Ghostwatching
I came across a thread on Skyscraper City of historical photos of Toronto, plus the occasional (delightful) 1910s print ad and 1880s catalog cover. My favorite is this 1937 shot, “Window Shopping at Simpson’s and Eaton’s”:
Showgirls on lunch break? Brazen hussies? The hats! The almost-work gloves on the woman in the foreground… The light-colored suit and the shoes on the man checking out the women in white…
The thread starts in 1834 with artwork; the photos begin in the 1850s. Has any era seen such transformations in The Way We Live NowTM as did the last few decades of the 19th century and first few decades of the 20th? Gas and then electric lights, railways and automobiles, (theoretically) universal suffrage, public health, utilities and education…
I find photos taken in the last horse-drawn decades eerie:
Add full-color and electric lights and pave the streets, and this could be today’s Columbus Avenue in New York, California Street in SF, Chicago or Back Bay. But it’s so not. And it’s going about its business just fine, thanks. Looking at it, there’s some weird absence that’s not in the picture but that I can’t get rid of, knowing how differently the scene’s inhabits would size it up than I do. Is it the lack of cars, an absence that only exists—or is only visible—in retrospect? Or the space that would be filled in today with traffic, and what’s not in the photo but that I know is long gone: the scent of horsesh*t and coal smoke, mud everywhere, the drudgery of nineteenth century laundry?
