal. Guitars will buzz, vocals will wretch, and you’ll ingest mass quantities d-beated death. Sound good?
As with many Carnal Savagery releases, they come out strong with a ripping, tearing monstrosity on “Entangled in Barbed Wire.” Rather than the usual thievery from the first few Dismember records, this sounds a whole lot like something off Slaughter of the Soul due to the riff patterns and the hyperkinetic energy (maybe even too much like something off Slaughter of the Soul). Flagrant influence humping aside, it’s a rousing blast of death metal with teeth and badass energy, so it works. As “Amputation” rolls in, it’s back to the Stockholm salt mines for the expected poaching off albums like Indecent and Obscene and Massive Killing Capacity. What sells it for me besides the furious energy is how it sounds like the vocalist keeps bellowing “GRAMPUTATION!,” leaving me to wonder why he hates old dudes so much. “Torn from the Grave” is another burner with vicious, blasting fury, and it’s interesting enough to get by despite some oh so familiar riffs.
From here, however, the ground becomes more unsteady. Some tracks just kinda lie there and refuse to play ball. “Scalped and Flayed” goes too far down a death-doom rat hole and feels lifeless and dull, while “Gruesome Death” feels generic and stock standard. At times, there’s an injection of the classic Wolverine Blues swagger and rock-based swing as on “Curse of the Catacomb” and the title track, but it doesn’t completely work. Overall, you get roughly half an album’s worth of C+ and B-level Swedeath with some clunkers and also-rans popping up to drag the momentum downward. Unfortunately, this is an issue Carnal Savagery struggles with regularly. They write some bangers to hook you in, then the wheels come off the War Wagon before they reach the finish line. Thankfully, most of the songs run only 2-3 minutes, so nothing gums up the works too severely (except “Gruesome Death”), and the 34-plus-minute runtime is short enough to stave off most variants of Swedeath fatigue.
Swedeath needs riotous, raucous and deadly riffs to fully capture the brainpan, and Mikael Lindgren can and does deliver some of these, usually with a strong Dismember flavor. But he also lapses into less stellar leads and ideas a bit too often, causing some cuts to feel generic and half-baked. His flowery solo style is a nice relief from the neanderthal buzz and brutality, showing another side of the duo’s identity, and that should be explored a bit more often to keep things interesting. Mattias Lilja’s death vocals are solid and full of greasy charm, sitting somewhere between the late, great L.G. Petrov and Dismember’s Matti Kärki. He doesn’t offer much in the way of versatility, but you don’t come here for that anyway. As per usual, it’s the songwriting that lets them down, with some tracks being killer and others ending up closer to filler.
Carnal Savagery usually serve up 3-4 songs that put a meat fork in your adrenal gland and activate your altered beat. The rest range from okay and underwhelming. Crypt of Decay is right in that modality. The good is fun, the rest is tolerable but non-essential. That sounds like a playlist poacher to me! Desecrate the Crypt and take what you like and leave the rest to rot in peace.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Moribund Records
Websites: facebook.com/carnalsavagery | instagram.com/carnalsavagery
Releases Worldwide: November 28th, 2025
#25 #2025 #carnalSavagery #cryptOfDecay #deathMetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormsCadaversCoffinsAndBones #moribundRecords #nov28 #review #reviews #slaughterOfTheSoul #swedishMetal

#carnalsavagery #cryptofdecay #deathmetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormscadaverscoffinsandbones
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected] · 2025-11-28 · 14:20 UTC

Carnal Savagery – Crypt of Decay Review
By Steel Druhm
Advanced scientific studies indicate that the style of metal known as “Swedeath” will not die and may, in fact, be incapable of being killed. The foundation created by Entombed and Dismember in the early 90s cemented the “Stockholm Sound” so deeply in musical bedrock that forecasters predict it could function like an everflowing stream for untold aeons. Enter Sweden’s Carnal Savagery. This gruesome duo have gone in big on the Swedeath formula, releasing 6 albums of it since 2020, all of which pay loving homage to the genre’s forefathers. Crypt of Decay is their 7th album in 5 years, so clearly, they just can’t stop spewing this fetid gunk into the world at a reckless pace. What does the new material sound like? Well, DisEntombed, of course. It’s got exactly zero new ideas, even less innovation, and you’ll be subjected to endlessly recycled ideas all powered by the force of the HM-2 pedal. Guitars will buzz, vocals will wretch, and you’ll ingest mass quantities d-beated death. Sound good?
As with many Carnal Savagery releases, they come out strong with a ripping, tearing monstrosity on “Entangled in Barbed Wire.” Rather than the usual thievery from the first few Dismember records, this sounds a whole lot like something off Slaughter of the Soul due to the riff patterns and the hyperkinetic energy (maybe even too much like something off Slaughter of the Soul). Flagrant influence humping aside, it’s a rousing blast of death metal with teeth and badass energy, so it works. As “Amputation” rolls in, it’s back to the Stockholm salt mines for the expected poaching off albums like Indecent and Obscene and Massive Killing Capacity. What sells it for me besides the furious energy is how it sounds like the vocalist keeps bellowing “GRAMPUTATION!,” leaving me to wonder why he hates old dudes so much. “Torn from the Grave” is another burner with vicious, blasting fury, and it’s interesting enough to get by despite some oh so familiar riffs.
From here, however, the ground becomes more unsteady. Some tracks just kinda lie there and refuse to play ball. “Scalped and Flayed” goes too far down a death-doom rat hole and feels lifeless and dull, while “Gruesome Death” feels generic and stock standard. At times, there’s an injection of the classic Wolverine Blues swagger and rock-based swing as on “Curse of the Catacomb” and the title track, but it doesn’t completely work. Overall, you get roughly half an album’s worth of C+ and B-level Swedeath with some clunkers and also-rans popping up to drag the momentum downward. Unfortunately, this is an issue Carnal Savagery struggles with regularly. They write some bangers to hook you in, then the wheels come off the War Wagon before they reach the finish line. Thankfully, most of the songs run only 2-3 minutes, so nothing gums up the works too severely (except “Gruesome Death”), and the 34-plus-minute runtime is short enough to stave off most variants of Swedeath fatigue.
Swedeath needs riotous, raucous and deadly riffs to fully capture the brainpan, and Mikael Lindgren can and does deliver some of these, usually with a strong Dismember flavor. But he also lapses into less stellar leads and ideas a bit too often, causing some cuts to feel generic and half-baked. His flowery solo style is a nice relief from the neanderthal buzz and brutality, showing another side of the duo’s identity, and that should be explored a bit more often to keep things interesting. Mattias Lilja’s death vocals are solid and full of greasy charm, sitting somewhere between the late, great L.G. Petrov and Dismember’s Matti Kärki. He doesn’t offer much in the way of versatility, but you don’t come here for that anyway. As per usual, it’s the songwriting that lets them down, with some tracks being killer and others ending up closer to filler.
