Coming to an Unusual Location Near You

Obscura Day is a holiday that never occurred to me, but it absolutely perfect. From their website:

Obscura Day is an international celebration of unusual places. It is a day of expeditions, back room tours, & exploring hidden wonders in your own hometown.

On Obscura Day thousands of people, all over the world, go out and explore interesting and unusual places. Sometimes we organize the event, sometimes folks organize it themselves! Over the past two years nearly 10,000 people have attend over 200 different events on Obscura Day.

Obscura Day is on Saturday, the 28th of April, just two weeks from now.  There are four official events being held in Philadelphia, at Eastern State, the Art Museum, Mount Pleasant Mansion, and Laurel Hill Cemetery.  All of these events will cost you something, but there are loads of free things you can do that hold to the spirit of the day.  In some ways, I would actually say that the things you can do by yourself hold more to the spirit of the day, since they’re more likely to be off the beaten path than, say, Eastern State, which pretty much everyone in Philadelphia has at least seen from the outside.

That said, I would rather fancy having a tour around Chislehurst Caves, southeast of London.

Image via Boing Boing.

Who knows, maybe I’ll have an Obscura Day adventure myself and post pictures here.  If you know a site that you’ve always meant to explore but could never quite make the time, take the upcoming holiday to have that adventure, and please, take some pictures so you can share your adventure with others.

The Emlen Street Ruin: History

Ferreting out the history of the Emlen Street ruin from my last post took a little bit of work, but what really ended up breaking it for me was a bit of luck brought on by this week’s warm weather.

The City of Philadelphia has its own online map site, which has filters for park trails, among other things.  While looking for a suitably nearby trail to enjoy on a warm spring afternoon, I noticed that the trail passing by the Emlen Street Ruin was marked.  While Google Maps doesn’t have a good overhead picture of the ruin–theirs was taken after the trees had started leafing–the city site showed a nice overhead view of the ruin.

When I switched the view from Aerial Photo to Road map, a name was suddenly revealed:

The Ruin has a name–a real name you can plug in to Google and get decent search results for.

While I still haven’t found any information about when the Barn burned down, I did discover that the original barn building dates to around 1812–the modern bathroom facilities were a more recent addition.  The cottage which the barn belonged to began as a six-room farmhouse, but around 1890, Henry Houston had it expanded to a 25-room summer retreat for working girls from the city (at that point, West Mount Airy was still quite suburban, and it had been positively rural when the cottage was first built).

Information on the barn is still scarce, and I haven’t yet been able to find out when it burned, though some evidence suggests that the destruction of the bathrooms may have come some time after the main building burned.  At least as recently as the 1970′s, there was a swimming club called the Devil’s Pool nearby for which Buttercup Cottage served as a sort of gateway entrance, and according to the few forum posts I found on the topic, the barn ruins already existed then (and were used as a party spot for the local teens).  That, unfortunately, is where my trail went cold.  I’m glad to have discovered some of the history of this place, but there’s still more to know.  If you have any leads, let me know in the comments, and for my part, I will be sure to post any more information I can find.

More Tools for Writers

Sorry there haven’t been any real, substantial posts from me in a while, but two posts in the past week-ish is better than nothing, right?

I was recently made aware of a useful tool called the Everchanging Book of Names, a shareware (Windows only, sadly) program that can generate random names based on the structures and phonemes of various languages.  This is great if you, like me, sometimes need a character name right now, and usually get bogged down if you can’t get one quickly.

Not all of the program’s features are available unless you register it, which costs $10, but the free features are useful enough that I’m not too bothered by the things that are locked out.  After all, I really don’t know what I’m missing.

Credit where credit is due, I wouldn’t have found this tool if it hadn’t been mentioned in a recent episode of Writing Excuses.

SEPTA: Philadelphia Topside

Many of the stories that I have set in Philadelphia are set back in the 1970s, and nothing says mid-’70s (or earlier, or into the early ’90s) Philadelphia quite like a PCC trolley car.

