When I moved to Brooklyn in 2005, I noticed people building restaurants and bars that looked like 1950s diner-style restaurants, with soda fountains and lunch counters. I’m from Canada and I don’t think there’s a period that Canadians look back on with such nostalgia. I grew up on Vancouver Island watching old US movies and thinking, as I looked across the water towards America, that they showed what the country must look like.
But our idea of those times is not firsthand, and I got really curious about that, and the fact that those days were not better for most people, only a few. That false, nostalgic feeling has become dangerous, with Trump’s “make America great again” rhetoric.
