ancient memories

A couple of days ago I visited the venerable Museum of Natural History. Caught between appointments with too much time to kill, I decided to see the Silk Road exhibition. It had quite a bit of really provocative information and was quite a show-stopper of an installation—I may eventually write something on it here, but this post isnt about that. It's about a somewhat sidelined hallway mural on the fourth floor. In a niche at the end of one of the dinosaur galleries is the 25 foot tall Flying Reptiles by Constantin Astori (1889-1975). A Russian artist who came to New York in 1923, Astori worked for the Smithsonian and the Cooper Hewitt as a restorer. The American Museum of Natural History commissioned him to paint a mural in 1940, and Flying Reptiles is signed 1942.


Oddly, as soon as I saw it, it was familiar to me from a very early, distant memory, although I had no specific childhood recollection of it. Perhaps it was reproduced in one of my books on dinosaurs (an avid interest circa ages 5 through 10)? In doing a little armchair research I rediscovered another very familiar mural: the magnificent Age of Reptiles by Rudolph Zallinger. (Interestingly, like Astori, Zallinger was a Russian, from Siberia). Age of Reptiles is a massive 110 foot long fresco panorama completed in 1947 at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. (I'm ashamed to say in my 4 years in New Haven I never did get over to the Peabody—I intend to go in August.) The mural was reproduced in several dinosaur books in the late 60s/ early 70s and that's how I know it.

Age of Reptiles (detail) Rudolph Zallinger

Zallinger was by far the better draftsman but there is something I love about Astori's Flying Reptiles. Somehow, his mural conveys "Lair of the Zorgons on planet Rilor" in a loopy science fiction sort of way, rather than "speculative view of life on prehistoric earth." Its a bit humorous (see the pterosaur antics in the details above) and I half expect to see a Maxfield Parrish nymph perched one of the rocks, nevertheless I'm simply drawn into that fabulous compositional spiral toward an ancient technicolor sunset.

the Burns Method Part II: Death Avenue and Martha Stewart

I first came across this astonishing photo of West 26th street and Eleventh Avenue on Shorpy but it's originally from the George Grantham Bain Collection of the Library of Congress. This is probably one of the richest images I've ever seen—it verges on the surreal in its disparate simultaneities. Surely GG Bain didnt see, at the time of clicking the shutter, all the separate stories he was recording.

Journeying around the image—something I think of as the Ken Burns method— its fascinating to see the details of that moment. [NOTE 7-18: I shouldn't be surprised there's a Wikipedia entry about the "Ken Burns Effect"— I just cant believe I didnt know about it or the Apple reference.]
There's the coal bin on the front of the train engine, the man making his way on crutches, the spindly "ice" cart. From the camera's vantage point (and ours) the young boys and chalk drawings on the sidewalk could have been captured by Kertesz. Notice the "flagman" riding in front of the train—here a barrel cart has gotten in between. Boys on horseback, called "West Side cowboys," had to carry a red flag to warn of the approach, at six miles an hour, of each locomotive.

New York Central's freight line had run along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues since 1849. Known as "Death Avenue" for the number of pedestrians killed by the mix of railroad and street life, the name was used collectively for both streets. Statistics vary; one study recorded 21 deaths on Tenth and Eleventh from July of 1907 to July of 1910. Somehow the flagmen didnt seem to make walking along the avenue much safer. A New York Times notice from November, 1911, about the year of this photo, announced:

"Another 'Death Avenue' suit was filed yesterday [by the brother of the victim]... Cyrus J Burby was crossing Tenth Avenue, the complaint states, when his foot became wedged between the track and the sidewalk. Before he could extricate himself a train bore down on him without warning and he was decapitated."

In 1929 the City and State of New York and the New York Central Railroad agreed on the West Side Improvement Project, which would replace "Death Avenue" with a seemingly futuristic elevated line that entered warehouses on their upper floors. 

