“Untitled,” taken between 1935 and 1942 for U.S. Farm Security Administration or Office of War, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
In the Library’s online catalogue, this picture is among photos taken by Edwin Rosskam of farms in New Jersey in Spring 1938. Click on the image for a better view.
These are not really porches, of course, but two café doorways and a storefront.
They caught my eye while we were walking around the Sainte-Catherine or Sint Katelijne neighborhood of Brussels, which is just northwest of the Grand’Place and La Bourse.
The one pictured above is on Rue de Flandre.
I believe I snapped this blue café, above, on Quai au Bois à Brûler, facing the site of the old Saint-Catherine Bassin or canal port, covered over since the 1870s.
I like the way the ivy is used as both a decorative windowbox planting and low privacy screen.
Above, a mass of vines shades a closed storefront, also along Rue de Flandre.
Rue de Flandre is a good street on which to find an interesting restaurant. We liked Viva M’Boma (old-fashioned Belgian food, emphasis on meat/offal) and Domaine de Lintillac (dishes from the southwest of France, emphasis on duck).
Click on any photo above to enlarge it.
“Washington, D.C. The home of Miss Norma Kale, a Woodrow Wilson High School English teacher,” October 1943, by Esther Bubley, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all photos here).
What a charming, patchwork quilt of a house: a Gothic window, a Dutch Colonial Revival shape, and a couple of Greek columns. The screened porch angles away from each side of the door. There are climbing rose canes around the downstairs windows.
The specific location is not given. The Palisades neighborhood in northwest Washington comes to mind. It still has old tall trees and funny little houses set among them. But much more of the city must have looked that way 70 years ago.
Bubley took a large number of photographs of students and teachers at Woodrow Wilson High School — including several of Miss Kale grading papers at home and hosting the editors of the student newspaper in front of the fire in her living room.
Two of the pictures also include an elderly man, who may have been her father; she was about 40 at the time.
“Miss Norma Kale. . . greeting some of her students who have come to her home on a Sunday afternoon.”
I like the old concrete and wire fence and gate too. It looks like the posts go up to support an arbor over the gate.
Sadly, an In Memoriam page in the 1956 Woodrow Wilson yearbook said that Miss Kale had died in March of that year. It noted that “Miss Kale placed importance on nature and the worth of human character, rather than on material possessions.”
. . . I love
this garden in all its moods,
even under its winter coat
of salt hay, or now,
in October, more than
half gone over: here
a rose, there a clump
of aconite. . . .— James Schuyler, from “Korean mums“
Two women and a young boy next to a balcony of roses at the Trutat chalet, Foix in the Midi-Pyrénées of France.
The autochrome was taken ca. 1903 by Eugène Trutat, via Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.
Look, Delia, how w’ esteem the half-blown rose
The image of thy blush and summer’s honour. . .— Samuel Daniel, from “Delia 31“
enclos*ure 