When you spend enough time with these cards…or really any postcards I imagine…you start to see things that you don’t see at first glance, or even after several glances. This is especially true when you spend time scanning the cards and seeing them blown up on the computer screen.
These details are everywhere…and today, I thought I would point out one that I stumbled across the other night. NT0247 is a night view of the City Hall and Fire Station with a fire engine in front and a few folks milling about (actually quite a few if you look very closely.) It’s a great night shot with the buildings outlined in light bulbs.
Looking closely at the lower right though, there is a detail that you might not expect…half of the Bekins moving carriage! It is resting in front of a billboard with some attraction posters on it (more on this in a moment). I thought this detail was pretty interesting because I don’t think that the Bekins moving sponsorship at the park lasted too terribly long. So, you can effectively use this to date the photo to within some time frame. (I could not find any ready information on when the Bekins carriage was at the park…I am sure someone out there knows.)
Getting back to the billboard that is visible in NT0247, it’s hard to tell exactly what poster is there in the dark on. However, if we go to NT0249 we get another detail that is related to the billboard by the Fire Dept. Zooming in on it we see see the billboard with another poster on it (probably not the same one shown in NT0247.) It’s an early Matterhorn poster! This hidden detail 
would put this photo at sometime during or after 1959.
I can easily see spending a pile of time just looking at the cards blown up on the computer. There is quite a bit more to look at when you do this. So, I will be sure to post on more “Hidden Details” going forward.
Until next time…
P.S. You get a much better look at the Bekins carriage in a number of other cards…NT0246 among them.
