Photography

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“I Watched Him Walk A Short Block And Shoot An Entire Roll Without Breaking Stride”

July 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A 1981 interview with famed street photographer Garry Winogrand.

Winogrand’s shooting style, as recalled by a former student: “We quickly learned Winogrand’s technique–he walked slowly or stood in the middle of pedestrian traffic as people went by. He shot prolifically. I watched him walk a short block and shoot an entire roll without breaking stride. As he reloaded, I asked him if he felt bad about missing pictures when he reloaded. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘there are no pictures when I reload.’ He was constantly looking around, and often would see a situation on the other side of a busy intersection. Ignoring traffic, he would run across the street to get the picture.

Incredibly, people didn’t react when he photographed them. It surprised me because Winogrand made no effort to hide the fact that he was standing in way, taking their pictures. Very few really noticed; no one seemed annoyed. Winogrand was caught up with the energy of his subjects, and was constantly smiling or nodding at people as he shot. It was as if his camera was secondary and his main purpose was to communicate and make quick but personal contact with people as they walked by.”

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Mayor Gaynor, Wounded By Gunman (1910)

July 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink


In this classic 1910 photograph, New York City Mayor William J. Gaynor, a Tammany reformer, had just been wounded in an assassination attempt by a disgruntled former city employee who’d lost his job. Gaynor was headed on a vacation cruise when the bullet entered his throat. He survived the attempt on his life, but oddly enough, in 1913, when Gaynor was finally able to take that cruise, he died quietly in a deck chair. An excerpt from the September 13, 1913 New York Times article announcing the Mayor’s death:

“Mayor William J. Gaynor of New York died in his steamer chair on board the steamship Baltic early Wednesday afternoon when the liner was 400 miles off the Irish Coast. His death was due to a sudden heart attack. 

The news reached London a little before 4 P.M. to-day, coming by way of New York, and half an hour later a message was received from Liverpool saying that the White Star Line offices had been advised by wireless of his death.

In the evening a wireless dispatch from the Baltic was received from the Mayor’s son, Rufus Gaynor, describing his father’s death in these words:

‘My father, William J. Gaynor, died on board the White Star liner Baltic at seven minutes past 1 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. His death was due to heart failure, and he was seated in his chair when the end came.

‘The deck steward had been with the Mayor a few moments before his death and had taken his order for luncheon, the Mayor marking the menu to indicate the dishes he desired.

‘I was on the boat deck and went below at the lunch call to tell my father that his lunch was ready. He had been taking his meals in one of the staterooms, and he was seated in the chair apparently asleep. I shook him gently but he did not respond.

‘His trained nurse, who had been with him ten minutes previously, was summoned and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hopper, was called. The Mayor was given a hypodermic injection, and artificial respiration was resorted to, but it was quickly apparent that he was beyond any aid. An examination with a stethoscope showed that the heart was no longer beating. The body was taken in charge by the ship’s officers, embalmed and placed in a sealed casket.'”

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Harriet Quimby Pauses Before Takeoff (1911)

July 7, 2011 in Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It was on the first day in July 1912 when pioneering aviator Harriet Quimby made her final flight. The first American woman to receive a pilot’s license, Quimby had become famous for also being the first female to fly across the English Channel. But those achievements were no help during her last flight, in which Quimby flew a demonstration over Boston Harbor in her new monoplane. Everything went well until a sudden, unexplained pitch caused her and her passenger, William Willard, to be ejected from the craft and plummet from an altitude of 1,500 feet to their deaths. In the above classic photograph from the Bain Collection, Quimby sits in a monoplane in the year before she was killed. A section from her July 5, 1912 New York Times obituary:

“Dr. Watson, who in speaking of the career of Miss Quimby, took a chapter from Revelation as his text, said, in part:

‘Her name is added to the long list of those who have freely given their lives in order that the world might be larger and better, in order that life might be greater and grander.

‘But in our sorrow to-night there rests still a joyous note of triumph. For we realize that through this death there has come progress and that, therefore, Miss Quimby’s life was a victory over those very elements which at the end brought on her tragic end. For through such as she was to do we reach nearer and nearer to the far-off goal of our hope.”

The aftermath of the Quimby crash.

