“Fire prevention week in Cincinnati, Ohio,” October 1938, by John Vachon for the U.S. Farm Security Administration, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Category: architecture
The Sunday porch: Le Droit Park
Detail of porch column, Le Droit Park, 3rd Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., 1974, by Ronald Comedy for an Historic American Building Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Le Droit Park is an old Washington subdivision of “large freestanding houses and duplexes of related architectural design,“ located just south of Howard University. When it was built in 1873, it was restricted to white buyers only and gated, but a series of protests brought the fences down in 1891, and by 1920 its residents were predominately African-American and included professors, politicians, and artists. The area suffered decline in the 1980s, but today its renovated homes are selling quickly, according to The Washington Post. The neighborhood is on the Heritage Trail, a self-guided walking tour developed by Cultural Tourism DC.
The home pictured above — with its distinctive porch columns — still exists.
The Sunday porch: storefront
Country store with rough tree trunk columns, Person County, North Carolina, 1939, by Dorothea Lange for U.S. Farm Security Administration, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Vintage landscape: mums
A display of chrysanthemums in a Central Experimental Farm greenhouse, Ottawa, ca. 1920s, photographer unknown, via Library and Archives Canada (under CC license).
The Sunday porch: catching up
A repeat porch from October 2014. . .
“Snapshot, two women sitting on the front porch of a house, unidentified,” ca. 1912-1934, by Michael Francis Blake, via David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries Commons on flickr.
Blake was one of the first African-American studio photographers in Charleston, South Carolina. His collection at Duke consists of 117 photos in an album entitled “Portraits of Members.”
. . . our effort to open the gift of the world,
our hope to find years
in this box we tear apart.— Allan Johnston, from “Evening Conversation“
enclos*ure 