By 1931 the entire block in this image— the west side of Eleventh Avenue, 26th to 27th streets— had become the magnificent Starrett-Lehigh Building. The Lehigh Valley railroad had retained the ground floor as a vast freight yard, and the 19-story, 1.8 million-square-foot building, with its three gigantic elevators to lift and lower trucks, was put up directly above it. (Today the axle grease has been wiped away and Comme des Garcons, Hugo Boss, and Martha Stewart are among the tenants)

The High Line, as the new elevated freight line was called, opened to trains in 1934 and was used until the early 1980s. Saved from demolition by a grassroots movement in the early 2000s, a portion of the High Line is now a park that is so exquisite, so unbelievably well done, it's hard to believe it got built in New York. In my opinion, it is one of the triumphs of this city.

the Burns Method

Image at top is "Lower Hudson Street" about 1865, the other is "Washington Statue in Union Square" about 1860. 

At bottom is how I used the Union Square crop, which I thought was vaguely and abstractly menacing, in the Lincoln and New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. It was intended to help suggest (along with the engraving, etc ) the mounting popular dissatisfaction with Lincoln that led up to the Draft Riots.

NOTE 7-18: I shouldn't be surprised there's a Wikipedia entry about the "Ken Burns Effect"— I just cant believe I didnt know about it or the Apple reference.

One of the many things I admired about Ken Burns' famous Civil War series was not just the amazing evocation of the 1860s—but the exceptional sense of being enveloped in the 1860s. This was achieved, in part, with Burns' habit of dramatizing the photographs. By dramatizing I mean his practice of zooming into a small corner of a photograph, panning across it, and drawing back, at some point, so that the viewer sees the entire image. It's a journey across the image. Not only is this a clever way for a documentary filmmaker to increase the store of visuals he can draw from (each image can yield two or more scenes, especially helpful when sources are historical and of limited availability) it is also a method of revivifying, showing the life within the image.

Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography) speaks of the excitement of (select) images, the "the pressure of the unspeakable [within the image] which wants to be spoken." In his somewhat overwrought way, Barthes explains that the "adventure" and "animation" of certain images in turn animate the viewer. By isolating and framing small parts of a scene, or panning across a battlefield or streetscape, Burns extracts "adventure" from images that may, on first look, be quite standard or dull. Training the camera across a photograph recreates in a small way the experience of three dimensional world. It places the viewer in the setting and evokes the sensation of taking in that very scene. Also, by refocusing the eye on small corners, the viewer is privy to other stories that might escape notice when seeing the photo in its entirety. For Burns' camera, a single image of Richmond in ruins could offer up "resoluteness" in teasing out the tiny details of street life or it could reinforce "devastation" by lingering on each and every physical manifestation of war.

I was mesmerized by these latent stories in historical images. Limited only by the resolution (image quality) of the image one is working from there's the potential for extracting candid moments, where none seemed to exist. When I worked on the "Lincoln and New York" show at the New-York Historical Society I felt strongly that the galleries needed to have a sense of immediacy. Lincoln's walk through New York City on his way to his speaking engagement at Cooper Union should seem like the real walk it was. I had hoped to use photographic murals of New York street scenes only— no engravings—to place the visitor on those New York streets. (Of course others weighed in on the design and things got watered down, but still...) Above are two of several images I drew from— they're pretty powerful even without the Burns method, so my job was easy.

Why was I even thinking about this now? A typographer friend, Nick Sherman, created this amazing post of signage seemingly extracted out of nowhere from vintage photographs.

Automats and Einfühlung

While this image is not of the Automat at 1557 Broadway, it gives an idea of the chain's original ornamentation. Freeland mentions that the stained glass of the Horn and Hardart flagship Times Square location was created by the same artisan who did the glass for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

"Oh how I love the automat

the place where all the food's at"

Life magazine, March 1928

Doyers street, scene of the Chinese Theatre massacre

The sumptuous Atlantic Garden at 50 Bowery c.1870. All images, NYPL digital archive

At the Victorian Society awards a few weeks ago, I chatted with David Freeland, author of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure. Now, I get obsessive in my avocational interest in New York history—tracking down images, poring over details— but he does it on a professional level! It was a thrill to speak with someone whose New York knowledge is academically comprehensive but who also appears to be just as viscerally enthralled by the poignance of everyday details.

Freeland finds slivers of the city's past which, though difficult to spot, can come to light if you train your eyes to see them. He's not interested in simply documenting architectural loss (e.g. blogs like vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com) he's got the determination to ferret out and appreciate the bits that remain.

