....mostly Westward Ho!

Grand Central Terminal (NOT Station or Depot!) in New York is one of the great indoor spaces in Manhattan. Seen here in 1949 in a time exposure, it is still one of the main transport hubs in the city.

Here seen at an unidentified location, 4451 powers what looks to be the Afternoon Daylight along the Californian coast. 4451 has long been scrapped and 4449 is the only member of the class to be preserved and was retired from service in 1957. Restored in 1974-76 it has been largely operational since then, with its 15 year overhaul scheduled to start in 2013.

An unidentified location is seen here in a Kodachrome transparency. There are clues to the general location in the shot. The car dates it to the late 1930s/early 40s (I am not an expert on American automobiles, 1930s British are my thing!) The lack of ANY other traffic marks it as c1930/40s too (although that is not by any means a certainty as suburban streets such as this would be quiet most of the time). The palms suggest it is hot and the architecture of the houses again suggest a Spanish influence. The lake at the bottom of the road looks to be a reservoir, again suggesting a hot, dry climate. A best guess is California c1941

Although it is hot in the image above, it is not always so in California, the mountains can be treacherous. 

Donner Pass is one such place, named after a group of California bound emigrants who had to overwinter there in 1846 due to their route being blocked by snow, of the 45 survivors of the group (originally 81 strong) some resorted to cannibalism to survive. Bleak is probably the best way to describe the high Sierra Nevadas in the winter, and even as late as 1952 the train the City of San Francisco was slowed in a blizzard and eventually stuck in a snowdrift there for three days.

The Mountains are unforgiving as can be seen in the image of the car below. That is a brave driver!

After our American interlude we will travel back to Europe on the 1938 built Nieuw Amsterdam, of the Holland-America line seen here mid Atlantic in 1950.

1939 -The World comes to New York

The 1939 World's Fair. Held at Flushing Meadows - Corona Park, which sounds idyllic but was actually the cleaned up Corona Ash Dump, New York's dumping ground for coal furnace ash, horse manure and garbage. This was the second biggest World's Fair ever held - only the 1904 St Louis Fair was bigger - and over the two seasons it was open 44 million people passed through the gates.

The British Pavilion is seen in the image above. Visited in June by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth it held exhibits such as the Magna Carta, the first time that it had left Britain. with the outbreak of WW2 it was deemed safer to keep it in the USA and it was stored at Fort Knox until 1947 alongside the Declaration of Independence.

The Fair celebrated the 150th anniversary of George Washington's first inauguration as President of the United States whilst looking forward to the future. In the distance in the image above can be seen the sixty feet high statue of George Washington which stood facing the future in the shape of the two symbols of the fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere.

But this was a fair for the masses and colour photography which had been available since 1907 in the form of Autochrome plates was now easily available with the introduction only four years previously of the iconic Kodachrome slide film. 

This was perhaps the first fair that the public photographed fairly extensively IN COLOUR. The Eastman Kodak exhibit had a background, painted by Salvador Dali, seen above and despite the perception today that colour photography was a product of the 1960s and 70s, colour photography was here to stay, even if prohibitively expensive - and that is why perhaps that it is seen as a recent invention. 

A roll of colour transparency film cost $5 - the equivalent of £50/$81 in today's currency! To put that into some context, the admission price for the Fair was 75 cents!!

Welcome to America - Not everything should be taken at face value......

 

Liberty Enlightening the World has stood sentinel over the approaches to New York Harbour since 1886. Now, her copper sheathing aged green with verdigris, she once shone in the sun, a beacon to millions of immigrants eagerly anticipating a new life in the New World. 

But the image above is not what it seems. No immigrant saw this as his or her first glimpse of America and the statue pictured above now resides in the Brooklyn Museum. Let me explain.....

The statue pictured, a replica of the Statue of Liberty albeit not a small scale one at 9 metres high, stood on top of the Liberty Warehouse at West 64th Street. This building is now converted into flats (condominiums) as, just off Central Park, this is one of the more desirable residential locations in Manhattan.   

The Liberty warehouse is pictured below in 1966.

Off to The States on the Queen Mary - 1952

Our luggage has been delivered to our stateroom on board RMS Queen Mary for the crossing to New York. It is 1952 and there is no restriction on the amount of luggage one can bring on board.

However some took this to excess, to such an extent with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who traveled with such amounts of luggage that, the story goes, Cunard hinted that perhaps they may wish to travel with less. 

The Duke and Duchess then transferred their allegiance to United States Lines. However there may have been other reasons for their shift in loyalty. The SS United States won the Blue Riband (in 1952 at nearly 40 miles per hour which is FAST for a liner!) and as a sea crossing was the only practicable way of getting across the Atlantic in the early fifties it made sense to travel on the fastest possible ship. Also, living in France, Cherbourg was a more convenient boarding point now that they were no longer welcome in Britain.