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Carrying The Dead From The General Slocum (1904)

June 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

The greatest loss of life in the New York City area prior to September 11th was caused by the 1906 disaster of the General Slocum, a steamer carrying approximately 1400 souls to a Sunday school picnic on Long Island. The classic photo above shows the aftermath of a fire, which began somehow in the Lamp Room, creating a conflagration which soon engulfed the ship. More than 1000 people perished. The last survivor of the calamity was Adella Wotherspoon, a baby at the time who lived to see her hundredth birthday. An excerpt from her 2004 New York Times obituary:

“On June 15, 1904, a sunny Wednesday morning, Mrs. Wotherspoon, then the 6-month-old called Adele Liebenow, was part of the 17th annual Sunday school picnic of St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, on the heavily German Lower East Side. The church had chartered a paddle-wheel, 264-foot-long steamboat, for $350 from the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company to go to Locust Grove Picnic Ground at Eaton’s Neck on Long Island.

The Liebenow party included Adele’s parents, her two sisters, three aunts, an uncle and two cousins. When the boat left the East River pier at Third Street at 9:40 a.m., a church band on board played, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.’

Forty minutes later, the joy turned to abject terror. Smoke started billowing from a forward storage room. A spark, most likely from a carelessly tossed match, had ignited some straw. Soon, the boat was an inferno. The captain ignored cries to steam for shore and proceeded at top speed through the perilous waters known as Hell Gate to North Brother Island, a mile ahead.

The inexperienced crew, which had not had a single fire drill, provided scant help. Lifeboats were wired or glued to the deck with layers of paint, cork in the life jackets had turned to dust with age and fire hoses broke under water pressure.

By the time the General Slocum reached the island, it was too late. The death toll among the estimated 1,331 passengers was 1,021, according to most sources. The dead included Adele’s sisters, Anna, 3, and Helen, 6. Munsey’s Magazine, a periodical of the time, wrote, ‘Children whom the flames had caught on the forward decks rushed, blazing like torches to their mothers.'”

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Thaddeus Lowe, Civil War Aeronaut (1861)

June 24, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

These classic 1862 Civil War photographs of Thaddeus Lowe’s balloons were taken in Virginia by Mathew Brady. Lowe, the father of American military aerial reconnaissance who had been designated Chief Aeronaut of the United States Balloon Corps by President Lincoln, deployed his crafts to gather information about the number and positioning of Confederate troops. Oh, and Lowe was also the first American to figure out how to make artificial ice, which is the odd choice for the lead of his 1913 New York Times obituary:

“Pasadena, Cal., Jan. 16–Dr. Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, scientist and experimenter, who invented an ice compressing machine in 1865, making the first artificial ice in the United States, died to-day at the home of his daughter in this place. Dr. Lowe was born in Jefferson, N. H., in 1832, of Pilgrim ancestry. He was educated in the common schools, and specialized in the study of chemistry. From 1856 to 1859 he was engaged in constructing balloons for the study of atmospheric conditions.

Dr. Lowe built the largest aerostat of his day, and in 1861 made a 900-mile trip in it from Cincinnati to the South Carolina coast in nine hours. Later he entered the Government services as Chief of the Aeronautics Corp, which he organized, rendering valuable service to the Army of the Potomac, from Bull Run to Gettysburg, by observations and timely warnings. Next he invented a system of signaling to field batteries from high altitudes. Other devices invented by him practically revolutionized the gas industry. He built the Mount Lowe Railway, 1891-1904, and established the Lowe Observatory in the Sierra Madre Mountains.“

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Homeless Build Their Huts In Manhattan (1935)

June 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

The great Berenice Abbott is responsible for this classic 1935 photograph of a mini-Hooverville that rose on Houston and Mercer Streets in Manhattan. The Great Depression hit hard and people were really hurting. (Notice the baby carriage outside one of the shanties, and the framed pictures hanging, an attempt at some semblance of normalcy.) Abbott had returned to New York City in 1929 after years in Paris and was stunned by how the building boom and the economic collapse had changed the city. She spent the next decade cataloging the transformation. An excerpt from Abbott’s 1991 obituary in the New York Times:

“Perhaps her most famous picture, a view of New York at night taken from the top of the Empire State Building, presents the city as a glittering tapestry of light, with massive buildings thrusting up from the criss-crossed streets. In her New York photographs, many of which were collected in the book Changing New York (1939), Miss Abbott also provided an invaluable historical record of the physical appearance of the city at a time when it was undergoing rapid transformation.

