Old America is full of grand architecture that doesn’t match the stuff of “Cowboys and Indians”. One of the styles is called “Moorish Revival“. The label is used to explain bizarrely out-of-place architecture. Wikipedia says:
Moorish Revival or Neo-Moorish is one of the exotic revival architectural styles that were adopted by architects of Europe and the Americas in the wake of Romanticist Orientalism. It reached the height of its popularity after the mid-19th century, part of a widening vocabulary of articulated decorative ornament drawn from historical sources beyond familiar classical and Gothic modes. Neo-Moorish architecture drew on elements from classic Moorish architecture and, as a result, from the wider Islamic architecture.
Say what?
An example of “Moorish revival” were a couple of “resort buildings” called Saltair at Salt Lake City, Utah. I first noticed this building in the eerie 1962 movie Carnival of Souls. It was already abandoned and locked off back then and apparently burned down in 1970. Apparently there was also a fire in 1930 and yet another in 1925 where it is also said to have burned down. The reports are contradictory.
A picture of Saltair I from 1900:
Photo of Saltair year 1893.
Nothing says “cowboys and indians” more than a giant domed building with a large star on its roof.
In school I was taught to believe that settlers arrived in the arid desert planes of Utah. These protestant settlers turned Mormons were initially builders of small wooden huts. In school there was no mention of an “Islamic Moorish Revival”.
This photo shows Mormon colonizers and the house they built:
This photo, dated 1908 shows the large star removed:
Saltair I is claimed to have been built in 1893, the same year the photo was taken. Does it look brand, sparkling new to you? Old postcards show that it was part of an even greater overall facility. On the left we see what appears to be another massive, domed building. In spite of searching the Internet up and down, I never found out what it is.
This is where certain false History comes in. On blogs and historical websites, the building below is referred to as “Saltair 2”. It is said to have been erected after “Saltair 1” burnt down in 1925.
The problem? This photo of “Saltair 2” is dated 1890.
For people so meticulous about record-keeping and documentation there sure is a lot of confusion over who built what and when.
Notice the crescent-star symbol, discussed in previous articles:
Remember when I talked about the Natatorium in Montana a few years ago? Same anomaly here. Massive “Moorish” structures in the desert.
Wikipedia tells us Saltair Pavillion was designed by the architect Richard Kletting, a superstar-architect who also built the Salt Palace in 1899:
The Salt Palace was said to have the largest unobstructed dancefloor in the world. Not bad for a small town! In the late 1800s Salt Lake City had a census-counted population of around twenty-thousand people but it boasted buildings normally only be seen in large cities.
Kletting also built the Utah State Capitol in 1914. His design was chosen from over 40 competing designs (and just happens to look like hundreds of other municipal buildings in the U.S.):
This building replaced the old capital building which was supposedly constructed in 1891. Here it is:
I’ve said this many times: The amount of buildings supposedly built worldwide in the 1890s is mind-boggling. If you’ve read this website this far, you realize: It never happened the way they said it did. Even this first capitol building is anomalous for a small desert town. And why would you abandon it only a few years after you built it, in favor of a capitol building that supposedly won a prize for “best design” out of 40 competitors and yet looks like every other capitol building in American towns? Even if you had a dulled sense of truth you’d know there is something off about all this.
A screenshots from his Wikipedia page (at the time of this writing) shows that there is controversy over what Kletting did and didn’t build, and these are only the first two items on the list:
The Amnesia of who-built-it is common to all American towns.
Saltair was said to have been built by the Mormon Church in cooperation with Los Angeles Railway. It is claimed to have been destroyed by fire in 1925 (but I saw it in a 1962 movie). Building bathing resorts doesn’t necessarily fit to the mentality of old-time Mormons, who had strict rules about exposing nude skin and indulging in frivolous activity. But who cares, right?
Salt Lake City is one of many places with Moorish architecture.
From the Wikipedia page titled Moresque:
Moresque is an obsolete alternative term to “Moorish” in English, and in the arts has some specific meanings.
