Monday, August 26, 2013

Ye Olde Suburb of Nottingham

More stuff about Bensalem PA.

I found a brief sound-less video from the 1950s on the Bensalem Township web site history page from which I made the screen cap on the left. The image on the sign is amusing: a coachman on the left, and then along the bottom what looks like Cinderella's carriage drawn by two horses.

It's amusing given that Philadelphia's newest suburb was made up of one-story ranch-style houses (or Ranch Homes as it says on the sign) for around $10,000, which is pretty much the opposite of regal splendour. After this image in the video you can see the houses, which now look shockingly small and shabby to me. Although by the time I rolled into Nottingham the front yards were no longer just dirt and some landscaping had taken place.

I also discovered that although realtors nowadays refer to both my old neighborhood and the one just north as "Nottingham" in fact the development I lived in was called Stanwood.