Miss Abbott first achieved fame as a photographer in Paris in the 1920’s with her penetrating portraits of such artists and writers as James Joyce, Janet Flanner and Jean Cocteau. She is also known for a series of photographs illustrating laws and processes of physics.

As a participant in the photographic controversies of her day, Miss Abbott was an eloquent and contentious advocate of the documentary approach. In books and articles she argued that photography was uniquely a descriptive medium, and should not be used to simulate effects that could better be achieved in other arts. ‘Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium,’ she wrote in 1951. ‘It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.'”

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Öndör Gongor Towers Over His Comrades

June 17, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

This classic photograph depicts Mongolian giant Öndör Gongor, who lived approximately from 1880 to 1925, though not too much is certain about his life. For instance, he either worked as an accountant, an elephant keeper, a bodyguard or a wrestler. The sketchy biographical details are collected at The Tallest Man website. An excerpt:

“According to an interview with his daughter G. Budkhand, published in 1997, Ondor Gongor was the third child of a herder named Pürev, who lived in the Dalai Choinkhor wangiin khoshuu, or what is today Jargalant sum of Khövsgöl aimag. He was not particularly big as child, only had long fingers. Because of him always eating a lot, he became a bit unpopular with his parents, and eventually was sent to Ikh Khüree. One day, he was summoned to the Bogd Khan, given fresh clothes, and after a while he was even made to marry a woman who worked as one of the Bogd Khan’s seamstresses, on the grounds that according to a horoscope by the Bogd Khan, their fates were connected.

The accounts are a bit at odds about what Gongor’s occupation at the Bogd Khan’s court was: accountant and keeper of the Bogd Khan’s elephant, the Bogd Khan’s bodyguard, or wrestler. In 1913, he travelled to Russia with a delegation headed by Sain Noyon Khan Namnansüren. Later, he is said to have worked at the toll office.

Ondor Gongor had four children. He died in his home area in the late 1920s, before reaching the age of 50. His corpse is said to have been stolen during the funeral – at that time, the deceased were laid out in the steppe to be devoured by birds and other animals – and now on display in a US museum.”

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Flower Bouquets Come To Ragpicker’s Row

June 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ragpicker's Row, 59 Baxter Street. (Image Jacob Riis.)

This classic 1898 photograph of New York City’s Ragpicker’s Row was taken by the famed muckraking journalist Jacob Riis. This impoverished section of the city was described (in the most offensive manner possible) in a 1879 New York Times article, “Flowers for the Poorest.” In that piece, a journalist tagged along with the well-meaning but dopey Ladies’ Flower and Fruit Mission, as members of the group visited the poorest quarters of Manhattan and handed out free flowers. An excerpt:

“The visitors shook loose from the crowd of children that clung to them begging for flowers, and made their way to Mulberry-street, in search of ‘Ragpicker’s Row.’ They found it at Nos. 56 and 59, and here encountered poverty in the most squalid and filthy aspects. In the little courts lying between the front and rear houses water stood in sickening fetid pools. The houses swarmed with the Italians who collect refuse, rags, bones, and bits of paper from the ash-barrels, or who work on the garbage scows, and bring back to the City much of the refuse matter once thrown away as worthless. In these houses and in these yards this reeking refuse is sorted, dried, and made up into bales. Men, women, and children engage in the work, and all are alike dirty and ragged to a degree. Most of the men are low-browed ugly-looking fellows, and many of the women are toothless hags. Occasionally there is to be seen among them a young woman holding her swathed bambino in her arms, whose face is so beautiful that, with the flat head-dress–which many of them still wear–she might be the original of the Italian Madonna. These people were the most clamorous for the flowers of any kind that had been met; nor did they wait to be bidden, but many of them helped themselves  from the baskets, laughing at the efforts of the visitors to prevent them and to secure an even distribution. In this way the baskets were quickly emptied, and the visitors were glad when they were, and they were at liberty to escape from the filthy yard and their noisy occupants.”

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This Guy Was Considered Obese During The 1800s

June 8, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some smart person on Reddit posted this image of nineteenth-century circus “Fat Man” Frank Williams, who was considered so grotesquely overweight during his life that he amazed crowds at sideshows. Today he would be far too slender to earn a place on network TV weight-loss spectacles.

Frank Williams was billed at 525 pounds when he worked at sideshows. Not even close.

