“Bridal pair starting on life’s voyage,” 1876, by Mrs. A. B. Mason, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Month: June 2015
The Sunday porch: interiors
More well-furnished porches in Queensland, Australia. . .
“Verandah at The Hollow, near Mackay, Queensland, about 1875,” photographer unidentified (all photos here), via State Library of Queensland Commons on flickr (all photos here).
I love the office setup on this very deep porch with an adjoining fernery or bush-house. There is also a sewing machine on the table between the two women.
These photos are not very clear, but you can click any thumbnail in the gallery below to scroll through larger versions. There are four additional pictures there too.
“Unidentified family on the verandah of a Cairns residence, ca. 1895.”
What a beautiful plant collection.
“Furniture on the verandah of a Queenslander home, ca. 1925,” photographer unidentified.
The white chairs on the left with the extended armrests are “squatter’s chairs,” typical to Queensland porches. There are two more examples here.
“Verandah of Gracemere Homestead, near Rockhampton,” ca. 1940.
“Furnishings on a verandah of a Queensland home, ca. 1925.”
“Verandah at ‘Fairseal,’ the residence of W.C. Hume at Torwood, Brisbane, 1890.”
“Invicta, the home of the Kingsfords in Cairns, ca. 1888.”
“Verandah at The Hollow, near Mackay, Queensland, about 1875.”
“Unidentified family on the verandah of a Cairns residence, ca. 1895.”
“Furniture on the verandah of a Queenslander home, ca. 1925.”
Additional links:
Gracemere Homestead 1940 photo, Rockhampton, Gracemere Homestead in 2001, GracemereHomestead history
Streifzug 1: sunflowers
Streifzug means ‘foray,’ ‘ brief survey,’ or ‘ramble’ (if my online German/English dictionary does not deceive me).
These photos are from yesterday’s ramble or, more specifically, bike ride.
The sign says, “Only paid-for flowers make friends*/joy.” Sonnenblumen are sunflowers. These are not quite open yet.
Blumen Selbt Schneiden or ‘cut your own flowers’ signs — with honor-system money boxes — are not uncommon sights alongside fields in the Stuttgart area. These long rows were beside a walking/biking/farm access path near our neighborhood.
(On the same ride, I also passed a house with a sidewalk shelf of already cut flowers in jars and a coin box.)
The fields around the rows of cut-your-own flowers are filled with wheat, beans, corn, and grass for hay.
Also, as you can see, our weather has much improved since Wednesday. Temperatures are now well into the seventies.
*See the comments here about the translation.
Life in gardens: Detroit, Michigan
Black children standing in front of a half-mile concrete wall in northwest Detroit. It was built in 1941 to separate their neighborhood from a white housing development going up on the other side.
The photo was taken in August 1941 by John Vachon for U.S. Farm Security Administration and is via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The 1930s and 1940s were times of great growth for the city of Detroit and the inner-suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), founded in 1934, pushed the idea of home ownership as an accessible goal for the average working class. . . .
[However], the FHA’s policies of mandated racial homogeneity in housing developments and redlining made it difficult for African Americans to become home owners. . . . Between 1930 and 1950, three out of five homes purchased in the United States were financed by FHA, yet less than two percent of the FHA loans were made to non-white home buyers. . . .
Public or private housing being hard to come by in the city, some African Americans were able to purchase land lots around the Wyoming Avenue and 8 Mile intersection with hopes of eventually building houses. . . . When the FHA was approached by a developer wanting to build an all-white subdivision west of the site, funding was refused because the area was too risky for investment. In a compromise with the FHA, the developer erected the wall that was to divide the “slum” from his new construction project.
— “The Detroit Wall,” Wikipedia
Light-catcher
Right now — at midmorning in Stuttgart — it’s 59°F. Our high today is predicted to be only 69°,with all-day clouds and intermittent rain.
It’s been this way since last week, and it looks like summer will not return until next Wednesday.
But yesterday about 5:30 p.m., I caught a few minutes of sun shining through my little arrangement of miniature roses, spirea, and wild strawberries.
An hour later, it was raining.
enclos*ure 