I love trolleys, even though most of SEPTA’s current fleet are the boxy white Kawasaki trams that serve Center City and West Philly on the five Green Line Subway/Surface routes, but I especially love the old PCC cars and the refurbished PCC-IIs which run down Girard.  You can imagine my delight, then, when I stumbled across Philadelphia Trolley Tracks, a site devoted to SEPTA’s trolley lines past and present.  The site is filled with photos of trolleys, some of which date back as far as the 1920s, as well as historical maps and rosters of rolling stock.

So what’s the use, yeah?  The internet is absolutely wonderful for finding information on really specific topics, but there’s a lot of stuff to troll through.  Since I began writing my 1970s paranormal investigator character, I’ve spent a lot of time researching Philadelphia circa 1970 because there have been a lot of changes.  Transit tunnels are especially interesting to me, especially historical ones, but the information I’ve been able to find has been a bit sparse, especially in the picture department.  It turns out that nobody was running around with a digital camera taking thousands of pictures of random stuff back then.  Who knew?

I’ve been thinking about the kind of stories that happen in trolleys and in tunnels lately because I’ve been looking at this site, or I’ve been looking at this site a lot because I’ve been thinking about stories.  We’ll see how things develop, but I’ve got a lot of writing coming up in this, my last semester at Wilson.

Some Thoughts on Characterization

A confluence of media has had me thinking about characters lately.  First, on my drive back to Philly from WNC, I listened to the episode of Writing Excuses about character quirks, which focused a lot on making characters distinguishable and memorable, even if they are based off of a trope.  I think about this a lot because one of my characters gets compared to a certain wizard from Chicago, a wizard I hadn’t heard of until quite a few years after this character came into being.

The second thing came just today when I was reading a post on Aaron Diaz’s art blog, Indistinguishable From Magic. You may or may not be familiar with Diaz’s work from Dresden Codak.  Anyhow, in his post, he talks about making characters recognizable, albeit in a visual medium.  In talking about the shape of a character, he says, in part,

Character designs follow a hierarchy: you grab the reader’s attention with the most essential information and then invite them to investigate the details.  If important elements of your design are only evident in the details, then it needs to be reworked.  If your character is not completely distinguishable in silhouette, it needs to be reworked.  Detail should always radiate from the core theme.

While I can’t draw worth a damn, I still find this to be a good metaphor for the most part.  The silhouette of your character should be distinct, but this can be stretched a little bit more when writing, for the silhouette comes first and foremost from what tropes your character is built off of.  One hard-boiled detective will, at first glance, look a lot like all the others, but you have to throw your readers something else immediately, something that tells them that this is a different hard-boiled detective than all the other one’s they’ve met.  Everything else is spot-on, whether you’re writing or drawing, though.  You can’t expect to keep a reader if you don’t give them something different in the first couple hundred words, if you’re writing a short story, or the first chapter, if you’re writing something longer.

This can be extended, in some ways, to the rest of a story, too.  The things that readers need early on are action, something happening that will get them to keep reading, and differentiation, something to tell them what makes your story different than everything else in the slush heap.

A Pause

For those among my regular-ish readers, I’m sorry for the lack of updates recently, and I regret to say that there probably won’t be any substantial updates again for a few months.  In late August, I started my senior year of college, and between a full course-load, having to write my senior portfolio, and trying to have a social life, I don’t anticipate much time to blog.  This isn’t to say that I’m putting this blog down or anything; I just don’t have much time in my life at the moment.

To hopefully appease some of you, I do have a few links, though.  The first is a magazine article from a while back about, as the author puts it in the dek, “Swordsmen and Sorcery in West Philadelphia.”

Second, a pair of links I discovered recently which relate to one of my earliest posts on this blog, the exploration of abandoned and unseen places.  Infiltration is the “zine about going places you’re not supposed to go.”  It was founded by a young Canadian man (now deceased) who went by the name Ninjalicious, and there is a nice little interview with him, circa 1998, done by the Philadelphia Citypaper.