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“The War Between The Sexes Could Be An Armageddon”

June 1, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Betty Friedan in 1964.

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“In The 17th Century Leonor Fini Would Have Been Burnt As A Witch”

May 31, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink


Carl Van Vechten took this classic 1936 photograph of Argentine surrealist painter Leonor Fini, she of the experimental hats and ever-present cats. From Fini’s 1996 obituary in the Independent: “In the 17th century Leonor Fini would have been burnt as a witch. Surrounded by cats, and with feline eyes herself, she exuded what her one-time lover Max Ernst described as ‘Italian fury, scandalous elegance, caprice and passion.’ In photographs you would take her for beautiful in the manner of Bianca Jagger but, according to the American art dealer Julian Levy, she was not a beauty as such, in that ‘Her parts did not fit well together: head of a lioness, mind of a man, bust of a woman, torso of a child, grace of an angel, discourse of the Devil . . .’

Levy confirms my belief that if she had been born in the age of the extra teat and the familiar, this lady was for burning. “Her allure,” he says, “was an ability to dominate her misfitted parts so that they merged into whatever shape her fantasy wished to present from one moment to the next.” You can almost hear the faggots crackle.

Leonor Fini was of mixed Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Slavic blood, a formidable genetic cocktail. She was born in Buenos Aires in 1908 but grew up in Trieste. Her formal education was, as might be imagined given her independent and imperious temperament, fragmentary, but she had the run of her uncle’s large library in Milan and also travelled widely in Italy and Europe visiting all the museums and taking in such then unfashionable painters as the Mannerists, a school later reflected in her own work. In reproduction she was to add Beardsley, the German Romantics and the British Pre-Raphaelites – all evidence of a Surrealist eye.

Her facility was precocious. By the time she was 17 she was already painting commissioned portraits. It was however in 1936 when she moved to Paris and became friendly with Ernst, the Eluards, Brauner and others, that she began to paint Surrealist images and to draw close to the movement. Close but not of. Like her greater contemporary Frida Kahlo, Fini refused to bend her knee before Andre Breton, and declined to accept the iconic role of child-woman or to accept his belief in l’amour fou, the monogamist obsession with one person as opposed to bisexual narcissism. She did however exhibit with the group as a kind of fellow traveller.”

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Charles Mingus Celebrates A Birthday (1976)

May 24, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Charles Mingus, Manhattan, July 4, 1976.

This classic 1976 photograph shows the tempestuous musical genius Charles Mingus playing in Manhattan as part of the celebration for the two hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Mingus would live just three more years, passing away from ALS in 1979. From a 1971 Ebony article about the musician’s memoir:

“In his offbeat autobiography, Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, the noted composer, bassist and general enigma of that name contends that he is really three people. One man stands at dead center, cooly surveying his domain and expressing what he sees to the other two, one of whom is prone to strike out like a frightened animal while the other is gentle and painfully vulnerable. While it is not quite clear as to which self wrote this “Sex Machine” of a book (possibly it was the middle man since he speaks of himself in the third person), it is interesting to note that one might find elements of all these selves in this man’s music. Mingus composes and plays like a beleaguered genius challenging some nameless deity to account for the inequities imposed on the man by fate and other men–and to do so in no uncertain terms. He is a music of storm and constant questioning, beauty, brilliance and embracing tenderness, all of it molded on a framework of logical musical order. It is difficult to think of any ‘jazz’ artists, aside from Mingus’ idol, Duke Ellington, who is capable of creating such impressionistic tapestries of shimmering sound. In other words, Charles Mingus is one of the truly great ones, beneath the layer of legends surrounding his sexual exploits and eccentricities. His genius must be acknowledged.”

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Silent super-8 footage of Battery Park celebration on July 4, 1976:

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Women At The Waldorf Track The Market (1918)

May 19, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rosie famously riveted on the home front during World War II, but the fighting of World War I had likewise necessitated American women being recruited to replace men in the workforce. In this classic 1918 photo by Underwood & Underwood, young women operate the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel’s Stock Exchange Board, reading tickers and manually adjusting numbers. The Waldorf had several years earlier shown a progressive attitude toward women when it reportedly became the first upscale NYC hotel to allow women to stay in its rooms without an escort. Two years after this photo was taken, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, and U.S. women had won the vote.

