Showy birds were the thing of the era. The Fauncy Destination restaurant near our house when I was a little kid was a place called the Peter Pan, which was among other things famed for the peacocks which roamed the grounds. On the other hand, you don't even need to smell the formaldehyde and vinyl chloride to know that all those plants are of the finest plastic.

[Some of these may be real; Tamarack Lodge had its own greenhouse. - Dave]

Maybe so, but those Strelitzia flowers aren't: I have one myself, and the leaves alone are a foot long and stand two feet above the pot. Even a philodendron would be hard pressed to grow in that cavern.

...ed arsonist charged, and lots of other Tamarack links here.

Were those birds real?

If so, those cages strike me as cruel (way too small for those birds), and impractical to boot. Well, the greens below might have made good use of the guano. But imagine having to clean the lower half of those cages. Yuck!

We know now that it extremely cruel to decorate a business with live animals. In the case of these birds, they are kept awake half the night with all the traffic, and have nowhere to go and nothing to do in those horribly small cages. Another thing we learned 20 years ago is that you never keep parrots in round cages. That's why you rarely see them anymore.

Here they are again, this time taken from the opposite side of the room.

After years of abandonment, it looked like the old Tamarack Lodge would get a new lease on life after an investor bought the property with the intent of renovating it. Last summer, according to police, the investor started to burn some debris near the property, the fire ended up going out of control, and you can figure out the rest of the story.

[Gosh. I hope he had millions of dollars' worth of insurance. Purchased shortly before the fire. - Dave]