I hope you find something of worth somewhere in those links or elsewhere on this site.  Thanks for reading, whether you’re new or old.  Hope to see you here again when I have time to devote energy to this project again.

H. B. B.

More from the Underground

Though in recent months, I’ve moved away from topics which may inspire writing somewhat, I haven’t forgotten my goals.  To that end, this cable-lacking author only just turned up a History Channel show which may be of interest to Urban Phantasy readers, Cities of the Underworld. I’m often inspired by the things which are unseen, the places that most people don’t go, and I’m always looking around for new, interesting bits of information to further inform my writing.

Part of the second series of CotU can be found on Hulu, but they lack the first-series episode which, in part, concerns Philadelphia.  Regardless, the show is at least worth a look.  Who knows, inspiration may strike you halfway through an episode and send you scrambling for a pad and pen, lest your muse abandon you.

Further Pennsylvania Folklore

During my the past week, which I spent in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania–more commonly known as The Middle of Nowhere–I discovered a series of books which should be of some interest to Urban Phantasy readers.  Pennsylvania Fireside Tales, by Jeffrey R. Frazier, is a multi-volume collection of folklore, ghost stories, hunting stories, and legends from the Native American tribes of Pennsylvania.

If I had been able to justify the expense, I might well have come away from the small bookshop where I found these books with the whole set, but that was not to be.  Nevertheless, I’m going to try to lay hands on the books.  I put my trust in the public library system on this count.

If you can track these books down, I recommend at least glancing through one or two, even if the prices seem a bit steep for each of the slim hardback volumes.

Tidbits from Underneath Philadelphia

In one of my many moments of research-induced distraction, I recently stumbled across several tidbits which should prove interesting to Urban Phantasy readers.  The first is a map which I had, until now, forgotten all about.  It used to be that there were maps around the City Hall/15th Street station downtown, which showed the extent of public underground concourse.  The last time I remember seeing one such map I think predates the turn of the millennium, though my memory is often far from perfect.

The post which I found this image in mentions a fact that I had previously been ignorant of, though it makes sense and fills in some gaps in what I know about the Penn Center tunnels.

Edmund Bacon’s concept of a hidden, weather-protected concourse connecting urban office, transportation and retail facilities was innovative at the time and influenced other cities, as well as Philadelphia’s subsequent Market East Redevelopment. Furthermore, the Penn Center complex includes an underground roadway that trucks use to service and supply the buildings. This significantly reduces the number of trucks traveling over and loading/unloading on the streets above. The entrance to this no-outlet road (called Commerce Street) is on 19th Street between Market Street and J.F.K. Boulevard.

My second discovery is a video clip from an unknown program that aired on WHYY several years ago, which took a look at Philadelphia’s underground architecture.  This particular video is of some of the subterranean portions of Philadelphia City Hall.

If you have any more information on the program this came from, let me know in the comments.  I’ll also post any more information I find on my own, for this looks like it was quite an interesting program.

Legends from (a Bit) Farther Afield

In my recent attempts to uncover more relevant legends to inform a story that I’m working on, I came across an interesting article from 1985 which strikes fairly close to home.  The article covers some of the legends which were brought to the Lehigh Valley by 18th Century German immigrants, albeit in fairly broad strokes.

Despite the overall lack of in-depth information in the article, it provides a foundation upon which stories can be built by giving readers an overview of the sorts of legends which were prevalent in the area.  This not only allows for improvisation based on suck local themes but also gives a jumping-off point for further research.  One such point is the mention of legends concerning Till Eulenspiegel, a German trickster figure.

Such legendary figures, especially tricksters, are handy to keep around to spice up stories.

Reading the article which inspired this post, I was struck by the change in attitudes towards the supernatural since the 18th Century.  In some ways, I long for an age where it is both exciting and normal to hear a tale of the devil’s buried treasure or a local spirit haunting a roadway.