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Montgomery, Alabama, circa 1906. "Dexter Avenue and the Capitol." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.
My dad the architect used this exact trick years ago to keep pigeons out of the light well space in his downtown office building - they strung thin, barely visible wires in crossing patterns - no birds. Bird-Safe glass now uses similar random crossing patterns. Sometimes "old ideas" are still the best ideas, you just have to have the knowledge of history to realize it.
It looks like a miniature carriage with a glass cube on top.
[It's street vendor's cart. Roasted peanuts would be my guess. - Dave]
Loving the wires and the insulators! Great picture. No wonder we've gone to underground wiring these days.
Lest anyone doubt the Southern sympathies were deep and long in Montgomery, you should know that the last time I was there, on this street leading to the capitol, the Confederate battle flag flew there, above the Stars and Stripes. (And Lurleen Wallace was governor.) 1966.
If you do "48 Court Square" on Google Earth for Montgomery, that'll let you zoom to street level, right behind this wonderful fountain with the State Capitol building on the horizon. A number of the 1906 buildings are still there, but while the fountain did its frothy duties for the past century, the Calcutta-like wire and pole circus has packed up and left town. You can almost see Savannah. OK, maybe not.
I noticed the lack of pigeons as well. But I think a pigeon would have no trouble navigating the forest of wires. Maybe their populations in cities weren't so large 100 years ago?
It would appear that there is an attempt to "keep left" when driving as noted by the carriages on the left and the horseless carriage coming down on the right. Even the escaped driverless carriage appears to be keeping left. If this rule were true, the trolley on the left would be bearing down on the gentlemen crossing the street reading a newspaper! I hope this all turned out OK.
Wondering how linemen would put back together this maze of overhead wires after a break caused by a tornado or strong thunderstorm. It seems like you would have to start all over from the main switching station in the area and go from there.
Who wired this place? Spider-Man? Obviously "multiplex" and "bandwidth" hadn't hit the dictionary yet.
One might call this an electrifying photograph!
Now there's something I don't believe I've seen before in other street views on Shorpy - a dog running in the street. He's just to the right of the second tier of the fountain.
The steeple just to the right of the Capitol is Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor from 1954 to 1960.
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