Alan Mays' photos with the keyword: fifties

A Vintage Photos Theme Park photo for the theme of this was the [you name the decade] (please explain why the photo represents the period) . "Midway Diner, where we ate our dinner. On our trip to Atlantic City. Thursday, July 13, 1950." This was the 1950s -- just barely -- but diners like this have played a significant role in fifties nostalgia. As Wikipedia observes, "In television and cinema (e.g. The Blob , Happy Days , Grease , and Diner ), diners and soda fountains have come to symbolize the period of prosperity and optimism in America in the 1950s. They are shown as the place where teenagers meet after school and as an essential part of a date." Based on other photos I purchased along with this one, I believe that the family members who ate their dinner here on July 13 were traveling to Atlantic City, New Jersey, from their home in or near Allentown, Pennsylvania. This suggests that the Midway Diner was located somewhere in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but I haven't been able to determine exactly where. As I was getting ready to post this picture, I discovered that I used a different diner photo for a previous 1950s theme for the Vintage Photos Theme Park. See Good Food Federal Diner, Brookline Avenue, Boston, Mass., 1956 .

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A photo of a dock or a pier for the Vintage Photos Theme Park. This is a 1957 snapshot of the Steel Pier , an amusement pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Billed as "The Show Place of the Nation," the pier hosted a variety of shows and acts, including a diving horse and a bicycle-riding bear. When I purchased this photo, however, I didn't realize that it showed a bear and a woman riding bikes on the high platform visible on the left-hand side (mouse over the image to see an enlargement ). After I spotted the bear, I still couldn't imagine that you could train an animal like that to climb a ladder and ride a bicycle. But a YouTube clip of the Bicycle-Riding Bear that's part of The Nieroslavski Family at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, N.J. --filmed during summer 1960--provides a glimpse of how the bear performed its act. Attitudes toward animal acts have changed over the past fifty years, however, and making a bear ride a bicycle seems inhumane and dangerous by today's standards. As far as I've been able to determine, there are no longer any bicycling bears or diving horses in Atlantic City.

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A 1950s photo for the Vintage Photos Theme Park. This 1956 photo shows a diner on "Brookline Avenue," as indicated by the pole-mounted street sign that's visible in the center of the photo (mouse over the image above for a close-up view of the diner and the sign). The letters on top of the diner's roof spell out the words "GOOD FOOD," and the name "Federal Diner" is barely legible on a circular sign situated above the entrance at the middle of the building. Four or five men are standing around the cars near the front door of the diner, and they appear to be looking in the direction of the photographer, perhaps waiting for him while he takes the photo. Or maybe they're watching the woman wearing a dress and high heels who's walking past on the sidewalk. This eatery was the "Good Food Federal Diner," formerly located at 410 Brookline Avenue in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. For another 1950s view of this diner, see Good Food Back in the Day on Boston's Universal Hub site.