Carnal Savagery usually serve up 3-4 songs that put a meat fork in your adrenal gland and activate your altered beat. The rest range from okay and underwhelming. Crypt of Decay is right in that modality. The good is fun, the rest is tolerable but non-essential. That sounds like a playlist poacher to me! Desecrate the Crypt and take what you like and leave the rest to rot in peace.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Moribund Records
Websites: facebook.com/carnalsavagery | instagram.com/carnalsavagery
Releases Worldwide: November 28th, 2025
#25 #2025 #carnalSavagery #cryptOfDecay #deathMetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormsCadaversCoffinsAndBones #moribundRecords #nov28 #review #reviews #slaughterOfTheSoul #swedishMetal

#carnalsavagery #cryptofdecay #deathmetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormscadaverscoffinsandbones
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected] · 2025-11-28 · 14:20 UTC

Carnal Savagery – Crypt of Decay Review
By Steel Druhm
Advanced scientific studies indicate that the style of metal known as “Swedeath” will not die and may, in fact, be incapable of being killed. The foundation created by Entombed and Dismember in the early 90s cemented the “Stockholm Sound” so deeply in musical bedrock that forecasters predict it could function like an everflowing stream for untold aeons. Enter Sweden’s Carnal Savagery. This gruesome duo have gone in big on the Swedeath formula, releasing 6 albums of it since 2020, all of which pay loving homage to the genre’s forefathers. Crypt of Decay is their 7th album in 5 years, so clearly, they just can’t stop spewing this fetid gunk into the world at a reckless pace. What does the new material sound like? Well, DisEntombed, of course. It’s got exactly zero new ideas, even less innovation, and you’ll be subjected to endlessly recycled ideas all powered by the force of the HM-2 pedal. Guitars will buzz, vocals will wretch, and you’ll ingest mass quantities d-beated death. Sound good?
As with many Carnal Savagery releases, they come out strong with a ripping, tearing monstrosity on “Entangled in Barbed Wire.” Rather than the usual thievery from the first few Dismember records, this sounds a whole lot like something off Slaughter of the Soul due to the riff patterns and the hyperkinetic energy (maybe even too much like something off Slaughter of the Soul). Flagrant influence humping aside, it’s a rousing blast of death metal with teeth and badass energy, so it works. As “Amputation” rolls in, it’s back to the Stockholm salt mines for the expected poaching off albums like Indecent and Obscene and Massive Killing Capacity. What sells it for me besides the furious energy is how it sounds like the vocalist keeps bellowing “GRAMPUTATION!,” leaving me to wonder why he hates old dudes so much. “Torn from the Grave” is another burner with vicious, blasting fury, and it’s interesting enough to get by despite some oh so familiar riffs.
From here, however, the ground becomes more unsteady. Some tracks just kinda lie there and refuse to play ball. “Scalped and Flayed” goes too far down a death-doom rat hole and feels lifeless and dull, while “Gruesome Death” feels generic and stock standard. At times, there’s an injection of the classic Wolverine Blues swagger and rock-based swing as on “Curse of the Catacomb” and the title track, but it doesn’t completely work. Overall, you get roughly half an album’s worth of C+ and B-level Swedeath with some clunkers and also-rans popping up to drag the momentum downward. Unfortunately, this is an issue Carnal Savagery struggles with regularly. They write some bangers to hook you in, then the wheels come off the War Wagon before they reach the finish line. Thankfully, most of the songs run only 2-3 minutes, so nothing gums up the works too severely (except “Gruesome Death”), and the 34-plus-minute runtime is short enough to stave off most variants of Swedeath fatigue.
Swedeath needs riotous, raucous and deadly riffs to fully capture the brainpan, and Mikael Lindgren can and does deliver some of these, usually with a strong Dismember flavor. But he also lapses into less stellar leads and ideas a bit too often, causing some cuts to feel generic and half-baked. His flowery solo style is a nice relief from the neanderthal buzz and brutality, showing another side of the duo’s identity, and that should be explored a bit more often to keep things interesting. Mattias Lilja’s death vocals are solid and full of greasy charm, sitting somewhere between the late, great L.G. Petrov and Dismember’s Matti Kärki. He doesn’t offer much in the way of versatility, but you don’t come here for that anyway. As per usual, it’s the songwriting that lets them down, with some tracks being killer and others ending up closer to filler.
Carnal Savagery usually serve up 3-4 songs that put a meat fork in your adrenal gland and activate your altered beat. The rest range from okay and underwhelming. Crypt of Decay is right in that modality. The good is fun, the rest is tolerable but non-essential. That sounds like a playlist poacher to me! Desecrate the Crypt and take what you like and leave the rest to rot in peace.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Moribund Records
Websites: facebook.com/carnalsavagery | instagram.com/carnalsavagery
Releases Worldwide: November 28th, 2025
#25 #2025 #carnalSavagery #cryptOfDecay #deathMetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormsCadaversCoffinsAndBones #moribundRecords #nov28 #review #reviews #slaughterOfTheSoul #swedishMetal

#carnalsavagery #cryptofdecay #deathmetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormscadaverscoffinsandbones
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected] · 2025-11-28 · 14:20 UTC

Carnal Savagery – Crypt of Decay Review
By Steel Druhm
Advanced scientific studies indicate that the style of metal known as “Swedeath” will not die and may, in fact, be incapable of being killed. The foundation created by Entombed and Dismember in the early 90s cemented the “Stockholm Sound” so deeply in musical bedrock that forecasters predict it could function like an everflowing stream for untold aeons. Enter Sweden’s Carnal Savagery. This gruesome duo have gone in big on the Swedeath formula, releasing 6 albums of it since 2020, all of which pay loving homage to the genre’s forefathers. Crypt of Decay is their 7th album in 5 years, so clearly, they just can’t stop spewing this fetid gunk into the world at a reckless pace. What does the new material sound like? Well, DisEntombed, of course. It’s got exactly zero new ideas, even less innovation, and you’ll be subjected to endlessly recycled ideas all powered by the force of the HM-2 pedal. Guitars will buzz, vocals will wretch, and you’ll ingest mass quantities d-beated death. Sound good?
As with many Carnal Savagery releases, they come out strong with a ripping, tearing monstrosity on “Entangled in Barbed Wire.” Rather than the usual thievery from the first few Dismember records, this sounds a whole lot like something off Slaughter of the Soul due to the riff patterns and the hyperkinetic energy (maybe even too much like something off Slaughter of the Soul). Flagrant influence humping aside, it’s a rousing blast of death metal with teeth and badass energy, so it works. As “Amputation” rolls in, it’s back to the Stockholm salt mines for the expected poaching off albums like Indecent and Obscene and Massive Killing Capacity. What sells it for me besides the furious energy is how it sounds like the vocalist keeps bellowing “GRAMPUTATION!,” leaving me to wonder why he hates old dudes so much. “Torn from the Grave” is another burner with vicious, blasting fury, and it’s interesting enough to get by despite some oh so familiar riffs.
From here, however, the ground becomes more unsteady. Some tracks just kinda lie there and refuse to play ball. “Scalped and Flayed” goes too far down a death-doom rat hole and feels lifeless and dull, while “Gruesome Death” feels generic and stock standard. At times, there’s an injection of the classic Wolverine Blues swagger and rock-based swing as on “Curse of the Catacomb” and the title track, but it doesn’t completely work. Overall, you get roughly half an album’s worth of C+ and B-level Swedeath with some clunkers and also-rans popping up to drag the momentum downward. Unfortunately, this is an issue Carnal Savagery struggles with regularly. They write some bangers to hook you in, then the wheels come off the War Wagon before they reach the finish line. Thankfully, most of the songs run only 2-3 minutes, so nothing gums up the works too severely (except “Gruesome Death”), and the 34-plus-minute runtime is short enough to stave off most variants of Swedeath fatigue.