Frances Densmore Meets Mountain Chief (1916)

May 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

In this classic 1916 photograph, ethnographer Frances Densmore appears to use an early phonographic device to make a recording of Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot Indians at the Smithsonian. The Minnesota native Densmore specialized in preserving Native American music, beginning her alliance of several decades with the Smithsonian in 1907. According to a post on the Institution blog, the photo was likely staged and wasn’t the actual recording session.

Densmore passed away in 1957 at age 90. A passage about Mountain Chief from The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories:

“Mountain Chief recalled that when the Assiniboines and Crees began to retreat, he mounted his horse and raced after those who were trying to cross the Oldman River. He ran down two enemy warriors on the trail, then dismounted to face a Cree armed with a spear who was starting to enter the water. Mountain Chief stabbed him between the shoulders with his own spear, took the man’s weapons and went back to his horse. Then he ran over another enemy who was armed with a gun; the man grabbed the bridle, but the Piegan swung his horse’s head around to shield himself then struck the man with the butt of his whip. As the Cree fell back, Mountain Chief jumped off his horse and killed him. ‘When I struck him,’ recalled the Piegan warrior, ‘he looked at me and I found that his nose had been cut off. I heard afterward that a bear had bitten his nose off.'”

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Barber, Twelve Years Old, Shaves A Head (1917)

May 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Straight razor applied to lathered face by pubescent boy.

A muckraker and an artist, the great photographer Lewis Hine took this classic 1917 shot of 12-year-old barber Frank De Natale plying his trade in Boston. By this point, child labor laws, which Hine’s work had helped advance, precluded this lad from working full-time; he was a barber after-school and on Saturdays. A note from an 1884 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the child barbers of an earlier era:

“‘How are barbers taught?’

‘We generally get small boys. They are regularly indentured to us by their parents. They are compelled to stay with us for three years. We give them about $50 for the first year and increase their wages as they become accustomed to the work. At first they do nothing but brush the clothes of the customers. Then we make them watch us while we are shaving or hair cutting. If the boy is smart he is soon permitted to lather the customers’ faces, while the hands are busy with other men. They finally graduate into full fledged barbers and receive a salary of from $5 to $12 per week.'”

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Women Join The Force, Fight Sedition (1918)

May 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

This classic photo from the Bain Collection profiles members of the women’s police reserve of New York City in 1918, the year that females began participating in the volunteer auxiliary. From a New York Times article about the formation of this new crime-fighting force:.

“New York City’s morals are to be toned up in the near future by the activities of a police reserve of volunteer women. It was announced at Police Headquarters last night that the Police Reserves which Commissioner Enright reorganized out of the Home Defense League, recruited so successfully by his predecessor, Commissioner Woods, was to have the prestige of this auxiliary.

The Special Deputy would not have the women police cope with rough and violent lawbreakers; on the the other hand, their forte under the plan would be to keep a finger on the city’s pulse in an effort to detect signs of unlawful developments before they grew to serious proportions, to watch out for cases of sedition, to uplift the general moral atmosphere of the city in the neighborhood of their posts. If need arose for the use of a nightstick or other instrument for curbing crime, the work would be referred to the men members of the force.”

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Weegee, Above Gun Shop, Aims Camera (1937)

May 5, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sign: "Frank Lava Gunsmith. Revolvers Bought Sold Repaired."

The apartment above the Frank Lava Gunsmith shop on Centre Market Place was pretty much the perfect locale to live in if you were New York City’s leading crime photographer, as Arthur “Weegee” Fellig was from the 1930s through the 1950s. This classic 1937 photo of Weegee (photographer unidentified) shows the street-smart shutterbug during the daytime, but it was the graveyard shift when he worked and dominated. From a 2008 New York Times piece about Weegee by John Strausbaugh:

“Weegee’s peak period as a freelance crime and street photographer was a whirl of perpetual motion running from the mid-1930s into the postwar years. Ceaselessly prowling the streets during the graveyard shift, he took thousands of photographs that defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of hoodlums and gangsters, Bowery bums and slumming swells, tenement dwellers and victims of domestic brawls, fires and car crashes. He gave it its enduring nickname, the Naked City.

‘Weegee captured night in New York back when it was lonely and desolate and scary,’ said Tim McLoughlin, editor of the Brooklyn Noir anthology series, the third volume of which has just been published by Akashic Books. ‘He once said he wanted to show that in New York millions of people lived together in a state of total loneliness.’”