The book is a treasure hunt of sorts, all over Manhattan. Freeland crawls out onto rooftops, he follows circuitous underground passages through Chinatown, and peers at faint traces of ornamental frippery stranded amidst the bleak streetscapes of Manhattan economic expedience. With Freeland's perseverance, the reader is able to cut through the cultural detritus of places like Grand Slam tourist shop in Times Square to the remnants of the original 1912 Horn and Hardart Automat. Elsewhere he conjures up Bowery beer gardens, swank nightclubs, gambling saloons and revives the heyday of Tin Pan Alley.

Freeland's research and documentation is astounding: where was Rogers Peet? how much did the cooks at the Automat make? what drinks did the Atlantic Garden serve? The implications of the American Mutoscope Company's "How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed"? (I live on this stuff, though some readers might find the occasional tsunami of facts a bit overwhelming.)

As amazing to me as his storehouse of facts is his orchestration of essentially three narrative voices. Freeland shifts between the modern-day flaneur—an often poetic observer of the present reality, the historian—a neutral provider of historical fact, and the eye witness—a "you-are-there" recreation of period events.

Freeland is obviously quite given over to the idea that it is possible, in some way, to tap into-- experience-- the past. 

If time is just a continuum and the present, past, and future all exist together with the past and future hidden from view then New York's past is still there lurking just beyond the range of our vision.

In a favorite old post of mine I describe a similarly intense awareness.

To the extent that a [period] photographic image, the rectangle, is a metaphorical window, its frame blocks the rest of the world that continues just beyond those edges. The "glass" is immovable, the "window" shut. I wonder, though, about what is to the left or the right. Or what connection there might be, in that photo of yesterday, to what I know today. 

If I understand it correctly, the philosopher and essayist Johann Gottfried von Herder's term Einfühlung, often translated as "empathy," puts a name to this complicated and elusive state of mind that I know very well and which seems to pervade Automats.

... a "feeling into," [Einfuhlung is] projecting one’s mind into the object of one’s contemplation, of seeing and thinking and experiencing from its perspective and so coming to understand it better, of turning it into a subject and oneself into the object of its gaze.– Robert Daly (SUNY Buffalo)

Afterglow

Sunset and afterglow, November, 1883

November 9, 1883

Sunset, May 10, 1884

Sunset, May 10, 1884

Amber afterglow with crepuscular rays, September, 1885

Sustained light after sunset, July 12, 1886

Sunset and noctilucent cloud, July 6, 1885

I mentioned the British artist William Ascroft (1832-1914) at the end of the last post about volcanoes. I thought his remarkable, almost eerie series of sketches documenting the atmospheric effects of Krakatoa's eruption upon London's sunsets warranted a bit more attention. In the years after the 1883 explosion, Ascroft's rapidly drawn sketches recorded details that would have been otherwise ephemeral or merely described before the invention of color photography.

In a thoughtful April 15th New York Times Op Ed piece that I only just now saw, Simon Winchester, author of “Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded,” creates a wonderful image of Ascroft laboring to capture the "magic" in the sky:

An obscure Londoner named William Ascroft, astonished by the nightly light show along the Thames, turned out a watercolor [sic, they appear to all be pastels, not watercolors] every 10 minutes, night after night, working like a human camera. More than 500 Krakatoa paintings survive him. “Blood afterglow,” he jotted down on one canvas, noting the magic done by refractive crystals of dust; “Amber afterglow,” on another.

When The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena, Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society was printed in 1888, several chromolithographic prints of Ascroft's sunsets were painstakingly reproduced and included, having been deemed to have exceptional scientific import. Printed to the artist’s directions by the Lithographic Department of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, the job required ten different 'stones' or printing plates.

As an aside, I found this photograph of "noctilucent clouds" over Hungary taken in 2006. Originally recognized as a polar atmospheric occurance, the clouds have now been spotted in much lower latitudes in recent years. It is thought that global climate change may be the cause.

Volcano notes

April 17, 2010. (REUTERS/Ingolfur Juliusson)

April 17 and April 19, 2010. Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day,

....

....

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe!

In July of 1816, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary's stepsister Claire, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, were spending their days indoors at the Diodati Villa, on a sojourn in Geneva, Switzerland. They were taking shelter from the inexplicable cold, "incessant rain" and mysterious fogs. "There was a celebrated dark day," Byron recalled, "on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight." Held captive by the weather, Mary drafted what would become her novel, Frankenstein, Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, and Byron wrote "Darkness" (excerpt above), their creative energies sympathetic with the brooding elements.