Swedeath needs riotous, raucous and deadly riffs to fully capture the brainpan, and Mikael Lindgren can and does deliver some of these, usually with a strong Dismember flavor. But he also lapses into less stellar leads and ideas a bit too often, causing some cuts to feel generic and half-baked. His flowery solo style is a nice relief from the neanderthal buzz and brutality, showing another side of the duo’s identity, and that should be explored a bit more often to keep things interesting. Mattias Lilja’s death vocals are solid and full of greasy charm, sitting somewhere between the late, great L.G. Petrov and Dismember’s Matti Kärki. He doesn’t offer much in the way of versatility, but you don’t come here for that anyway. As per usual, it’s the songwriting that lets them down, with some tracks being killer and others ending up closer to filler.
Carnal Savagery usually serve up 3-4 songs that put a meat fork in your adrenal gland and activate your altered beat. The rest range from okay and underwhelming. Crypt of Decay is right in that modality. The good is fun, the rest is tolerable but non-essential. That sounds like a playlist poacher to me! Desecrate the Crypt and take what you like and leave the rest to rot in peace.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Moribund Records
Websites: facebook.com/carnalsavagery | instagram.com/carnalsavagery
Releases Worldwide: November 28th, 2025
#25 #2025 #carnalSavagery #cryptOfDecay #deathMetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormsCadaversCoffinsAndBones #moribundRecords #nov28 #review #reviews #slaughterOfTheSoul #swedishMetal

#swedishmetal #slaughterofthesoul #reviews #review #nov28 #moribundrecords
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected] · 2025-11-28 · 14:20 UTC

Carnal Savagery – Crypt of Decay Review
By Steel Druhm
Advanced scientific studies indicate that the style of metal known as “Swedeath” will not die and may, in fact, be incapable of being killed. The foundation created by Entombed and Dismember in the early 90s cemented the “Stockholm Sound” so deeply in musical bedrock that forecasters predict it could function like an everflowing stream for untold aeons. Enter Sweden’s Carnal Savagery. This gruesome duo have gone in big on the Swedeath formula, releasing 6 albums of it since 2020, all of which pay loving homage to the genre’s forefathers. Crypt of Decay is their 7th album in 5 years, so clearly, they just can’t stop spewing this fetid gunk into the world at a reckless pace. What does the new material sound like? Well, DisEntombed, of course. It’s got exactly zero new ideas, even less innovation, and you’ll be subjected to endlessly recycled ideas all powered by the force of the HM-2 pedal. Guitars will buzz, vocals will wretch, and you’ll ingest mass quantities d-beated death. Sound good?
As with many Carnal Savagery releases, they come out strong with a ripping, tearing monstrosity on “Entangled in Barbed Wire.” Rather than the usual thievery from the first few Dismember records, this sounds a whole lot like something off Slaughter of the Soul due to the riff patterns and the hyperkinetic energy (maybe even too much like something off Slaughter of the Soul). Flagrant influence humping aside, it’s a rousing blast of death metal with teeth and badass energy, so it works. As “Amputation” rolls in, it’s back to the Stockholm salt mines for the expected poaching off albums like Indecent and Obscene and Massive Killing Capacity. What sells it for me besides the furious energy is how it sounds like the vocalist keeps bellowing “GRAMPUTATION!,” leaving me to wonder why he hates old dudes so much. “Torn from the Grave” is another burner with vicious, blasting fury, and it’s interesting enough to get by despite some oh so familiar riffs.
From here, however, the ground becomes more unsteady. Some tracks just kinda lie there and refuse to play ball. “Scalped and Flayed” goes too far down a death-doom rat hole and feels lifeless and dull, while “Gruesome Death” feels generic and stock standard. At times, there’s an injection of the classic Wolverine Blues swagger and rock-based swing as on “Curse of the Catacomb” and the title track, but it doesn’t completely work. Overall, you get roughly half an album’s worth of C+ and B-level Swedeath with some clunkers and also-rans popping up to drag the momentum downward. Unfortunately, this is an issue Carnal Savagery struggles with regularly. They write some bangers to hook you in, then the wheels come off the War Wagon before they reach the finish line. Thankfully, most of the songs run only 2-3 minutes, so nothing gums up the works too severely (except “Gruesome Death”), and the 34-plus-minute runtime is short enough to stave off most variants of Swedeath fatigue.
Swedeath needs riotous, raucous and deadly riffs to fully capture the brainpan, and Mikael Lindgren can and does deliver some of these, usually with a strong Dismember flavor. But he also lapses into less stellar leads and ideas a bit too often, causing some cuts to feel generic and half-baked. His flowery solo style is a nice relief from the neanderthal buzz and brutality, showing another side of the duo’s identity, and that should be explored a bit more often to keep things interesting. Mattias Lilja’s death vocals are solid and full of greasy charm, sitting somewhere between the late, great L.G. Petrov and Dismember’s Matti Kärki. He doesn’t offer much in the way of versatility, but you don’t come here for that anyway. As per usual, it’s the songwriting that lets them down, with some tracks being killer and others ending up closer to filler.
Carnal Savagery usually serve up 3-4 songs that put a meat fork in your adrenal gland and activate your altered beat. The rest range from okay and underwhelming. Crypt of Decay is right in that modality. The good is fun, the rest is tolerable but non-essential. That sounds like a playlist poacher to me! Desecrate the Crypt and take what you like and leave the rest to rot in peace.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Moribund Records
Websites: facebook.com/carnalsavagery | instagram.com/carnalsavagery
Releases Worldwide: November 28th, 2025
#25 #2025 #carnalSavagery #cryptOfDecay #deathMetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormsCadaversCoffinsAndBones #moribundRecords #nov28 #review #reviews #slaughterOfTheSoul #swedishMetal

#carnalsavagery #cryptofdecay #deathmetal #dismember #entombed #gravewormscadaverscoffinsandbones
DrWeb @[email protected] · 2025-11-20 · 18:49 UTC

Take a Culinary Trip Through Southern Nevada – KNPR.org
Special Promotion
Take a Culinary Trip Through Southern Nevada
Nevada Public Radio | By Debbie Hall, Published November 19, 2025 at 10:41 AM PST
Chuck Wagon buffet line at the Flamingo.
Enjoy tasty bites from the past to the present
According to Guinness World Records, Madrid’s Sobrino de Botín has been serving meals since 1725, making it the world’s oldest continuously operating restaurant. Las Vegas, by contrast, is known more for reinvention than preservation. Here, the neon never sleeps, buildings come and go, and trends flip with every season.
Las Vegas has always been a city built on bold bets—and not just at the tables. While today’s Strip dazzles with celebrity chefs and global cuisine, the city’s culinary scene had humbler beginnings, shaped by saloons, sandwiches and sheer grit.
Officially founded on May 15, 1905, Las Vegas began as a dusty railroad town, just a mile from an earlier Mormon settlement dating back to 1855. With the arrival of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, a new boomtown emerged—bringing with it an appetite for entertainment, lodging and something stronger than water.
The city’s first bar is widely believed to be the Arizona Club, which opened that same year. It quickly became a fixture in the fledgling downtown, serving whiskey to thirsty railroad passengers and workers carving out a new life in the Mojave Desert.
Beyond The Strip
Downtown Summerlin Delivers Delicious Dining
A vibrant walkable urban destination in the heart of the master planned community of Summerlin®, Downtown Summerlin® is serving up the city’s most tantalizing fare. With over a dozen fine dining and fast causal options to please, it’s a one-stop for all things delicious. Read on for a few favorites worth checking out.
La Neta Cocina y Lounge
The upscale dining destination offers a modern twist on authentic Mexican cuisine, complimented by a vibrant atmosphere and exceptional service. Whether in the mood for a lively happy hour, a romantic date night or a festive brunch, La Neta Cocina Y Lounge delivers an unforgettable experience.
