Uptown garden


“Artist’s uptown residence,” New York City, ca. 1860, via Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, New York Public Library.

Detail from above image.

Upper Manhattan at this time was rapidly transforming from country to city — as villages and small farms became blocks of middle-class rowhouses. This backyard, with its neat latticed sitting area and then large cabbage garden, seems to encapsulate the change.

Detail.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the name of the artist or the address. Is he one of the two men in top hats sitting by the door, or was she standing in front of them, balancing a small boy on the fence — or maybe taking the picture?

Life in gardens: California

A repeat “Life in” from 2013. . .

Back yard, Turlock, CA, 1943, by Russell Lee, Library of Congress

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”

Hood River, Oregon

hood-river-oregon-arthur-peck-osu-special-collections-and-archives“Good enough Farm House in Hood River, [Oregon]: View from front yard,” undated, via Arthur Peck Photograph Collection, OSU Special Collections and Archives Commons on flickr.

Arthur Peck was a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Oregon Agricultural College from 1908 to 1948. This picture was part of his teaching library of 24 boxes of glass lantern slides — now in OSU’s archives.

It is not clear whether “good enough” was his critical evaluation or the name of the farm.

Industry

factory-and-garden1941-or-42-library-of-congress
Vegetable gardens beside workers’ housing; factory in the background, place unknown, between 1941 and 1942, color slides by unknown photographer for the U.S. Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

factory-and-garden-21941-or-42-library-of-congress

It was suggested by commenters on the photos’ flickr pages that the factory is for steel and the location is Pittsburg or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Quai d’Auteuil, Paris

Jardins potagers, quai d'Auteuil (actuel quai Louis-Blériot), Paris (XVIe arr.), France, 30 mai 1928, (Autochrome, 9 x 12 cm), Auguste Léon, Département des Hauts-de-Seine, musée Albert-Kahn, Archives de la Planète, A 54 766The little vegetable gardens near pont Mirabeau, behind quai d’Auteuil (now quai Louis-Blériot), Paris,  on May 30, 1928, by Auguste Léon, via Collection Archives of the Planet – Albert Kahn Museum/Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

The Auteuil wharf or quai, next to the Seine River, was situated at the top of the sandy-looking embankment on the right side above (also see here, third photo).  Then there was a drop down to the gardens, and, on the left, Avenue de Versailles was at the top of the wall (I think). In the distance, you can see the Eiffel Tower and before it, a little to the right, the small Paris replica of the Statue of Liberty at the southwest end of the Île aux Cygnes.

There’s another view here (the 15th photo down). The area was filled in and covered by the highway Voie George Pompidou and modern apartment buildings in the 1960s.

This lovely autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived from 1909 to 1931 by French banker and pacifist Albert Kahn. He sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to 50 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.


*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. The above photo (A 54766) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.