“Happy and beautiful, Atlantic City, N.J.,” 1903.
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Photo possibly taken by B.W. Kilburn, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
“Roominghouse district, Washington,” a Kodachrome slide by Charles W. Cushman, mid-September 1940.*
In the two years leading up to the U.S. entering World War II, the population of Washington, D.C., went from 621,000 to over 1,000,000, according to journalist David Brinkley.
Most of the new arrivals were women, many of whom were hired “before they had even found a place to leave their bags.” Thousands of townhouses were turned into roominghouses and several women shared each room. (According to one of them, Enid Bubley, it was “social suicide” to violate the morning schedule of eight minutes each in the bathroom.)
By 1941, Malcolm Cowley described the city this way: “Washington in wartime is a combination of Moscow (for overcrowding), Paris (for its trees), Wichita (for its way of thinking), Nome (in the gold-rush days) and Hell (for its livability).”
So the two or three benches placed in each little yard above are significant. They were undoubtedly places of real reprieve from the crowded conditions inside the houses and the chaos of the city.
These gardens still have their wrought iron fences. During the war, the metal was much needed, and many D.C. residents gave up their black railings for wooden pickets.
The photographer, Charles Cushman, was a talented amateur who traveled across the U.S. and other countries and took more than 14,500 Kodachrome slides from 1938 to 1969. He bequeathed his images to Indiana University, his alma mater.
*Used with the permission of the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection of the Indiana University Archives. Please do not “pin” or re-blog without contacting them here.
(Chapter the first, here.)
“Government experts test power of gas to keep weeds out of golf greens. Washington, D.C., Aug. 4[,1938].
“Attention golfers!! Your putting is bound to improve and your cussing cut down if the tests now being conducted by grass experts of the Department of Agriculture on the use of tear gas to keep weeds out of golf greens are successful. A.E. Rabbit, (left) grass specialist of the United States Golf Association with whom the Department of Agriculture is cooperating in making the tests, is pictured as he pours the gas into the soil while Stanley Graeff, Dept. of Agriculture, rakes it over. The gas treatment was developed by Dr. John Monteith of the Department of Agriculture.”
Photo and text in quotes by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
“Washington Monument,” ca. 1900, Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Good luck today, Washington.
What a great old gate at Bluff Hall, Demopolis, Alabama, in 1936. I love the fat finials.
The playwright Lillian Hellman may have passed through this gate in the first decades of the 20th century. Her mother’s family was from Demopolis, and she visited there as a child. She later used the town as inspiration for the setting of The Little Foxes. Lionnet is said to have been based on Bluff Hall and another local mansion.
Today the house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is open to the public as a museum.
Photo: by Alex Bush for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
enclos*ure 