Frankie’s Uptown
A local favorite that recreates an iconic old school tavern vibe, Frankie’s boasts the friendliest staff in the neighborhood. From a full bar with signature cocktails and happy hour specials to live music on select nights to their signature Stroll and other must-try eats, you can’t go wrong with a night out at Frankie’s Uptown.
Grape Street Café & Wine Bar
Boasting a California bistro-style cuisine with Italian and Mediterranean flares, the neighborhood favorite offers a dynamic center bar with a variety of wine, beer and spirits for all to sip, savor and enjoy.
JING
Since opening in 2019, JING Las Vegas has been one of the most recognized and highest rated restaurants in the Valley. Dine on premium steak, seafood, and an extensive wine list prepared by Chef Thomas Griese. The world-class dining destination blends a globally inspired cuisine with a high-energy ambience that starts with dinner and ends with a late-night vibe that’s contagious.
Trattoria Reggiano
Centered around family, friends and tradition, Trattoria Reggiano sources local, responsibly grown ingredients into every entrée. Guests are treated to a true Italian experience in a traditional street-side Trattoria setting.
Harlo Steakhouse & Bar
At Harlo, you’ll enjoy a classically elegant steakhouse with an elevated ambiance for a discerning clientele unlike anything else in Las Vegas. Chef and Partner Gina Marinelli brings her culinary excellence ensuring every dish is expertly curated and beautifully crafted.
Hungry? Visit summerlin.com for all the delicious details.
Just steps away, the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino, also built in 1905, welcomed guests with comfort and excitement. During Prohibition, it even featured a hidden bar, keeping the party alive when the law tried to shut it down. While booze flowed freely in Vegas’s early days, food was another story.
Before the Strip, before buffets and long before fine dining, meals in Las Vegas were little more than an afterthought. In the early 20th century, culinary offerings were limited to home kitchens, bar-top sandwiches and the occasional boarding house stew. Dining out was a big-city luxury—not for a raw, sunbaked town in the desert.
That began to change in 1931, when two transformative events reshaped Southern Nevada: the legalization of gambling and the start of construction on the Hoover Dam. With new workers flooding into the area, demand for food and drink skyrocketed. While most eateries remained informal, the seeds of a dining culture were slowly being planted.
Even in this ever-changing landscape, a few local legends endure—like one still serving steak and whiskey just off the beaten path.
Located in North Las Vegas, the Hitchin’ Post Saloon & Steakhouse holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the Las Vegas area. Opened in 1948, the Hitchin’ Post is a genuine piece of Old Vegas history—one that predates the Rat Pack era, the megaresorts and even the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Take a Culinary Trip Through Southern Nevada
#beyondTheStrip #cpb #culinary #dining #foodHistory #knpr #knprOrg #lasVegas #npr #southernNevada

#southernnevada #npr #lasvegas #knprorg #knpr #foodhistory
DrWeb @[email protected] · 2025-11-20 · 18:49 UTC

Take a Culinary Trip Through Southern Nevada – KNPR.org
Special Promotion
Take a Culinary Trip Through Southern Nevada
Nevada Public Radio | By Debbie Hall, Published November 19, 2025 at 10:41 AM PST
Chuck Wagon buffet line at the Flamingo.
Enjoy tasty bites from the past to the present
According to Guinness World Records, Madrid’s Sobrino de Botín has been serving meals since 1725, making it the world’s oldest continuously operating restaurant. Las Vegas, by contrast, is known more for reinvention than preservation. Here, the neon never sleeps, buildings come and go, and trends flip with every season.
Las Vegas has always been a city built on bold bets—and not just at the tables. While today’s Strip dazzles with celebrity chefs and global cuisine, the city’s culinary scene had humbler beginnings, shaped by saloons, sandwiches and sheer grit.
Officially founded on May 15, 1905, Las Vegas began as a dusty railroad town, just a mile from an earlier Mormon settlement dating back to 1855. With the arrival of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, a new boomtown emerged—bringing with it an appetite for entertainment, lodging and something stronger than water.
The city’s first bar is widely believed to be the Arizona Club, which opened that same year. It quickly became a fixture in the fledgling downtown, serving whiskey to thirsty railroad passengers and workers carving out a new life in the Mojave Desert.
Beyond The Strip
Downtown Summerlin Delivers Delicious Dining
A vibrant walkable urban destination in the heart of the master planned community of Summerlin®, Downtown Summerlin® is serving up the city’s most tantalizing fare. With over a dozen fine dining and fast causal options to please, it’s a one-stop for all things delicious. Read on for a few favorites worth checking out.
La Neta Cocina y Lounge
The upscale dining destination offers a modern twist on authentic Mexican cuisine, complimented by a vibrant atmosphere and exceptional service. Whether in the mood for a lively happy hour, a romantic date night or a festive brunch, La Neta Cocina Y Lounge delivers an unforgettable experience.
Frankie’s Uptown
A local favorite that recreates an iconic old school tavern vibe, Frankie’s boasts the friendliest staff in the neighborhood. From a full bar with signature cocktails and happy hour specials to live music on select nights to their signature Stroll and other must-try eats, you can’t go wrong with a night out at Frankie’s Uptown.
Grape Street Café & Wine Bar
Boasting a California bistro-style cuisine with Italian and Mediterranean flares, the neighborhood favorite offers a dynamic center bar with a variety of wine, beer and spirits for all to sip, savor and enjoy.
JING
Since opening in 2019, JING Las Vegas has been one of the most recognized and highest rated restaurants in the Valley. Dine on premium steak, seafood, and an extensive wine list prepared by Chef Thomas Griese. The world-class dining destination blends a globally inspired cuisine with a high-energy ambience that starts with dinner and ends with a late-night vibe that’s contagious.
Trattoria Reggiano
Centered around family, friends and tradition, Trattoria Reggiano sources local, responsibly grown ingredients into every entrée. Guests are treated to a true Italian experience in a traditional street-side Trattoria setting.
Harlo Steakhouse & Bar
At Harlo, you’ll enjoy a classically elegant steakhouse with an elevated ambiance for a discerning clientele unlike anything else in Las Vegas. Chef and Partner Gina Marinelli brings her culinary excellence ensuring every dish is expertly curated and beautifully crafted.
Hungry? Visit summerlin.com for all the delicious details.
Just steps away, the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino, also built in 1905, welcomed guests with comfort and excitement. During Prohibition, it even featured a hidden bar, keeping the party alive when the law tried to shut it down. While booze flowed freely in Vegas’s early days, food was another story.
Before the Strip, before buffets and long before fine dining, meals in Las Vegas were little more than an afterthought. In the early 20th century, culinary offerings were limited to home kitchens, bar-top sandwiches and the occasional boarding house stew. Dining out was a big-city luxury—not for a raw, sunbaked town in the desert.
That began to change in 1931, when two transformative events reshaped Southern Nevada: the legalization of gambling and the start of construction on the Hoover Dam. With new workers flooding into the area, demand for food and drink skyrocketed. While most eateries remained informal, the seeds of a dining culture were slowly being planted.
Even in this ever-changing landscape, a few local legends endure—like one still serving steak and whiskey just off the beaten path.
