- In September 1855, surveyor David Phillips hacked his way through bushes to the muddy banks of a small lake north of Seattle’s Lake Union, and found a tired, postglacial lake. His team entered the name Green Lake into their field logs, which eventually reached their employer, the Surveyor General of the United States. Their late summer visit coincided with the appearance of seasonal algae blooms and may explain the name they entered on the survey map. Area visitors have been talking about the foul smelling green stuff for the past 80 years.
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London