Short Circuit

Another short circuit.

Or should the title be “Circuit Short”?

This post is not about the sort of short circuit one could expect from a Costa Rican “plein air” wiring job. I’ve mentioned the possibility of a post about electricity in that fair land. Here’s a foretaste of what you’ll see when that post happens…

Central American Electricuriousity.

We are returning, briefly, to the short nighttime circuit of Circuit Avenue, from a few nights ago. Along Circuit Avenue there are gems of nineteenth century architecture, worn by time and decay, peeling of paint, wrapped with skirts from the twentieth century.

Oak Bluffs is full of anachronistic juxtapositions. Wouldn’t you love to see a photo of this edifice “as built”?

Above the Avenue looms the past.

Oak Bluffs has planted a number of these bradford pear tress on Circuit Avenue. They’re real pretty in the spring.

Look up, look up, to see what was before.

Victorian rococo. Behind this building, from 1874 to 1896, was the “Campground” loop of the MV Railroad. In my childhood, that loop still had bumps in the pavement, from the ties and rails buried underneath that macadam surface. ( see: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=371218822944727&set=a.200553103344634.51910.200547683345176&type=1&theater )

Once upon a time, these buildings were lit by candle and kerosene, and transport in the streets below was on pad of foot, wheel of cart, tire of velocipede, or hoof of horse. One of my ancestors, a refugee from the reconstruction era South, a “reverse carpetbagger”, published a newspaper in this town.

Perhaps the hotels and fancy homes of Oak Bluffs had fancy bathrooms. The cast iron bathtub made its first appearance in the early 1880s. Not sure of how successful its new product would be, the Kohler company primarily marketed the tubs as hog scalding troughs, noting parenthetically that with the addition of feet, the troughs could be used in the home as bathing devices.

We don’t know how old this shopwindow tub is, but never in their wildest dreams did Kohler imagine that the cast iron tub would be a shopwindow centerpiece.

Cast iron tub in the display window of Beth Serusa’s “Simply Soaps” store. (Through which we see a cigarettely interlude.)