Curbside pump at Hudson Essex service station, 3rd Avenue at 23rd Street, 1928.
HOMEtown Reflections
Jeff O’Brien
The roaring 20's Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - LH 540
The Roaring 20's, we call them. The Jazz Age. From flappers to F. Scott Fitzgerald, from the Charleston to Charlie Chaplin, images of the 1920s pervade our popular culture even now, a century later. It was a decade of prosperity and excess. A time of extremes, when the economy lurched from boom
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to bust and prohibition was on everyone's lips. But it was also a period of peace, prosperity, innovation and excitement. When, for a fleeting moment, the world danced in the sunlight. An Inauspicious Start The 1920s started poorly. The years just after the war had been marked by bitter
political and economic unrest as the country struggled to return to normal. Returning soldiers were hit the hardest. Unemployment skyrocketed, reaching crisis levels in 1921. There was a housing shortage: accommodations were poor, rents were high, and overcrowding was rampant, with reports in Saskatoon of five or six
families crammed into a single house. By 1920, food and clothing prices were double what they had been in 1914, but wages still lagged far behind. It was a recipe for chaos. A Boom Begins But as the decade progressed, things began to sort themselves out. By 1926,