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“You push the button and it gives you the things you want.”

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Mayor LaGuardia Outweighed By A Halibut (1939)

May 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The "Little Flower," as the Mayor was known, with a big fish. (Image by C. M. Stieglitz.)

C.M Stieglitz of the long-defunct World Telegram took this classic 1939 photograph of New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia with a 300-pound halibut. LaGuardia, a commanding presence to say the least, was famous for everything from being one of Hitler’s earliest and most outspoken critics to reading comic strips to local children on the radio. He was also known to not be allergic to cameras. LaGuardia passed away from pancreatic cancer eight years after this photo was snapped. An exceprt from his New York Times obituary:

“A city of which he was as much a part as any of its public buildings awoke to find the little firebrand dead. Its people had laughed with him and at him, they had been entertained by his antics and they had been sobered by his warnings, and they found it difficult to believe that the voice he had raised in their behalf in the legislative halls of city and nation, on street corners and over the radio, was stilled forever.

Mayor O’Dwyer, his successor, expressed this feeling. Although Mr. La Guardia’s death was expected, the Mayor said, his passing brought with it ‘a shock of awful finality.’

‘In his death the people of the city, the State and nation have lost a great, patriotic American citizen,’ the Mayor said.”

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Robert Goddard Makes Rockets In Roswell (1940)

April 29, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Goddard, far left, was a rocket man. (Image by National Geographic Society.)

Known as the “Father of American Rocketry,” Dr. Robert H. Goddard believed even before the 1920s that we could reach the stars, though some scoffed at him. In this classic 1940 photograph, Goddard and his team labor over a rocket with turbopumps in his workshop in Roswell, New Mexico. An excerpt from a Time article about the naysayers who took aim at Goddard’s far-flung ambitions:

“Robert Goddard was not a happy man when he read his copy of the New York Times on Jan. 13, 1920. For some time, he had feared he might be in for a pasting in the press, but when he picked up the paper that day, he was stunned.

Not long before, Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., had published an arid little paper on an outrageous topic, rocket travel. Unlike most of his colleagues, Goddard believed rocketry was a viable technology, and his paper, primly titled ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,’ was designed to prove it. For the lay reader, there wasn’t much in the writing to excite interest, but at the end, the buttoned-up professor unbuttoned a bit. If you used his technology to build a rocket big enough, he argued, and if you primed it with fuel that was powerful enough, you just might be able to reach the moon with it.

Goddard meant his moon musings to be innocent enough, but when the Times saw them, it pounced. As anyone knew, the paper explained with an editorial eye roll, space travel was impossible, since without atmosphere to push against, a rocket could not move so much as an inch. Professor Goddard, it was clear, lacked ‘the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.'”

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Siouxsie Sioux Screams Like A Banshee (1980)

April 26, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"There was a time in Long Island's cultural history when the whole world looked here for the next big trend in rock 'n' roll." (Image by Malco23.)

In this classic photograph, the Siouxsie and the Banshees frontwoman performs at the legendary Long Island rock club, My Father’s Place. The Roslyn-based live-music venue was once a leading stage for unknown rock artists, from Bruce Springsteen to Meat Loaf to Hall & Oates. It closed its doors in 1987. From a 2000 New York Times piece recalling the cabaret:

“THERE was a time in Long Island’s cultural history when the whole world looked here for the next big trend in rock ‘n’ roll. That was between 1974 and 1980, the heyday of My Father’s Place, a cabaret in Roslyn.

And Michael Epstein, known as Eppy, ran the whole shebang.

Along with My Father’s Place, which opened on Memorial Day in 1971 with a concert by Richie Havens, a confluence of entities created a scene that would influence music for decades to come.

Dance-oriented rock ‘n’ roll, punk, singer-songwriters and New Wave music had become the rage — and it was essential for musicians to come here to perform. My Father’s Place, WLIR-FM and the dance club Malibu in Long Beach were at the center of popular music.

Today, 13 years after My Father’s Place closed, Mr. Epstein still longs for the club. ‘Once it’s in your blood, you never lose that feeling,’ he said.”

