A Series of Photographs of Downtown Belleville, Ontario in 1975

Belleville is a city in Ontario, Canada situated on the eastern end of Lake Ontario, located at the mouth of the Moira River and on the Bay of Quinte.

Downtown Belleville, Ontario in 1975

Belleville is between Ottawa and Toronto, along the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor. It is the seat of Hastings County, but politically independent of it, and is the centre of the Bay of Quinte Region.

A series of photographs from the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County that show downtown Belleville, Ontario in 1975, commissioned by Heritage Belleville.

160 and 162 Front Street, Belleville, Ontario, with Cablevue office at 160

160, 162 and 166 Front Street, Belleville, Ontario. The Corbin Lock building on Coleman Street is visible through the passage way 

166 and 168 Front Street, Belleville, Ontario

186, 188, 190 and 192 Front Street, Belleville, Ontario (the Lister Block). Businesses included Lots o'Leather, Davison & Davison Travel and the Modern Café

194, 196 and 200 Front Street, Belleville. Businesses included McKinney Insurance and Central Taxi which was located on the southwest corner of Bridge and Front Streets

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20 Wonderful American Kitchen Designs From the 1950s

It’s the 1950s. The war is over, and the United States is enjoying a wave of unprecedented prosperity. Millions of GIs returned, eager for the comforts of home that they had been missing, and everyone settled down to a kind of nationwide nesting. Record numbers of homes were being built in the newly developed suburbs, and the center of all those homes was the kitchen.

The new, modern American kitchen took the form that had been established at the Bauhaus way back in the 1920s — built-in cabinets, with a long, continuous countertop above, and appliances integrated into the cabinets for a seamless look. People who couldn’t afford to buy a new house, or to replace their kitchen all in one go, were encourage to modernize their kitchen bit by bit, replacing their old piecemeal kitchens with new, modern cabinetry — starting with the sink unit.

By the 1940s, refrigerators had become a common feature in American kitchens. Appliance designers in the 1950s experimented with some refrigerator designs that might seem rather unusual to us now, like the 1952 GE wall-mounted version, which replaced a section of upper cabinets. The pink unit above, grandly titled the ‘GE Refrigeration Center’, combined a wall-mounted fridge with pull-out refrigerator (or freezer) drawers that were designed to match the rest of the cabinets.

Steel kitchen kitchen cabinets were very common in the 1950s, as manufacturers looked for ways to turn steel factories that produced weapons for the war to more domestic purposes. There were quite a few different manufacturers, including GE, who made both appliances and cabinets. GE also made the “cabinettes” you see above — little tiny metal cabinets made to mount under an upper cabinet (or on the backsplash).

Throughout the 1950s, designers and homeowners embraced color in the kitchen, although these colors were softer than the ones commonly seen in 1930s and 1940s kitchens. While kitchens in the 1930s and 1940s often featured bolder colors like black, red, or green, the 1950s was dominated by soft shades of blue, pink, and yellow — candy-colored cabinets with appliances to match.

1951 Western Style Youngstown Kitchen – This modern kitchen shows the steel cabinetry so popular during the post-WWII period as well as the prevalence of the Western theme with the knotty pine walls and yoke light fixture in the adjacent breakfast booth.

1951 Armstrong Picture Kitchen – In addition to the flooring, this kitchen is visually active with cupboard doors that serve as cooking inspiration. The idea was to introduce low-cost design with inexpensive materials ... in this case pages from magazines.

1951 Early American Kitchen – One of the design trends of the early 1950s was wallpaper. Not only was wallpaper used abundantly throughout the house, but ceiling treatments were common in the magazines of the period. How many homeowners actually undertook the daunting task of doing this themselves is anybody's guess, but it looks like a heck of a lot of work to us.

1953 Armstrong Kitchen – This kitchen has tons of storage ... a common feature in Armstrong linoleum ads. Other common trends included the modern light fixtures and pinch pleated café curtains.

1953 Brown & Green Kitchen – This modern mid-century kitchen has a brown, orange, and apple green scheme, and an eat in kitchen. Wallpaper was a common wall treatment and during the early 1950s was often used on the ceiling as well.

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In the 1920s, People Thought Radioactive Water Was Good for the Health

Back in the 1920s, people thought that drinking radium, and thorium, infused water was healthy. One of the more famous varieties of this water was sold under the brand name Radithor. It was eventually famously implicated in the illness and subsequent death of an industrialist named Eben Byers, which was accompanied by the headline of “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off”.

A bottle of Radithor at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in New Mexico, USA.

Radithor was a well known patent medicine/snake oil that is possibly the best known example of radioactive quackery. It consisted of triple distilled water containing at a minimum 1 microcurie (37 kBq) each of the Radium 226 and 228 isotopes, as well as 1 microcurie of isothiouranium, a cheaper radioactive compound.

Radithor was manufactured from 1918-28 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, Inc., of East Orange, New Jersey. The head of the laboratories was listed as Dr. William J. A. Bailey, not a medical doctor. It was advertised as “A Cure for the Living Dead” as well as “Perpetual Sunshine”.

These radium elixirs were marketed similar to the way opiates were commonly advertised with Laudanum an age earlier, and electrical cure-alls during the same time period such as the Prostate Warmer.

The story of socialite Eben Byers’s death from Radithor consumption and the associated radiation poisoning found its way into the New York Times under the title “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off,” which led to the strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration's powers and the demise of most radiation quack cures.

Amazing Photographs Capture Punk Scenes in East Germany During the 1980s

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s there were new movements within the German punk scene, led by labels like ZickZack Records, from Hamburg. It was during this period that the term Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) was first coined by Alfred Hilsberg, owner of ZickZack Records. Many of these bands played experimental post-punk, often using synthesizers and computers.