Located in North Las Vegas, the Hitchin’ Post Saloon & Steakhouse holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the Las Vegas area. Opened in 1948, the Hitchin’ Post is a genuine piece of Old Vegas history—one that predates the Rat Pack era, the megaresorts and even the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Take a Culinary Trip Through Southern Nevada
#beyondTheStrip #cpb #culinary #dining #foodHistory #knpr #knprOrg #lasVegas #npr #southernNevada

#beyondthestrip #cpb #culinary #dining #foodhistory #knpr
Panethos @[email protected] · 2025-10-15 · 09:00 UTC
The Tallest Skyscraper in American Cities, Listed by Year of Completion
The buildings shown above do necessarily match the list below. – Source: reddit.com
The following list identifies American cities by the year of completion of their tallest building. The list starts with the newest and extends back to the oldest. Included are both completed buildings and those actively under construction. Long Island City and Brooklyn were incorporated as separate cities from New York City itself for comparison purposes.
Some very interesting findings from this data set:
- There were two significant building clusters of tallest skyscraper built during the 20th century – one took place between 1968 and 1975, while the other took place from 1982 to 1992.
- Approaching the numbers from those previous two eras, there is a boom in new tallest towers taking place in the 2020s.
- As would be expected, three cities with the most rapidly expanding skylines in the country are represented near the top of the list: Austin, Miami, and Nashville.
- The principal differences between the 2020s and the 1970s and 1980s are that the new tallest towers are more often being built in midtown and edge city locations, such as: Newark, Beverly Hills, Reston, Santa Clara, West Palm Beach, Long Island City, Bellevue, Fort Lauderdale, Brooklyn, Silver Spring, Bethesda, Long Beach, Cambridge; and Jersey City. Causes for this trend may include increasing land costs, availability of land, financial incentives, zoning, a limited number of pre-existing skyscrapers, or other considerations.
- Despite a lot of skyscraper construction in downtown areas that is not necessarily the tallest, a significant proportion of American cities have aging tallest skyscrapers…often 30-40-50 years old. These include major cities like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Worth, Houston, Indy, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Tampa.
- A comparison of completion years by decade yields the following results:
- 2020s = 24 to date
- 2010s = 12
- 2000s = 11
- 1990s = 25
- 1980s = 37
- 1970s = 29
- 1960s = 6
- 1950s = 1
- pre-1950 = 15
As new data becomes available, this list will be updated. As always, any additions, corrections, or suggestions are most welcome. Peace!
——-
Nashville, TN: Paramount Tower and Newark, NJ: Summit Tower (2028)
Miami, FL: Waldorf Astoria (2027)
Austin, TX: Waterline; Beverly Hills, CA: One Beverly Hills Tower; and Omaha, NE: Mutual of Omaha Tower (2026)
Reston, VA: Skymark Town Center; Santa Clara, CA: Tasman East Tower; St. Petersburg, FL: 400 Central; and West Palm Beach, FL: One Flagler (2025)
Long Island City, NY: The Orchard and Salt Lake City, UT: Astra Tower (2024)
Bellevue, WA: Sonic; Fort Lauderdale, FL: Veneto Las Olas; Portland, ME: The Casco; and San Jose, CA: 200 Park Avenue (2023)
Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Tower and Silver Spring, MD: Solaire 8200 (2022)
Bethesda, MD: The Wilson; El Paso, TX: WestStar Tower; Honolulu, HI: The Central Ala Moana; and Long Beach, CA: Shoreline Gateway East (2021)
Cambridge, MA: Graduate Tower at Site 4 and Jersey City, NJ: 99 Hudson Street (2020)
Clayton, MO: Centene Centre (2019)
Philadelphia, PA: Comcast Technology Center; San Francisco, CA: Salesforce Tower; and Tysons, VA: Capital One Tower (2018)
Arlington, VA: Central Place Tower and Los Angeles, CA: Wilshire Grand Center (2017)
Irvine, CA: 200 Spectrum Center Drive (2016)
New York City, NY: One World Trade Center (2014)
Boise, ID: Eighth & Main (2013)
Oklahoma City: Devon Energy Center (2012)
Cincinnati, OH: Great American Tower and Tempe, AZ: West Sixth II (2011)
Champaign, IL: 309 Green and Stamford, CT: Park Tower (2009)
Atlanta/Buckhead, GA: 3344 Peachtree; Grand Rapids, MI: River House; Raleigh, NC: PNC Plaza; Virginia Beach, VA: Westin Town Center; and White Plains, NY: The Residences at Ritz Carlton (2008)
Mobile, AL: RSA Towering and San Juan, PR: Coliseum Tower Residences (2007)
Rochester, MN: Broadway Plaza (2004)
The Woodlands, TX: Allison Tower (2002)
Biloxi, MS: Beau Rivage Casino Hotel and Glendale, CA: Glendale Plaza (1999)
Las Vegas, NV: The Strat and Montgomery, AL: RSA Tower (1996)
Reno, NV: Silver Legacy Resort & Casino and Winston-Salem, NC: 100 North Main (1995)
Louisville, KY: 400 West Market (1993)
Atlanta, GA: Bank of America Plaza; Charlotte, NC: Bank of America Center; Manchester, NH: City Hall Plaza; Sacramento, CA: Wells Fargo Center; and Tampa, FL: 100 North Tampa (1992)
Cleveland, OH: Key Tower; Des Moines, IA: 801 Grand; Overland Park, KS: Lighton Plaza I; San Diego, CA: One American Plaza; and Worcester, MA: The 6Hundred (1991)
Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Plaza Tower; Colorado Springs, CO: Wells Fargo Tower; Covington, KY: River Center 1; Greensboro, NC: Lincoln Financial Building; Indianapolis, IN: Salesforce Tower; Jacksonville, FL: Bank of America Tower; New Haven, CT: Financial Center; and Roanoke, VA: Wells Fargo Tower (1990)
Burbank, CA: Tower Burbank; Corpus Christi, TX: One Shoreline Plaza; Kansas City, MO: One Kansas City Place; Orlando, FL: 200 South Orange; Sandy Springs, GA: Concourse Corporate Center V; and Wilmington, DE: 1201 North Market (1988)
Columbia, SC: Capitol Center; Lexington, KY: Financial Center; Metairie, LA: Three Lakeway Center; Norfolk, VA: Dominion Tower; Springfield, MA: Monarch Place; Springfield, MO: Hammons Tower; St. Paul, MN: Wells Fargo Place; and Wichita, KS: Epic Center (1987)
Birmingham, AL: Shipt Tower; Durham, NC: University Tower; Little Rock, AR: Simmons Tower; Shreveport, LA: Regions Tower; and Tucson, AZ: One South Church (1986)
Alexandria, VA: Hilton Mark Center; Billings, MT: First Interstate Center; and Dallas, TX: Bank of America Plaza (1985)
Abilene, TX: Enterprise Tower; Denver, CO: Republic Plaza; El Segundo, CA: Pacific Corporate Towers III; Hartford, CT: City Place I; Peoria, IL: Twin Towers; and Seattle, WA: Columbia Center (1984)
Anchorage, AK: Conoco-Phillips Building; Fort Worth, TX: Burnett Plaza; and Portsmouth, VA: Harbor Tower Apartments (1983)
Fort Wayne, IN: Indiana Michigan Power Center; Houston, TX: JPMorgan Chase Tower; and Toledo, OH: Fifth Third Center (1982)
