John Vachon – Page 4

The Sunday porch: Houston, Texas

July 26, 2015April 11, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

Originally posted in October 2013:

Another photo by John Vachon — an old house with a double porch in Houston, Texas, May 1943.* I love the tower room.

You really need to click on the photo and enlarge it to enjoy all the details of this one.

Sharp-eyed commenters on the Library of Congress’s Flickr Commons project noticed that the address on the curb is 1900 Franklin Street. The location is currently a parking lot next to the US Route 59 overpass, close to Minute Maid Park.

*via Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs Collection, Library of Congress.

Life in gardens: Detroit, Michigan

June 25, 2015June 25, 2015 Cindy at enclos*ure1 Comment

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

Vintage landscape: food cellar

May 9, 2015April 11, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

“Food storage cellar, Deshee Unit, Wabash Farms [Cooperative], Indiana,” May 1940, by John Vachon, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

I found the preserves in the cellar. . . .

The black raspberries were still
delicious, each cluster
burning like years in the brain.

— Michael Waters, from “Preserves“

Life in gardens: Woodbine

May 8, 2015May 8, 2015 Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

“Planting a garden in the backyard, Woodbine, Iowa,” May 1940, by John Vachon, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (both photos here).

In the spring of 1940, John Vachon was on assignment for the Farm Security Administration in the Midwest.

. . . I photographed Spring – clothes blowing on the wash line, kids playing marbles, women planting backyard gardens, blossoms on trees.

— John Vachon’s journal

Woodbine is a town of about 1,400 people on the Boyer River. It was named for the woodbine vine (Parthenocissus vitacea) by the wife of the first postmaster, according to the community’s website.