I am not sure when (or if) the Luggage story occurred as Edward abdicated in 1936, but was still using Cunard in 1940 - at least to send luggage ahead, as 14 pieces were unloaded from the RMS Britanic in New York with no sign of the Duke on board. 

While we are crossing on the RMS Queen Mary this time, we will possibly use the SS United States on a future crossing.

The next few entries will be images of the USA from the past, starting with a familiar icon - or so it may seem to begin with.  

The front of the Palace......for real, this time!

Round the front of the Palace (not the theatre this time!) and we are in what may be more familiar territory, but four years earlier than the previous post for this is 1953. 

Buckingham Palace is seen in all its smoke begrimed glory - the stone having been cleaned in recent years. This is the official residence of the British monarch, but not that of the Court, which is still officially resident at St James Palace, and a coronation is in the offing. 

George VI having died the previous February, Elizabeth II is now on the throne and her coronation is in a few days, and despite it being June, it will take place in the pouring rain. 

London's streets are bedecked in decorations, but these are surprisingly muted here with only some red banners bearing the letter E to be seen on the right hand side of the image.

The few cars in shot appear to be pre-war and the fashions are muted, Britain was in a period of austerity and the browns, greys and pastel colours of the clothes are typical of the early 1950s. The demographics of the colour palette would not change until the mid to late 1950s when the brighter colours we are familiar with today would start to appear.

At the rear of the Palace in London 1957, not as glamorous as it sounds.........

The rear of the Palace, the Palace Theatre that is. Now, I have NO idea why this particular image was taken, perhaps the three people wandering across Romilly Street are friends of the photographer, but they seem too relaxed to me as normally people posed for the camera. Other than that there is no great focus of interest, just another throwaway shot perhaps at the start or end of a film. 

However, there is a lot to be gleaned from an image even as apparently mundane as this......

Romilly Street had only been named thus since 1937, previously it had been called Church Street, but was renamed due to Sir Samuel Romilly having been born nearby at 18 Frith Street. No, I don't know why they didn't rename Frith Street!

The Palace Theatre, from the front, is one of the more spectacular of London's theatres. It is situated on what was Cambridge Circus, now just a road junction but back in 1957 a roundabout hence the "Circus" sobriquet - much like the more famous Oxford Circus that most people have heard of.

However, from the back, it reveals itself to be just another brick built monolithic edifice of no great arcitectural merit - much like any other theatre. 

We know it is 1957 as Victor Borge, the comedian and pianist,  is appearing in his one man show, fresh from a record breaking run of three years on Broadway.

Looking at the cars, the most prominent is a Standard Ten, which wouldn't park there today as the area is infested with double yellow lines!  The three wheeler looks to be a Heinkel Kabine, in production from 1956-58 so almost brand new here with possibly a Fordson Van behind the Heinkel.

The Coach and Horses pub on the corner is still open for business, although no longer serving Taylor Walker's beer. Taylor Walker, founded in Stepney in 1730 as Salmon and Hare were taken over by Ind Coope in 1959.

Kettners restaurant is still in business, having opened in 1867. Phillip Raphael Ltd advertising is no longer there and is now a barber shop offering £5 hair cuts (which is a bit of a snip in Central London)

"Guinness Is Good For You" is probably the most famous of the Guinness slogans of the period and when the hoarding is as large and prominent as the one at the end of the street, overlooking Cambridge Circus you couldn't ignore it!  

The yellow sign, which is almost unreadable in this image gave me a few problems. Eventually, looking at another shot of Cambridge Circus from 1952 that I have, and even on that slide it is partially obscured, it transpires that it is an advertisement for Dameroids - some type of patent restorative elixir, described on the label as "A Safe and Sure Remedy for General Weakness, Spinal Exhaustion, Neurasthenia, Physical Decay, and Loss of Nerve Power." Obviously so good that it isn't available today!!

The snake oil salesmen were alive and well in London half a century ago!!

The last summer of peace - Knaresborough 1913

In one of the earliest colour images in my collection, Knaresborough in Yorkshire is seen here in an Autochrome glass plate taken in 1913, only six years after colour photography became easily available in 1907. It is typical of Autochromes in rendering colours in pastel shades rather than the vibrant colours we expect today. But Autochromes of towns are rare as most, due to the long exposure times, were of static and colourful subjects.

The image is taken from the ruins of Knaresborough Castle and surprisingly for an image taken a century ago, very little has really changed in what you can see here. The trees now almost obscure the church of St John the Baptist and the railway bridge still carries trains across the River Nidd.

Waterside is the street running below the bridge but what appears to be the gardens of a house to the right of the road now has houses built there. Google Map street view is a wonderful thing and these houses were being constructed in 2008 when the Google camera car tootled along Waterside.

Just under the bridge what may in 1913 have been a house is still there, but new houses have again been constructed in the gardens.

The riverbank has also been extended to the outer edge of the bridge pier and finished in concrete.

Not much has changed here in the past century - and that is not something you can say about many of the images that you will see on this blog!