Richmond, VA: James Monroe Building and Spokane, WA: Bank of America Center (1981)
McAllen, TX: Chase Neuhaus Tower (1980)
Harrisburg, PA: 333 Market Street and Knoxville, TN: First Tennessee Plaza (1979)
Detroit, MI: Marriott Renaissance Center (1977)
Chattanooga, TN: Republic Centre; Jackson, MS: Regions Plaza; Los Angeles/Century City, CA: Century City Towers; Southfield, MI: 3000 Town Center; Troy, MI: PNC Building; Tulsa, OK: BOK Tower; and Yonkers, NY: Seven Pines Tower (1975)
Boston, MA: John Hancock Tower and Chicago, IL: Willis Tower (1974)
Albany, NY: Erastus Corning Tower Baltimore, MD: Transamerica Tower; Columbus, OH: Rhodes State Office Tower; Milwaukee, WI: U.S. Bank Center; and Minneapolis, MN: IDS Center (1973)
Buffalo, NY: Seneca One Tower; Cedar Rapids, IA: Alliant Tower; New Orleans, LA: Hancock Whitney Center; Phoenix, AZ: Chase Tower; and Portland, OR: Wells Fargo Tower (1972)
Amarillo, TX: FirstBank Southwest Tower and Santa Monica, CA: 100 Wilshire Building (1971)
Dayton, OH: Stratacache Tower; Oakland, CA: Ordway Building; Pittsburgh, PA: U.S. Steel Tower; South Bend, IN: Liberty Tower; and Tacoma, WA: 1201 Pacific (1970)
Evanston, IL: Orrington Plaza (1969)
San Antonio, TX: Tower of the Americas and Rochester, NY: Innovation Square (1968)
St. Louis, MO: The Gateway Arch (1967)
Greenville, SC: Landmark Building (1966)
Memphis, TN: 100 North Main (1965)
Lubbock, TX: Metro Tower (1955)
Bismarck, ND: State Capitol (1934)
Baton Rouge, LA: State Capitol; Charleston, WV: State Capitol; Lincoln, NE: State Capitol; and Reading, PA: Berks County Courthouse (1932)
Akron, OH: Huntington Tower and Lansing, MI: Boji Tower (1931)
Allentown, PA: PPL Building; Providence, RI: Industrial National Bank and Syracuse, NY: State Tower Building (1928)
Davenport, IA: Davenport Bank and Trust (1927)
Fresno, CA: Pacific Southwest Building (1925)
Augusta, GA: Lamar Building (1918)
Madison, WI: State Capitol (1917)
Berkeley, CA: Sather Tower (1915)
Waco, TX: ALICO Building (1911)
Topeka, KS: State Capitol (1903)
Springfield, IL: State Capitol (1888)
Charleston, SC: St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church (1872)
SOURCES:
- en.wikipedia.org
- skydb.net
- skyscraperpage.com
#buildings #cities #downtown #edgeCities #edgecities #geography #history #landUse #Midtown #planning #skylines #skyscrapers #towers
#buildings #cities #downtown #edgecities #geography #history
Panethos @[email protected] · 2025-10-15 · 09:00 UTC
The Tallest Skyscraper in American Cities, Listed by Year of Completion
The buildings shown above do necessarily match the list below. – Source: reddit.com
The following list identifies American cities by the year of completion of their tallest building. The list starts with the newest and extends back to the oldest. Included are both completed buildings and those actively under construction. Long Island City and Brooklyn were incorporated as separate cities from New York City itself for comparison purposes.
Some very interesting findings from this data set:
- There were two significant building clusters of tallest skyscraper built during the 20th century – one took place between 1968 and 1975, while the other took place from 1982 to 1992.
- Approaching the numbers from those previous two eras, there is a boom in new tallest towers taking place in the 2020s.
- As would be expected, three cities with the most rapidly expanding skylines in the country are represented near the top of the list: Austin, Miami, and Nashville.
- The principal differences between the 2020s and the 1970s and 1980s are that the new tallest towers are more often being built in midtown and edge city locations, such as: Newark, Beverly Hills, Reston, Santa Clara, West Palm Beach, Long Island City, Bellevue, Fort Lauderdale, Brooklyn, Silver Spring, Bethesda, Long Beach, Cambridge; and Jersey City. Causes for this trend may include increasing land costs, availability of land, financial incentives, zoning, a limited number of pre-existing skyscrapers, or other considerations.
- Despite a lot of skyscraper construction in downtown areas that is not necessarily the tallest, a significant proportion of American cities have aging tallest skyscrapers…often 30-40-50 years old. These include major cities like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Worth, Houston, Indy, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Tampa.
- A comparison of completion years by decade yields the following results:
- 2020s = 24 to date
- 2010s = 12
- 2000s = 11
- 1990s = 25
- 1980s = 37
- 1970s = 29
- 1960s = 6
- 1950s = 1
- pre-1950 = 15
As new data becomes available, this list will be updated. As always, any additions, corrections, or suggestions are most welcome. Peace!
——-
Nashville, TN: Paramount Tower and Newark, NJ: Summit Tower (2028)
Miami, FL: Waldorf Astoria (2027)
Austin, TX: Waterline; Beverly Hills, CA: One Beverly Hills Tower; and Omaha, NE: Mutual of Omaha Tower (2026)
Reston, VA: Skymark Town Center; Santa Clara, CA: Tasman East Tower; St. Petersburg, FL: 400 Central; and West Palm Beach, FL: One Flagler (2025)
Long Island City, NY: The Orchard and Salt Lake City, UT: Astra Tower (2024)
Bellevue, WA: Sonic; Fort Lauderdale, FL: Veneto Las Olas; Portland, ME: The Casco; and San Jose, CA: 200 Park Avenue (2023)
Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Tower and Silver Spring, MD: Solaire 8200 (2022)
Bethesda, MD: The Wilson; El Paso, TX: WestStar Tower; Honolulu, HI: The Central Ala Moana; and Long Beach, CA: Shoreline Gateway East (2021)
Cambridge, MA: Graduate Tower at Site 4 and Jersey City, NJ: 99 Hudson Street (2020)
Clayton, MO: Centene Centre (2019)
Philadelphia, PA: Comcast Technology Center; San Francisco, CA: Salesforce Tower; and Tysons, VA: Capital One Tower (2018)
Arlington, VA: Central Place Tower and Los Angeles, CA: Wilshire Grand Center (2017)
Irvine, CA: 200 Spectrum Center Drive (2016)
New York City, NY: One World Trade Center (2014)
Boise, ID: Eighth & Main (2013)
Oklahoma City: Devon Energy Center (2012)
Cincinnati, OH: Great American Tower and Tempe, AZ: West Sixth II (2011)
Champaign, IL: 309 Green and Stamford, CT: Park Tower (2009)
Atlanta/Buckhead, GA: 3344 Peachtree; Grand Rapids, MI: River House; Raleigh, NC: PNC Plaza; Virginia Beach, VA: Westin Town Center; and White Plains, NY: The Residences at Ritz Carlton (2008)
Mobile, AL: RSA Towering and San Juan, PR: Coliseum Tower Residences (2007)
Rochester, MN: Broadway Plaza (2004)
The Woodlands, TX: Allison Tower (2002)
Biloxi, MS: Beau Rivage Casino Hotel and Glendale, CA: Glendale Plaza (1999)
Las Vegas, NV: The Strat and Montgomery, AL: RSA Tower (1996)