In the 1980s, many new punk bands became popular in the scene and developed the so-called “Deutschpunk” style, which is not a generic term for German punk rock, but an own style of punk music that included quite primitive songwriting, very fast rhythms and politically radical left-wing lyrics, mostly influenced by the Cold War.

Because of repressions by the state of East Germany, there was only a secret punk scene that could develop there. One of the most popular bands were probably Schleim-Keim, who also got popular in West Germany. Only in the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) did the government allow some bands like Feeling B or Die Skeptiker from East Berlin, but those bands were criticized in the scene for cooperating with the government. Some of these bands applied for and received “amateur licenses” to allow them to perform in state-sanctioned venues, while still maintaining connections with the underground East German punk community.

Harald Hauswald’s pictures show everyday life in the GDR in all its facets, between SED dictatorship and underground opposition. Hauswald, who was born in Radebeul, went to East Berlin himself after an apprenticeship as a photographer and became part of the scenes he documented there. With all clarity, his photographs, taken from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, articulate the dignity of those portrayed, the transformation of East Berlin’s urban space, and the work of oppositional groups and youth cultures in an East German republic marked by decay.

Bluesmass, Berlin, 1983

Punks in East-Berlin, 1985

Alternative church congress (church from below), Berlin-Friedrichshain, 1987

Punkrock concert in a church hall of the protestant church, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Saxony, 1985

Alexanderplatz, Berlin-Mitte, 1988

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Handsome Portrait Photos of George Montgomery in the 1940s and ’50s

Born 1916 in Brady, Montana, American actor George Montgomery signed with 20th Century Fox in 1939. His first film at the studio was The Cisco Kid and the Lady (1939), the first of the Cisco Kid series.

Montgomery was promoted to leading roles in a melodrama written by Dalton Trumbo, Accent on Love (1941). Fox then starred him in some B Westerns: Last of the Duanes (1941), Riders of the Purple Sage (1941), and The Cowboy and the Blonde (1941).

Montgomery is best remembered as an actor in Western films and television. In the 1958–59 season, Montgomery starred in his own 26-episode NBC Western series, Cimarron City as Mayor Matt Rockford, through his own production company Mont Productions. He claimed to have turned down the lead roles in the Western television series Gunsmoke and Wagon Train. Cimarron City ran one season.

Montgomery acted in and directed Satan’s Harvest (1970), starred in The Leo Chronicles (1972) and The Daredevil (1972) and helped produce The Proud and Damned (1972). He also starred in the TV movie Ride the Tiger (1970) and made guest appearances on 1970s television shows including The Odd Couple and The Six Million Dollar Man.

Montgomery died at home in 2000, aged 84. For his contribution to the television industry, George Montgomery has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6301 Hollywood Blvd. In 1995, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars was dedicated in his honor. He is also honored with a statue in the square of Plentywood, Montana.

Take a look at these vintage photos to see portrait of a young and handsome George Montgomery in the 1940s and 1950s.

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Photos of Sophia Loren During the Filming of ‘A Countess from Hong Kong’ (1967)

A Countess from Hong Kong is a 1967 British romantic comedy film scored, written, and directed by Charlie Chaplin and starring Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Sydney Chaplin (Chaplin’s third son), Tippi Hedren, Patrick Cargill and Margaret Rutherford.

It was the last film directed, written, produced and scored by Chaplin, and one of two films Chaplin directed in which he did not play a major role (the other was 1923’s A Woman of Paris), as well as his only color film. Chaplin’s cameo marked his final screen appearance.

The story is based loosely on the life of a woman Chaplin met in France, named Moussia Sodskaya, or “Skaya”, as he calls her in his 1922 book My Trip Abroad. She was a Russian singer and dancer who “was a stateless person marooned in France without a passport”.

It was originally started as a film called Stowaway in the 1930s, planned for Paulette Goddard, but production was never completed. This resulting film, created nearly 30 years after its inception, was a critical failure and grossed US$2 million from a US$3.5-million budget. However, it did prove to be extremely successful in Europe and Japan. In addition, the success of the music score was able to cover the budget.

Critics such as Tim Hunter and Andrew Sarris, as well as poet John Betjeman and director François Truffaut, viewed the film as being among Chaplin’s best works. The film’s theme song, "This Is My Song", written by Chaplin and performed by Petula Clark, became a worldwide success, topping the charts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, the Netherlands and Belgium, while reaching number three in the United States and number four in Canada.

These vintage photos captured portrait of Sophia Loren during the filming of A Countess from Hong Kong in 1967.

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Vintage Photographs of Masquerade Dancers in Nigeria From the Early 20th Century

Dance is the most popular form of recreation in Africa. In towns, men and women of all ages meet informally in dance clubs to dance to the rhythms of popular musicians. In villages there may be opportunities in the evenings for informal dancing, but relations between the sexes there are more tightly controlled.

Masquerade dancers are a feature of religious societies in many areas. Four main types of masquerader are identified by the roles they play: those who embody deities or nature spirits and to whom sacrifice is made to assure the fertility of land and people, those who embody the ancestral spirits, those who placate the spirits through their dance, and those who perform principally as entertainers.

The type of mask influences the style of the masquerade dance. The Ikpelweme ancestral masqueraders of the Afemai people of Bendel State, Nigeria, wear richly colored, close-fitting costumes with face masks and elaborate headpieces of embroidered cloth, which allow for a dance that accelerates into a climax of rapid, abrupt movement.

Here, some amazing photographs of plays, dances and performances of various groups in Nigeria from the early 20th century.

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