Changes at the Bar

Micklegate Bar in York is seen here in 1951. The old southern entrance to the City of York is still today one of the main entrances into the centre of the city although the main road skirts round the old town by the railway station to avoid too much congestion through the narrow arches of the gatehouse.

Although the gate itself survives, some of the buildings seen here do not. The three story Georgian house with the first floor bay windows has gone (despite York's assertion today to be a city that cares for its past, I suspect this building was demolished in the late 1950s or 1960s when heritage was not top of the agenda!) along with the rest of the buildings on the left hand side nearer the camera. The right hand side seems to have fared little better with, again those buildings nearest the camera now gone and the replacements seeming to be faux Georgian replacements.

Now, one can no longer stay at Armatages bed and breakfast, nor indeed park your bike, unlocked propped up by its pedals on the kerb. The Coach and Horses (Tetley brewery, tied house) is no longer welcoming with its brown curtains, possibly once white but now stained with the tar from countless cigarettes. Possibly it never WAS welcoming, but you get the impression that they may have tried long ago. Pubs back then were largely the preserve of the working man, women rarely ventured alone inside. 

There is a garage lurking behind the red and white frontage just beyond the Georgian house with the bay windows. The clock hanging outside is JUST unreadable as to the name of the premises apart from declaring it is a garage.

Among the plethora of enamel signs outside the garage there are two that possibly indicate a newsagents, Players Please and Wills Gold Flake. And on the corner is another Tetley pub, perhaps the Coach and Horses really wasn't all that welcoming after all......

The road sweepers barrow is parked outside the coach and horses but no sign of him - breathalysers are well in the future here and a council bin lorry seems to be parked outside the other pub. It must have been thirsty work!

And presiding over it all is the Micklegate Bar, standing sentinel and strong, for it was built as defence, for the past 800 years or so. 

Inhabited since 1196 it (and the heads of traitors and rebels until 1794) has over the centuries gazed silently over the streets of York.

The ghost of Christmas past.......

Simpsons department store in Piccadily is decorated for Christmas 1965. Simpsons may not be a familiar name to many now - it closed in 1999 and the art deco building is now the flagship store of the Waterstones chain of bookshops. However it was the inspiration for a series on British Television that IS familiar to far more people than Simpsons ever was. 

In the early 1950s, scriptwriter Jeremy Lloyd was employed as an assistant at Simpsons. Twenty or so years later he used his experiences to co-write Are You Being Served?

London at Christmas half a century ago. This is Oxford Street in 1962. Not all night shots on slow film are successful but this one works. You can almost feel the chill in the air as the shops count down the days and their money into the tills. Some of the department stores that fulfilled Christmas wishes for thousands of small and not so small children are still with us but others have gone. 

Whiteley's, Robinson and Cleaver, Derry and Toms, and others have all passed into history. Only memories remain from the cold Christmas trips up to London all those years ago now...

....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.