Reno, NV: Silver Legacy Resort & Casino and Winston-Salem, NC: 100 North Main (1995)
Louisville, KY: 400 West Market (1993)
Atlanta, GA: Bank of America Plaza; Charlotte, NC: Bank of America Center; Manchester, NH: City Hall Plaza; Sacramento, CA: Wells Fargo Center; and Tampa, FL: 100 North Tampa (1992)
Cleveland, OH: Key Tower; Des Moines, IA: 801 Grand; Overland Park, KS: Lighton Plaza I; San Diego, CA: One American Plaza; and Worcester, MA: The 6Hundred (1991)
Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Plaza Tower; Colorado Springs, CO: Wells Fargo Tower; Covington, KY: River Center 1; Greensboro, NC: Lincoln Financial Building; Indianapolis, IN: Salesforce Tower; Jacksonville, FL: Bank of America Tower; New Haven, CT: Financial Center; and Roanoke, VA: Wells Fargo Tower (1990)
Burbank, CA: Tower Burbank; Corpus Christi, TX: One Shoreline Plaza; Kansas City, MO: One Kansas City Place; Orlando, FL: 200 South Orange; Sandy Springs, GA: Concourse Corporate Center V; and Wilmington, DE: 1201 North Market (1988)
Columbia, SC: Capitol Center; Lexington, KY: Financial Center; Metairie, LA: Three Lakeway Center; Norfolk, VA: Dominion Tower; Springfield, MA: Monarch Place; Springfield, MO: Hammons Tower; St. Paul, MN: Wells Fargo Place; and Wichita, KS: Epic Center (1987)
Birmingham, AL: Shipt Tower; Durham, NC: University Tower; Little Rock, AR: Simmons Tower; Shreveport, LA: Regions Tower; and Tucson, AZ: One South Church (1986)
Alexandria, VA: Hilton Mark Center; Billings, MT: First Interstate Center; and Dallas, TX: Bank of America Plaza (1985)
Abilene, TX: Enterprise Tower; Denver, CO: Republic Plaza; El Segundo, CA: Pacific Corporate Towers III; Hartford, CT: City Place I; Peoria, IL: Twin Towers; and Seattle, WA: Columbia Center (1984)
Anchorage, AK: Conoco-Phillips Building; Fort Worth, TX: Burnett Plaza; and Portsmouth, VA: Harbor Tower Apartments (1983)
Fort Wayne, IN: Indiana Michigan Power Center; Houston, TX: JPMorgan Chase Tower; and Toledo, OH: Fifth Third Center (1982)
Richmond, VA: James Monroe Building and Spokane, WA: Bank of America Center (1981)
McAllen, TX: Chase Neuhaus Tower (1980)
Harrisburg, PA: 333 Market Street and Knoxville, TN: First Tennessee Plaza (1979)
Detroit, MI: Marriott Renaissance Center (1977)
Chattanooga, TN: Republic Centre; Jackson, MS: Regions Plaza; Los Angeles/Century City, CA: Century City Towers; Southfield, MI: 3000 Town Center; Troy, MI: PNC Building; Tulsa, OK: BOK Tower; and Yonkers, NY: Seven Pines Tower (1975)
Boston, MA: John Hancock Tower and Chicago, IL: Willis Tower (1974)
Albany, NY: Erastus Corning Tower Baltimore, MD: Transamerica Tower; Columbus, OH: Rhodes State Office Tower; Milwaukee, WI: U.S. Bank Center; and Minneapolis, MN: IDS Center (1973)
Buffalo, NY: Seneca One Tower; Cedar Rapids, IA: Alliant Tower; New Orleans, LA: Hancock Whitney Center; Phoenix, AZ: Chase Tower; and Portland, OR: Wells Fargo Tower (1972)
Amarillo, TX: FirstBank Southwest Tower and Santa Monica, CA: 100 Wilshire Building (1971)
Dayton, OH: Stratacache Tower; Oakland, CA: Ordway Building; Pittsburgh, PA: U.S. Steel Tower; South Bend, IN: Liberty Tower; and Tacoma, WA: 1201 Pacific (1970)
Evanston, IL: Orrington Plaza (1969)
San Antonio, TX: Tower of the Americas and Rochester, NY: Innovation Square (1968)
St. Louis, MO: The Gateway Arch (1967)
Greenville, SC: Landmark Building (1966)
Memphis, TN: 100 North Main (1965)
Lubbock, TX: Metro Tower (1955)
Bismarck, ND: State Capitol (1934)
Baton Rouge, LA: State Capitol; Charleston, WV: State Capitol; Lincoln, NE: State Capitol; and Reading, PA: Berks County Courthouse (1932)
Akron, OH: Huntington Tower and Lansing, MI: Boji Tower (1931)
Allentown, PA: PPL Building; Providence, RI: Industrial National Bank and Syracuse, NY: State Tower Building (1928)
Davenport, IA: Davenport Bank and Trust (1927)
Fresno, CA: Pacific Southwest Building (1925)
Augusta, GA: Lamar Building (1918)
Madison, WI: State Capitol (1917)
Berkeley, CA: Sather Tower (1915)
Waco, TX: ALICO Building (1911)
Topeka, KS: State Capitol (1903)
Springfield, IL: State Capitol (1888)
Charleston, SC: St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church (1872)
SOURCES:
- en.wikipedia.org
- skydb.net
- skyscraperpage.com
#buildings #cities #downtown #edgeCities #edgecities #geography #history #landUse #Midtown #planning #skylines #skyscrapers #towers
#buildings #cities #downtown #edgecities #geography #history
Panethos @[email protected] · 2025-10-15 · 09:00 UTC
The Tallest Skyscraper in American Cities, Listed by Year of Completion
The buildings shown above do necessarily match the list below. – Source: reddit.com
The following list identifies American cities by the year of completion of their tallest building. The list starts with the newest and extends back to the oldest. Included are both completed buildings and those actively under construction. Long Island City and Brooklyn were incorporated as separate cities from New York City itself for comparison purposes.
Some very interesting findings from this data set:
- There were two significant building clusters of tallest skyscraper built during the 20th century – one took place between 1968 and 1975, while the other took place from 1982 to 1992.
- Approaching the numbers from those previous two eras, there is a boom in new tallest towers taking place in the 2020s.
- As would be expected, three cities with the most rapidly expanding skylines in the country are represented near the top of the list: Austin, Miami, and Nashville.
- The principal differences between the 2020s and the 1970s and 1980s are that the new tallest towers are more often being built in midtown and edge city locations, such as: Newark, Beverly Hills, Reston, Santa Clara, West Palm Beach, Long Island City, Bellevue, Fort Lauderdale, Brooklyn, Silver Spring, Bethesda, Long Beach, Cambridge; and Jersey City. Causes for this trend may include increasing land costs, availability of land, financial incentives, zoning, a limited number of pre-existing skyscrapers, or other considerations.
- Despite a lot of skyscraper construction in downtown areas that is not necessarily the tallest, a significant proportion of American cities have aging tallest skyscrapers…often 30-40-50 years old. These include major cities like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Worth, Houston, Indy, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Tampa.
- A comparison of completion years by decade yields the following results:
- 2020s = 24 to date
- 2010s = 12
- 2000s = 11
- 1990s = 25
- 1980s = 37
- 1970s = 29
- 1960s = 6
- 1950s = 1
- pre-1950 = 15
As new data becomes available, this list will be updated. As always, any additions, corrections, or suggestions are most welcome. Peace!