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Talking Heads at My Father’s Place on May 10, 1978:

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Buying Cakes And Pies At The Automat (1936)

April 22, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

This classic photo by the great Berenice Abbott was taken in 1936 at the 977 Eighth Avenue Automat, a cafeteria-like restaurant which sold food and drink from coin-operated machines. From a 1991 New York Times article:

“Automats were a home away from home for New Yorkers who did not have money to burn — songwriters waiting for a break on Tin Pan Alley, actors dreaming of Broadway. ‘The Automat! The Maxim’s of the disenfranchised,’ the playwright Neil Simon wrote in 1987. But people who did have money to burn ate there too: Walter Winchell, Irving Berlin’s socialites, celebrities.

‘You used to have movie stars who were poor there, making it their home base,’ said Michael Sherman, an executive vice president of Horn & Hardart, the company that owned the Automat. ‘But then things changed. It was more successful for its catering and its parties. It was losing money as an Automat.'”

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Adam buys his own meal at the Automat, during the eatery’s obsolescence:

Italian Woman Carrying Dry-Goods Box (1912)

April 19, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Lewis Hine was a schoolteacher, a photographer, a muckraker, and, above all, an artist. His work brought about real changes in American child-labor laws, but his pictures remain brilliant because of his amazing eye for subject and composition. In the above classic photo, an Italian-American immigrant woman on Bleecker Street in New York hauls an enormous dry-cleaning box the best she can. To see more great work by Hine, go here.

Hine’s philosophy on photography: “Whether it be a painting or photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality. In fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated.

The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”

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Commodore Nutt With His Famous Boss

April 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Barnum and Nutt conduct business.

This undated, classic 1800s photograph of sideshow attraction “Commodore Nutt,” along with his employer, P.T. Barnum, was taken by Charles DeForest Fredricks. An excerpt from the performer’s 1881 New York Times obituary:

“Commodore Nutt, the celebrated dwarf, died early yesterday morning at the Anthony House, after suffering nearly two months from a severe attack of Bright’s disease. He was born April 1, 1844, at Manchester, N.H., and at the age of 17 was brought to New-York by Barnum and exhibited in the old museum, corner of Ann-Street and Broadway. He was widely advertised as the ‘smallest man in the world.’ His full name was George Washington Morrison Nutt. His father was a New Hampshire farmer, over six feet in height and weighing 270 pounds. His mother was average size and healthy. When he engaged with Barnum in 1860 he was 30 inches high, but as years went by he grew somewhat, and at the time of his death his height was 3 feet seven inches. In girth his increase in size was even more marked, and it is not improbable that recently his average weight has been fully twice that when originally presented to the public. The ‘Commodore’ was originally known as ‘$30,000 Nutt,” Mr. Barnum claiming that such sum was paid the dwarf to go on exhibition. ‘The fact is, though,’ said Mr. Hutchings, who used to be known as the ‘Lightning Calculator,’ the old man paid the boy but $15 a week.'”

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Seth Kinman’s Drinking Establishment (1889)

April 6, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Bears and elk died so that Seth Kinman could decorate his California bar.

I already posted a story about the rugged nineteenth-century hunter and chair maker Seth Kinman. The classic 1889 photograph above is a look at the eccentric interior of his bar in Table Bluff, California, which filled with whiskey many a Humboldt County sawmill employee.

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Seth Kinman’s great great grandchildren display some of his memorabilia.

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Annie Oakley, With Rifle, In Her Dotage (1922)

April 4, 2011 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

At age 62, Annie Oakley hit 100 clay targets from 16 yards.

This classic 1922 photograph shows legendary markswoman Annie Oakley, still a sure shot just four years before her death, as she displays a firearm given to her by Buffalo Bill. The image from the New York World-Telegram & Sun profiles the 62-year-old Oakley in the same year she suffered injuries in a bad automobile accident, which could have been fatal but only temporarily disarmed her. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle mistakenly pronounced her dead once in 1890. An excerpt from that false report:

“Annie Oakley, the champion woman rifle and wing shot of the world, died at Buenos Aires, South America, on Monday last of congestion of the lungs. At the age of 10 years she was accustomed to handle a light gun with great proficiency and soon obtained a reputation as being one of the best rifle shots, defeating most of the prominent shots in various matches. Just before her departure for Europe last year she joined the Fountain and Coney Island gun clubs in their shoots at Woodlawn Park, Gravesend L.I., and made many friends by her modest and unassuming manner.”

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Oakley, steady of eye and hand, in 1894:

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