Painted Bricks: One you definately do not see anymore, brickwork, Thermopolis Wyoming

Thursday, February 17, 2011

One you definately do not see anymore, brickwork, Thermopolis Wyoming

Here's one that you would not see done again, and you might also expect to have been changed since 1945. Swastika motif in brickwork.

This is not as sinister as it might seem. Swastikas showed up as ornamental designs in quite a few things prior to World War Two, and they bore no association at all with the Nazi Party. In the west, they were associated with Indians, and were regarded as an Indian good luck symbol. Chances are that the architect of this Thermopolis, Wyoming building had that in mind, as Thermopolis is not far from the Wind River Reservation.

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Painted Bricks?

As we noted in our very first post on this curiously named blog, this blog started off as an effort to photograph and document the painted "ghost signs" on buildings in Casper, Wyoming.

It has since expanded, as we have photographed most if not all of those, into one that captures generally interesting older buildings anywhere, while still recording painted signs on buildings where we run across them. It is one of a series of photograph blogs we have, including our main site, Holscher's Hub, our site dedicated to churches in our region, Churches of the West; our similar site on courthouses, Courthouses of the West; our railroad site, Railhead; and our site dedicated to war memorials, Some Gave All.

In a way, however, this site is a history site, attempting to record a bit of the history of the West through the depiction of its buildings of a certain era. We have a couple of history sites as well, including Lex Anteinternet and Today In Wyoming's History. This one mostly lacks text, unlike those other two, with the buildings speaking for themselves.