From the Archives: Belmont Center in 1969

One upon a time, several lives ago, I lived in Belmont, Massachusetts, USA. Belmont is a quiet bedroom community in Middlesex County west of Cambridge, also bordered by Arlington, Waltham, and Watertown. Belmont's commercial nexus was the Center, where Leonard Street emerged from under the railroad tracks and ran past a fire station and a cluster of stores. 

I bought my first "serious" camera in late 1968, a Nikkormat FTn, at the famous discounter, Lechmere Sales. Here are some frames from my early attempts to use Tri-X film. I did not know what I was doing, but the built-in light meter was reasonably reliable in the hands of a total novice, and the Nikkor lenses were very good optically. I do not remember who developed the film, possibly a small camera shop in Arlington, where my dad knew the proprietor. 

Leonard Street

Leonard Street from railroad bridge 

Leonard Street passed through the Center and often had heavy traffic, even back in the 1960s. Note how the Volkswagen Beetle on the right is dwarfed by the Chevrolet behind it. 

1908 Belmont Station

Rail side of the Belmont Station

The Fitchburg Railroad (later the Boston and Maine Railroad) built the Craftsman-stye railroad station in 1908 after they raised the rail line to eliminate a grade crossing for the busy Concord Avenue. According to Wikipedia, a farmer quarried the stone used in the station from nearby Belmont Hill. 

Train service to Belmont ended in 1958, but the Boston and Maine ran commuter trains from Concord to North Station on these tracks using Budd Rail Diesel Cars (Buddliners). I recall when we occupied the new Belmont High School at its new Clay Pit Pond site in 1970, we occasionally mooned the commuter train as long as the teacher was not present. The MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) resumed service to Belmont in 1974 during the first energy crisis. 

When I moved to Belmont in 1966, the Lions Club owned the station, and the platforms were fenced off. If you look at Google Maps, the porch in the picture above has been filled in with ugly cinder block. 

Fire station hose tower

This is the Belmont Center fire station tower, where the firemen dried canvas hoses. The fire station is now a restaurant. The new fire station is a beautiful brick complex at the corner of Alexander Avenue and Leonard Street. This was formerly a parking lot for Filenes clothing store (sto-wah). The boring moderne building that was once Filenes is gone, replaced with a CVS and craft beer cellar. During one of my life interludes, I sold men's clothing at Filenes in 1979-1980 while job hunting. It was rather dull but paid a bit ($2.90 and then $3.10/ hour??). I had to wear a suit or jacket every day. But the suits came from a tailor in Athens, not Filenes.

Construction of Belmont Savings Bank

Demolition of Tudor-style commercial building (Kodak Instamatic 500 photograph)

Demolition detail of the Tudor building

Belmont Savings Bank demolished an elegant 1920s Tudor style building to build a pseudo-colonial style bank and parking lot. Back in that era, banks invited new depositors to open savings accounts, no matter how little they could deposit. The idea was to encourage a habit of saving and demonstrate the benefits of interest. The bank employee typed your deposit and the accumulated interest in a passbook using a machine that resembled a big typewriter. I assume that it was connected to a mainframe computer somewhere, but I do not know what technology they used. Today, banks rarely accept customers with minimal funds, thereby driving the poor to pay day loan shops and other unsavory or illegal financial services. 

Clay Pit Pond from Concord Avenue

Clay Pit Pond was the site of a blue clay that was mined for brick production between 1888 and 1926. When I lived in Belmont in the 1960s, the pond was polluted and may only be marginally better now. The city needed a site for a new high school and chose the land between the pond and the Boston and Maine railroad tracks. The photograph above shows some initial dirt work in the distance. 

The town selected this site to replace an older high school on Orchard Street. In 1968, a disgruntled student torched the building. After the fire, we still used part of the old building. A temporary wall closed off the burned section. 

The 1971 school was quite luxurious in a mid-century manner, with earth tones as the color scheme. I even lifeguarded at the pool. Today, a spectacular new school occupies the site, a gorgeous brick complex that resembles a corporate headquarters (demonstrating an advantage of living in a rich town with a strong education ethic).

The author measuring cedar shingles. The house and shingles are still extant.
The black underlayment is tar paper.

The famous February 1969 snow storm

This ends our short time warp trip to Belmont. Thank you for riding along.

Most of these photographs are Kodak Tri-X film. I scanned the negatives on a Nikon Coolscan 5000 scanner operated with NikonScan 4.03 software. I cleaned splotches and scratches with Photoshop CS6 software.

Athens in 1964 with an Instamatic 500 Camera

2024 New Year Note

Dear Readers, welcome to 2024. Thank you all for your support. In the upcoming year, look for a mixture of new material and more treasures (garbage?) from my archives. I also want to scan more of my father's negatives. My New Year's resolution is to sort through much of this old material and purge. 

Resolution 2: Don't buy more cameras. But a friend said he would send me his Mamiya RB67.....  (And I keep hearing a Leica IIIG and/or Leica M6TTL calling me.)

Resolution 3: Use some of the film in my freezer before buying any more new film. The 120 Panatomic-X is 35 years old. It responds perfectly so far, but its life is finite. 

