Sarah Wrote That

Night Scene, West from 500 Fifth Ave, showing Times, Paramount, Astor & Edison Hotels.
Byron Company, 1937 (photographer unnamed)

the-mtblog:

Pennsylvania Station
New York City
September 6, 1962

Photographs by Walker Evans, commissioned by LIFE for “America’s Heritage of Great Architecture is Doomed…It Must be Saved” - published July 5, 1963. These photos were from a total collection of 141 that Evan’s shot for the commission.

(© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

With some things, nostalgia, golden age-ism, is merited. Come and go from Manhattan by way of a crystal palace? How would I!

Reblogged from Maury Postal

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton | Part 2, Chapter 11:

Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the afternoon spectacle of Fifth Avenue. It was a day in late April, and the sweetness of spring was in the air. It mitigated the ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt roof-lines, threw a mauve veil over the discouraging perspective of the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry to the delicate haze of green that marked the entrance to the Park.

As Lily stood there, she recognized several familiar faces in the passing carriages. The season was over, and its ruling forces had disbanded; but a few still lingered, delaying their departure for Europe, or passing through town on their return from the South.

Lily in her eventual destitution does a lot of walking around Midtown, which was evidently even more devoid of places to rest without buying something than it is today.

I’d forgotten that Wharton refers to “a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street,” not on. I wonder when that usage changed.

photo: Museum of the City of New York
Easter Sunday outside St Patrick’s Cathedral ca. 1902
Edwin Levick, Frederick Lewis

Impressions of the Maiden Voyage of the ‘Queen Mary’ to New York (1936)
Charles Chislett
Yorkshire Film Archive | Cunard Queens [blog]

You really do want to click through to this 30 min. black and white silent film (unfortunately not embeddable). Chislett brought his camera through Times Square at night, on the El, up to “The Yankee Stadium,” and to the top of the Woolworth and Empire State Buildings. He traveled across the Atlantic third class:

The cost of a trip to New York was, for cabin class, £53.15s (equivalent to £2,710 in today’s money, r.p.i.) – according to Merseyside Maritime Museum, this was enough to “keep a family with three children in food for over a year.” The cost for third class was £18.10 (equivalent to £942 in today’s money, r.p.i.) …[…] taking into account how average earnings have risen since 1936 makes it equivalent to £3,530. A considerable sum for a 31 year old bank employee (and this may well have been the cost for just for a one-way ticket!).

R.M.S. Olympic arrives in New York (from a 1935 newsreel); Olympic at speed, 1934

In my Downton Abbey season 2 anticipation, I’ve been browsing Edwardian era artifacts. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s use of the Titanic sinking as season 1’s inciting incident might be commended in screenwriting workshops*—up the ante, tidily identify time and place—but also seemed to me to flirt with Forrest Gumpish-ness: characters need less interest and individuation if they only animate a background we already have associations for.

Titanic has been so mythologized that it’s a shock seeing its nearly identical elder sister Olympic (“Old Reliable”) not fixed in 1911-12 amber but in 1935 after years of successful service—and also with a record of ramming things, including a U-Boat, the only recorded such sinking in World War One.

I find these photos entirely eerie—the first, the kind of New York arrival Titanic never got. The occasion for the newsreel from which it’s taken? The ramming and sinking and sinking of the Nantucket lightship from which the second photo was snapped the January before.

*the “Passover question” (why this night of all nights?), while a convenient memonic for writers to check whether they’re recounting something worth people’s time, can also lead to over-stuffing: Dad doesn’t just die in a plane crash, he dies in a 9/11 plane crash...

Columbus Circle, 1892
Museum of the City of New York

These electric poles are terrifying.

The Third Avenue El with Grand Central Depot on the right:

Looking down the 42nd St Branch not long after it was converted to a shuttle in 1879.

[Joseph Brennan, Beach Pneumatic: Alfred Beach’s Pneumatic Subway and the beginnings of rapid transit in New York]

Trolley tracks, Union and Devoe Streets, Schenectady, NY circa 1936
sent to the Albany Times-Union by Joanne DeVoe

Map of Schenectady Railway Company lines [full img]

From a circa 1910 brochure digitized by the Schenectady County Library:

…to-day, the steam locomotive has its supremacy threatened by the new electric engine of the twentieth century. But the modern highway of commerce and of trade, waterways and ways of steel as well, follow the ancient trail of the Indian runner…

…The Albany line of the Schenectady Railway is a splendid example of interurban rapid transit. It crosses the Pine Plains amid great sand-dunes and terminates at the Capital city. Relics of the pre-revolutionary days are constantly found on these plains.

…Albany, the second oldest settlement in the original thirteen States, is a veritable Mecca to the tourist. Following the venturesome navigator, Henry Hudson, who sailed northward from Manhattan in his queer craft, the “Half Moon,” the early Dutch traders made their way and established a trading post on a small island at the mouth of Tawasentha Creek…

…Southward from the Albany road, the Helderbergs rise splendidly against the sky. Their great precipices are noticeable from Stop 6 to best advantage….

I found these while researching which transit line a character in a story I’m writing would have overheard while ill in bed. (Unfortunately, she would have heard a bus. The story takes place in the early ’70s; the trolley must have been entirely or mostly defunct by the time my parents were growing up, in the ’50s, and before I was born the area had re-oriented itself around the Northway.)

It’s so stark, comparing the 1910 map to today, how the interstate not only acceded nothing to natural topography but evaded the existing cities. It was headed to Lake George, to Montreal, and cut due north past the then-hamlet of Clifton Park, which, suddenly convenient, ended up with over 30,000 people without ever getting a downtown. It’s one of the things that strikes me most about pre-interstate/motorway/autoroute maps, the sharp boundary between really dense city and country, the perceptible shape of each place.

2 Dec 2011 17:36