——-
Nashville, TN: Paramount Tower and Newark, NJ: Summit Tower (2028)
Miami, FL: Waldorf Astoria (2027)
Austin, TX: Waterline; Beverly Hills, CA: One Beverly Hills Tower; and Omaha, NE: Mutual of Omaha Tower (2026)
Reston, VA: Skymark Town Center; Santa Clara, CA: Tasman East Tower; St. Petersburg, FL: 400 Central; and West Palm Beach, FL: One Flagler (2025)
Long Island City, NY: The Orchard and Salt Lake City, UT: Astra Tower (2024)
Bellevue, WA: Sonic; Fort Lauderdale, FL: Veneto Las Olas; Portland, ME: The Casco; and San Jose, CA: 200 Park Avenue (2023)
Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Tower and Silver Spring, MD: Solaire 8200 (2022)
Bethesda, MD: The Wilson; El Paso, TX: WestStar Tower; Honolulu, HI: The Central Ala Moana; and Long Beach, CA: Shoreline Gateway East (2021)
Cambridge, MA: Graduate Tower at Site 4 and Jersey City, NJ: 99 Hudson Street (2020)
Clayton, MO: Centene Centre (2019)
Philadelphia, PA: Comcast Technology Center; San Francisco, CA: Salesforce Tower; and Tysons, VA: Capital One Tower (2018)
Arlington, VA: Central Place Tower and Los Angeles, CA: Wilshire Grand Center (2017)
Irvine, CA: 200 Spectrum Center Drive (2016)
New York City, NY: One World Trade Center (2014)
Boise, ID: Eighth & Main (2013)
Oklahoma City: Devon Energy Center (2012)
Cincinnati, OH: Great American Tower and Tempe, AZ: West Sixth II (2011)
Champaign, IL: 309 Green and Stamford, CT: Park Tower (2009)
Atlanta/Buckhead, GA: 3344 Peachtree; Grand Rapids, MI: River House; Raleigh, NC: PNC Plaza; Virginia Beach, VA: Westin Town Center; and White Plains, NY: The Residences at Ritz Carlton (2008)
Mobile, AL: RSA Towering and San Juan, PR: Coliseum Tower Residences (2007)
Rochester, MN: Broadway Plaza (2004)
The Woodlands, TX: Allison Tower (2002)
Biloxi, MS: Beau Rivage Casino Hotel and Glendale, CA: Glendale Plaza (1999)
Las Vegas, NV: The Strat and Montgomery, AL: RSA Tower (1996)
Reno, NV: Silver Legacy Resort & Casino and Winston-Salem, NC: 100 North Main (1995)
Louisville, KY: 400 West Market (1993)
Atlanta, GA: Bank of America Plaza; Charlotte, NC: Bank of America Center; Manchester, NH: City Hall Plaza; Sacramento, CA: Wells Fargo Center; and Tampa, FL: 100 North Tampa (1992)
Cleveland, OH: Key Tower; Des Moines, IA: 801 Grand; Overland Park, KS: Lighton Plaza I; San Diego, CA: One American Plaza; and Worcester, MA: The 6Hundred (1991)
Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Plaza Tower; Colorado Springs, CO: Wells Fargo Tower; Covington, KY: River Center 1; Greensboro, NC: Lincoln Financial Building; Indianapolis, IN: Salesforce Tower; Jacksonville, FL: Bank of America Tower; New Haven, CT: Financial Center; and Roanoke, VA: Wells Fargo Tower (1990)
Burbank, CA: Tower Burbank; Corpus Christi, TX: One Shoreline Plaza; Kansas City, MO: One Kansas City Place; Orlando, FL: 200 South Orange; Sandy Springs, GA: Concourse Corporate Center V; and Wilmington, DE: 1201 North Market (1988)
Columbia, SC: Capitol Center; Lexington, KY: Financial Center; Metairie, LA: Three Lakeway Center; Norfolk, VA: Dominion Tower; Springfield, MA: Monarch Place; Springfield, MO: Hammons Tower; St. Paul, MN: Wells Fargo Place; and Wichita, KS: Epic Center (1987)
Birmingham, AL: Shipt Tower; Durham, NC: University Tower; Little Rock, AR: Simmons Tower; Shreveport, LA: Regions Tower; and Tucson, AZ: One South Church (1986)
Alexandria, VA: Hilton Mark Center; Billings, MT: First Interstate Center; and Dallas, TX: Bank of America Plaza (1985)
Abilene, TX: Enterprise Tower; Denver, CO: Republic Plaza; El Segundo, CA: Pacific Corporate Towers III; Hartford, CT: City Place I; Peoria, IL: Twin Towers; and Seattle, WA: Columbia Center (1984)
Anchorage, AK: Conoco-Phillips Building; Fort Worth, TX: Burnett Plaza; and Portsmouth, VA: Harbor Tower Apartments (1983)
Fort Wayne, IN: Indiana Michigan Power Center; Houston, TX: JPMorgan Chase Tower; and Toledo, OH: Fifth Third Center (1982)
Richmond, VA: James Monroe Building and Spokane, WA: Bank of America Center (1981)
McAllen, TX: Chase Neuhaus Tower (1980)
Harrisburg, PA: 333 Market Street and Knoxville, TN: First Tennessee Plaza (1979)
Detroit, MI: Marriott Renaissance Center (1977)
Chattanooga, TN: Republic Centre; Jackson, MS: Regions Plaza; Los Angeles/Century City, CA: Century City Towers; Southfield, MI: 3000 Town Center; Troy, MI: PNC Building; Tulsa, OK: BOK Tower; and Yonkers, NY: Seven Pines Tower (1975)
Boston, MA: John Hancock Tower and Chicago, IL: Willis Tower (1974)
Albany, NY: Erastus Corning Tower Baltimore, MD: Transamerica Tower; Columbus, OH: Rhodes State Office Tower; Milwaukee, WI: U.S. Bank Center; and Minneapolis, MN: IDS Center (1973)
Buffalo, NY: Seneca One Tower; Cedar Rapids, IA: Alliant Tower; New Orleans, LA: Hancock Whitney Center; Phoenix, AZ: Chase Tower; and Portland, OR: Wells Fargo Tower (1972)
Amarillo, TX: FirstBank Southwest Tower and Santa Monica, CA: 100 Wilshire Building (1971)
Dayton, OH: Stratacache Tower; Oakland, CA: Ordway Building; Pittsburgh, PA: U.S. Steel Tower; South Bend, IN: Liberty Tower; and Tacoma, WA: 1201 Pacific (1970)
Evanston, IL: Orrington Plaza (1969)
San Antonio, TX: Tower of the Americas and Rochester, NY: Innovation Square (1968)
St. Louis, MO: The Gateway Arch (1967)
Greenville, SC: Landmark Building (1966)
Memphis, TN: 100 North Main (1965)
Lubbock, TX: Metro Tower (1955)
Bismarck, ND: State Capitol (1934)
Baton Rouge, LA: State Capitol; Charleston, WV: State Capitol; Lincoln, NE: State Capitol; and Reading, PA: Berks County Courthouse (1932)
Akron, OH: Huntington Tower and Lansing, MI: Boji Tower (1931)
Allentown, PA: PPL Building; Providence, RI: Industrial National Bank and Syracuse, NY: State Tower Building (1928)
Davenport, IA: Davenport Bank and Trust (1927)
Fresno, CA: Pacific Southwest Building (1925)
Augusta, GA: Lamar Building (1918)
Madison, WI: State Capitol (1917)
Berkeley, CA: Sather Tower (1915)
Waco, TX: ALICO Building (1911)
Topeka, KS: State Capitol (1903)
Springfield, IL: State Capitol (1888)
Charleston, SC: St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church (1872)
SOURCES:
- en.wikipedia.org
- skydb.net
- skyscraperpage.com
#buildings #cities #downtown #edgeCities #edgecities #geography #history #landUse #Midtown #planning #skylines #skyscrapers #towers
#buildings #cities #downtown #edgecities #geography #history