First found in 15th-century Italy, especially Venice, moresques continue in the Mannerist and Northern Mannerist styles of the 16th century.
The term is ultimately derived from the name of the Moors, a historic people in the western Mediterranean.
They claim the Moorish people were Muslims who ruled Spain from 711 to 1492, exactly the year Columbus set sail for America. But in the paragraph above it is claimed that Moresque styles are first found in Venice. And then we have the country of Morocco in Africa, which is named after the Moors. It is also claimed that the “Moors” were black people and this is why a “sovereign citizen” movement of blacks in America call themselves “Moorish”. Confusion abounds.
The page on Moorish Revival architecture shows more than seventy famous synagogues built in “Moorish revival style”. I scratch my head wondering why the Jews, who have been at variance with Islam for more than a thousand years, would prefer an Islamic style of building. None of this adds up.
A Moorish Synagogue in New York.
A Jewish synagogue in Cincinnati Ohio, with Islamic Minarets.
The page also lists more than twenty masonic Temples built in the Moorish style.
Murat Temple, a masonic Shriners building in Indiana.
The page also lists Churches built in Moorish style.
My guess: The buildings were repurposed as Synagogues, Temples and Churches. Either that or Jews, Christians and Freemasons were keen on reviving the Islamic spirit.
Much more likely: None of these buildings are “Moorish”, the term is just made up. They are old Tartarian, from a time the Tartarian Empire stretched from Russia across Alaska to America. That’s the part of History that was erased from the books. Ever since then, Historians are scrambling to explain the discrepancies and anomalies that don’t match fake school textbooks. The so-called “Moorish” style is similar to old buildings we find in Russia and the countries with a “-stan” ending.
Here’s an 1848 building in Bridgeport Connecticut:
I don’t recall these buildings shown in Hollywood “Western” or learning about them in school. Why were the omitted? Between 1930 and 1954 a staggering 2700 “Western” movies were made, but none of them feature the Moorish, ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, Victorian or Gothic architecture found across old America. The number of western movies reaches close to 10 000 by 1970. Then they abruptly stop making them. After 1970 you had only one mass-market western every couple of years. The abruptness with which “western movies” were stopped points to them having been propaganda. In 1970 someone decided the propaganda campaign was complete because nearly everyone believed in the fake “indians vs. cowboys” version of History.
The building has a Wikipedia page, where we read:
When Barnum experienced financial difficulties, he had Iranistan closed and it was unoccupied for more than two years. Carpenters and painters entered to do some work and had been ordered not to smoke in the building. They smoked after-dinner pipes there in the evening. A pipe left to smolder may have ignited a blaze after the workmen were gone.
The fire alarm was sounded at 11 PM on December 17, 1857, and the house burned until 1 AM. P.T. Barnum was staying at the Astor House in New York City. In the morning of December 18, he received a telegram from his brother, Philo F. Barnum, informing him that Iranistan had burned to the ground. Barnum had retained some insurance on the unoccupied mansion…
I’m used to reading stories about famous anomalous architecture burning down between 1850 and 1899. It’s so common that I don’t believe all the fake reasons for the fires. I suggest it was a worldwide war on the old world and only very few buildings were left to stand.
Next to nothing is known about the construction of these buildings. A random example is the “Moorish Revival” building of Yeshiva University:
Below the “History” section, Wikipedia says:
Yeshiva University has its roots in the Etz Chaim Yeshiva founded in 1886 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a cheder-style elementary school founded by Eastern European immigrants that offered study of Talmud along with some secular education, including instruction in English.The rabbinical seminary was chartered in 1897.
When Lamm took office in 1976, Yeshiva was facing a serious financial crisis.
This is typical of entries on Moorish architecture. All it says that it was “chartered” in 1897, and then the text jumps to 1976 and never goes back. It says nothing about who built it, when it was built or how. The complete absence of specifics is because there were no specifics. We didn’t build this stuff in the late 1800s, it was already there from a previous civilization.
