As I recounted in this week’s Era’s Past column, Bruce Springsteen paid a surprise visit to The Village nightclub in downtown Lancaster in the early morning hours of June 22, 1984.
I was an intern at the Intelligencer Journal that summer. And as luck would have it, an Intell reporter got the tip, shortly after the […]

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My, my, how the downtown Lancaster retail scene has changed in 75 years.
At right is a list of stores participating in “Lancaster Sales Day” in 1934. The list was published in the New Era on Jan. 22 of that year. It’s a nice Who’s Who from the retail landscape of that day.
But only a few of the […]

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The beginning of May 1984 marked the start of local filming for the movie “Called Home” (later renamed “Witness”), starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis.
I only had space for one photo each of Ford and McGillis in this week’s Eras Past column on the 25th anniversary of the start of local filming, so I’m posting some additional photos […]

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Last year, the Lititz Car Co. began selling Zap brand electric cars and trucks that can travel up to 40 mph and go 25 miles between battery charges. It was a big new thing for Lancaster County…..sort of.
Turns out that 100 years ago, you could buy an electric car on East King Street that went about 15 mph […]

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If  you ever doubted the power of one vote, consider the 1898 election for mayor of Lancaster.
Democrat Simon Shissler defeated Republican Samuel M. Myers by a single vote.
But early discrepancies in the vote totals led to our own “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in the New Era, 50 years before that famous 1948 error by the Chicago Tribune.
Below is the Feb. 16, […]

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Here’s a nifty photo and description from the Nov. 14, 1933, New Era. And there’s more, so read on….”Go, Team!”

The Brubaker twins were the subject of a feature article in the Intelligencer Journal in 2002, when they got together to celebrate their 85th birthdays with their families. They said they still remembered some of their high school […]

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I wish there would have been a picture of this guy walking the streets of Lancaster!
This short piece was published in the New Era on Dec. 23, 1908.
I thought it was an interesting, and somewhat unusual, little item of local color from the period, so here it is:

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Shaub’s Shoe Shop, which opened in 1880, is one of the oldest family businesses in Lancaster.
The shop, at 18 N. Queen St., underwent a renovation earlier this year and added some extra clothing lines. It remains a fixture on the downtown retail scene.
If you had popped into Shaub’s 100 years ago, here’s an example of what you would have found […]

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In this week’s Eras Past column, I included an item about Frank McClain, a state representative from Lancaster City who was facing opposition in December 1908 in his bid for a second term as Speaker of the House (he lost the election a month later).
McClain was a political giant in his day, serving as Speaker of […]

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Old-timers sometimes refer to how much less crime there was in Lancaster 40, 50 or 60 years ago, compared with today, but you wouldn’t know it from this list of warnings city police had for holiday shoppers in 1958.
Their recommendations: Lock your doors and windows when you go out, guard your pocketbook, avoid crowds, don’t talk to strangers, and beware […]

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