Strange weather, lengthy periods of darkness and record-cold temperatures swept across Europe and North America that summer. Prolonged, brilliant sunsets and twilights were frequently seen. On June 6, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine. Nearly a foot of snow fell in Quebec City. Lake and river ice were reported as far south as Pennsylvania.The resulting crop failures and livestock loss forced up prices, created panic and produced famine in many parts of the world. Some historians point to the weather conditions in New York and the Northeast of 1816 and '17 as spurring an early westward migration.

1816, The Year Without Summer or the Poverty Year, it was later determined, was the result of a volcano, erupting the previous year, thousands of miles away.

On Wednesday, April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano in the Dutch East Indies, thought to have been dormant for 5,000 years, had begun a series of eruptions. On April 15th the final and largest blast spewed sulphur dioxide nearly 27 miles into the stratosphere. The finer ash particles stayed in the atmosphere up to a few years causing global climate changes. The pyroclastic flow killed over 10,000 local people immediately and another 70,000 or more were killed on neighboring islands in the aftermath of tsunamis, ash blanketing and the resulting agricultural devastation. Tambora was the largest volcanic eruption in at least 1,600 years— ten times the size of Mt. Vesuvius. 

Decades later John Ruskin gave a lecture at the London Institute on another meteorological anomaly. In a semi-apocalyptic conflation of atmospheric and psychological disturbance, Ruskin railed about ominous clouds:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.... It is a wind of darkness...It is a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attaching its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter....

—The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

This was a year after the famous 1883 Krakatoa eruption. //

Following the August 27th Krakatoa eruption, artist William Ascroft documented eerily brilliant sunsets and other optical phenomena over England, attributed to the volcano's after-effects, until 1886. For a selection of his uncanny sketches, see the Science and Society Picture Library/

Twilight and after glow effects at Chelsea, London, Nov. 26, 1883

Shadows in living color

 

Images from top: Pearl Street and Peck Slip, October 7, 1942

Drink cart near the Battery, October, 1942

Wartime salvage, October 4, 1942

58 Mulberry Street

South East corner of First Street and the Bowery (and the same corner today in a desultory view from Google maps)

Charles Weever Cushman (1896–1972), dedicated amateur photographer, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater, Indiana University. The resulting Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection of the Indiana University Archives is a meticulously documented online repository (you can read the grant proposal, peruse online scans of Cushman's notebooks, find out about Charles, or read about the color restoration process).

Amassed by Cushman during a thirty-two year period from 1938 to 1969, the slides document a dizzying array of subjects, in part: fires, floods, train wrecks, train yards, harbors, street vendors, street scenes, churches, synagogues, saloons, advertisements, the steel industry, mining, ghost towns, farms, urban slums, mule auctions, and the filming of B movies. What particularly interested me were the shots of New York, many of which are from the early forties. Nearly all the images are preserved in uncanny, vivid color.

 

Kodachrome, the first modern color film, was introduced in 35mm still camera format in 1936. It reproduced a more natural color than earlier color processes, and nothing like it in photography had been seen before. Revolutionary as it was, Kodachrome would not come into popular use until after World War II. Cushman, however, began shooting with Kodachrome as early as 1938. In 1938 there were still Civil War veterans alive. In the 1942 of the Pearl Street image at top, the nineteenth century was only as distant in time as the Summer of Love (1967) is to us. It was still hanging on—in buildings not yet cleared by urban redevelopment, in horse-drawn work carts—and Cushman captured it's last shadows in color.
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ADDENDUM  I've come across Dino's NYC in which the author seeks to update the Charles Cushman views of New York (there are only 150 or so)! He's got some great information about the Pearl Street image in particular and it's definitely worth a visit. Be prepared, though, that it's a dirge-like procession of former streetscapes— however trash-strewn or gritty— turned to parking lots, off-ramps and highrises.

In an old post I featured this detail of a 1912 photograph of Elizabeth Street, which I colorized in Photoshop. I think one reason the past becomes so foreign, so removed, is that we so often see it in black and white. As if the past were a different dimension. The Past: some time disconnected from my existence. The monochrome abstracts the subject, creates an artistic chiaroscuro— but leaches the immediacy from the scene. How I wish I could see the nineteenth century in full color!