Turf farmhouse in Hlíðarendi, Fljótshlíð, Iceland, ca. 1900, by Frederick W.W. Howell, Cornell University Library, via Cornell University Library on flickr (both photos).
House covered with chamomile in Reykjavík.
Category: culture and history
Life in gardens: Austin, Texas
Five adults and two children at wooden tables beneath the large trees of Pressler’s Beer Garden, Austin, Texas, between 1890 and 1910, by Samuel B. Hill, via Austin Public Library and The Portal to Texas History (University of North Texas Libraries).
Pressler’s (originally a brewery) was located at 1327 West 6th Street for more than 30 years, closing in 1910. Its grounds featured a concert hall and dance pavilion, “ornamental shrubbery, arbors, and a fountain. . . . a boating ramp, a shooting club, and an alligator pond.” Pressler’s also hosted the German-American Austin Garten Association one Sunday every month.
The city had at least five biergartens at the time of the photo above. “Austin’s beer gardens of the 19th century were tightly woven into the fabric of local social life,” according to an interesting article in The Austin Chronicle, “Gardens of Eden.” “They were convivial places, patronized by both men and women, their families, and children.” They were particularly loved for their musical performances.
Today, only Scholz Garten remains — the oldest operating business in Texas.
Life in gardens: Knoxville, Tennessee
“Home of C.C. Dodson, Knoxville,” Tennessee, ca. 1899, via African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Dodson was a jeweler who owned a shop on West Vine Avenue in 1899. ‘Exuberant’ is the word I would use for his family’s front yard.
The photos collected by W.E.B. Du Bois for the 1900 Paris international exhibition particularly featured middle-class African Americans and their homes and institutions. “The photographs of affluent young African American men and women challenged the scientific ‘evidence’ and popular racist caricatures of the day that ridiculed and sought to diminish African American social and economic success,” according to the Library of Congress’s online catalogue.
In 2003, the Library of Congress published a book of 150 of the images, entitled A Small Nation of People. You can listen to a good NPR interview with its co-author, historian Deborah Willis, here.
Life in gardens: California
A repeat “Life in” from 2013. . .
I love this photo by Russell Lee, * of a May 1942 Turlock, California, backyard. (Unfortunately, it’s not very sharply focused.) The caption, possibly by the photographer, reads:
Housewife waters the lawn. All garden furniture and barbecue pit were made by her husband; about one out of every three houses in this town has such an arrangement in the backyard, and during the summer months people eat and spend many hours in their yards.
I particularly like the rolling sofa thing with the awning. Turlock is located in central California between Modesto and Merced. Continue reading “Life in gardens: California”
Parc Monceau, Paris
La Naumachie Colonnade in Parc Monceau, Paris, September 12, 1923, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine (both photos).
In Ancient Rome, a naumachia was a large basin dug for staging naval battles* as public entertainment. In Parc Monceau, La Naumachie is a tranquil oval pool framed on one end by a Corinthian colonnade.
The columns were once part of a never-completed late 16th century mausoleum attached to the Basilica of Saint Denis. In the late 1770s, they were acquired by the Duke of Chartres for an elaborate “Anglo-Chinese” public garden he was creating in northwest Paris. He filled it with architectural follies (see here) — one of them being a “Roman” colonnade.
The Duke was guillotined in 1793. His land was first confiscated and then returned to his heirs, who sold about half of it to developers. In the 1850s, the city bought the last 20 acres of the old garden, and Parc Monceau opened in 1861 as a largely informal “English-style” park. Today, there are still a few follies, although only the colonnade/naumachia and a small Egyptian pyramid remain from the 18th century.
The autochromes above are two of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”† The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*The word also refers to the spectacle itself.
†words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photos (A 39 095 S and A 39 089) are © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
enclos*ure 