I went to the History page of the University itself and it offered no answers to these questions.
The main building is called “David A. Zysman Hall” Here’s a 1928 photo:
The building on the photo doesn’t even look relatively new, it looks ancient. The discoloration of the stone point to old age. The street looks raw and undeveloped.
Here’s an undated photo taken from Google Image Search, originally linked to the University website but meanwhile removed for unknown reasons:
Apparently it used to look bigger and better. Where did the rest go?I spent a few minutes searching but found no explanation why or when these beautiful buildings were removed and only one left standing.
It’s interesting how just a little bit of poking quickly pops any bubbles of the official narrative.
This is the fox movie theater in Atlanta:
From Wikipedia:
The 4,665-seat auditorium was ultimately developed as a lavish movie theater in the Fox Theatres chain and opened in 1929.
When the Fox Theatre first opened, the local newspaper described it as having, “a picturesque and almost disturbing grandeur beyond imagination”.
In my humble opinion stuff like this needs to be questioned. This fantastic temple was developed as a movie theater? Really?
Digging one inch deeper, I read the building was designed by Shriner Freemasons and then sold to William Fox as a movie theater because the Shriners couldn’t afford to keep the building. So it wasn’t “developed as a movie theater” after all.
A 1929 view of the theater, the year it was allegedly completed:
Here’s an image from 1870, showing the Opera House in Atlanta:
Across from it we see a Moorish style building proving the Moorish style was present in the city much earlier. I bet if I did a little more digging I’d find more.
The interior of Fox Theater:
The theater is on Peachtree street. If you image-search “Atlanta Old Peachtree Street” or “Peachtree Street 1800s” or similar, you will find that the whole street was full of incredible architecture that surpasses even the theater.
I found a Blog written by a local, saying that the building was the headquarter of the Shriner’s organization in 1925.
This contradicts the statements that it was completed in 1929. But notice the strange wording above: “used for the Shriner’s from 1925”. It doesn’t say that it was constructed in 1925, just in case someone finds a photo or postcard of it standing there earlier. The Blog also features this strange painting. Strange because there’s an unexplained tower in the middle.
Why Shriner Freemasons are into mosques and wearing Turkish Fez is anyone’s guess.
This very short search revealed the lie that it was developed as a movie theater, and the lie that it was completed in 1929. I’d also bet that it wasn’t build by Shriner Freemasons in 1925.
If it’s made in Spain it’s called “Moorish Architecture”. If it’s made in Europe or Africa it’s usually called “Moorish”. But if it’s made in America it’s called “Moorish Revival Architecture”. And if it’s made anywhere outside of Spain or northern Africa it’s called “Moorish Revival”. Example: Moorish Revival in Bosnia.
I can tell no difference between Moorish and Moorish Revival buildings. I guess they are called “Revival” in America because the Moorish phase was supposed to have ended in 1492, before America was discovered. So any Moorish building in America must be part of a “Revival”. But then you also have buildings in Turkey, Iraq and Iran and many other countries that look similar and are neither called “Moorish” nor “Revival”. Check out this old Hamam in Istanbul, Turkey. Nobody is calling it “Moorish”:
In my opinion it’s all lies. I found zero construction photos of any Moorish building on American soil. Type “Moorish Revival” and “Construction Photo” into a search engine and you come up empty. And yet, we have plenty of construction photos of lesser buildings and wood-builds from the 1800s.
Why? Because this actually happened in the 1800s.
If something actually happened, there are photos of it. Or at the very least reports. Where are the neighbor’s reports of “Moorish construction”? Yes, maybe you could find a big fake news paper reporting it (but even here, I mostly come up empty), but reports of normal citizens seem non-existent.
If hundreds-of-thousands of grand buildings were made between 1890 and 1900 alone, where are the witness reports? Where are the construction photos (and I’m not referring to photos of renovation)?
Let go of the idea that America is “The New World” and it all makes sense.