The Kodak Instamatic 500

Kodak Instamatic 500 camera (photo source unknown)

My dad always took pictures. So when I was in elementary school, I wanted a camera, too. My childhood friend had an Instamatic 100 and, later, the 104 (the 4 meant it could accept flashcubes). 

In the early 1960s, Instamatics and the associated type 126 film cartridge were Eastman Kodak's marketing marvel, an astonishing sales success worldwide. Kodak introduced the one-piece film cartridge in 1963. The cameras were easy to use. Many casual photographers had endless trouble loading 35mm film into a camera, but the one-piece 126 cassette solved that complexity. All a user needed to do was place the plastic film cassette into the camera and close the back. Most Instamatics were simple cameras with a fixed aperture, but some had early-vintage auto exposure. Some even has a hand-wind spring motor to advance the film. 

Kodak sold 126 film until the early 2000s. Their last Instamatic camera was the X-15F in 1988. Mike Eckman has written a detailed summary of the film and its history. He also summarized ways to load  35mm film into recycled or brand new 126 cartridges. 

I did not know anything about cameras, so an Instamatic seemed like the logical path. I saved my allowance and, with help from the parents, requested a Kodak Instamatic 500 camera. A relative bought one in Germany and brought it home to Greece.

From The Bulletin, August 14, 1965

Unlike most of the simple box versions, the 500 let you focus manually and had a built-in Gossen selenium light meter. The 45mm ƒ/2.8 Xenar lens was a modern coated 4-element Tessar type. Mike Eckman wrote a detailed review of the Instamatic 500 and its history, so I will not try to repeat details here. On Instamatic standards, the 500 was capable of decent negatives or slides.

I did not know what I was doing, but the instruction manual said look at the distance scale and turn the aperture scale until the light meter needle pointer was in the middle of the bar in the viewfinder. Simple even for a youngster. Here are some 1964 examples from Greece. The film was probably Verichrome Pan (which I used and liked in 2021 in 120 format). 

Athens view west from Lycabettus Hill

In the 1960s, Athens was growing furiously. Elegant turn of the century townhouses were being torn down and replaced with rectangle concrete apartment buildings of no architectural merit. Now, some 60 years later, they look like tired nondescript apartment buildings with inadequate elevators, bathrooms, and electrical supply. My 1964 photograph shows the ugly constriction.

Athens view south from Lycabettus Hill

To the south, the scene is about the same. The stadium in the middle is the site of the 1896 Olympic Games revival. The suburb beyond is Nea Smyrni, an area settled by Greek refugees from Anatolia after the disasterous 1923 war and the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey (i.e., forced ethnic cleansing).  

Athens view east

This is the view towards Mount Hymmetus. Today, the urban sprawl extends a lot further up the slopes.  The American Embassy is the modern white building with columns in the center just beyond the green slope. Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius designed the chancery building, which was completed in 1961. I recall when you could drive right up to the building and enter the basement garage. Now, it is surrounded by tall walls and the sidewalks have truck bomb concrete barriers. The concrete ramp in the foreground is part of the ramp for a funicular. 

S.S. Hanseatic in Piraeus

A trip to see ships in Piraeus was always a treat. This was the S.S. Hanseatic of the Hamburg-Atlantic Line. Built in 1930, this was formerly the Empress of Scotland steamship. The Hamburg-Atlantic Line bought it and extensively rebuilt it, replacing her three funnels with two modern style funnels. Note the open lifeboats, a deadly way to save passengers in case of an evacuation on the open Atlantic ocean. In 1964, passengers still crossed The Atlantic via ocean liner, but the Boeing 707 airliner was in the process of crushing the traditional cross-ocean passenger ship business. 

Unknown sports car near Mount Pendeli

Update: a reader from Germany wrote that this sports car is an Auto Union 1000 Sp roadster (3 cylinders, two-stroke, front wheel drive).

Picnic somewhere near Mount Pendeli

Family friends invited me to a picnic. The stove with all the smoke was a clever Israeli folding camp stove that burned crushed newspaper. I do not know if it could handle the heat of wood or charcoal. Sitting on the rocky soil on newspaper does not look too comfortable. 

My mom and two cousins somewhere near the sea

A typical Sunday outing was to go to a taverna by the sea and eat. The adults hung about and talked, while the children were bored and ran around. Note the poofy hair in classic 1964 style.

Sitting around at a taverna

Yes indeed, here are the adults sitting around at the taverna. The kid looks bored. Don't forget the high-heeled shoes for the Sunday casual outing.

This ends out short look back at 1964 through a Kodak Instamatic 500 camera. As you can see, for internet display, the quality is quite acceptable. I could not find any companies that sell new 126 film, but some adapter kits exist to reload perforated 135 film into 126 cartridges. The Film Photography Project may be trying to reintroduce 126, but I have not kept up with their progress. 

I used my 500 for about 5 years and then progressed to a Nikkormat FTn camera in December of 1968. This was a much more sophisticated camera and used the dreaded "complicated" 135 cartridges. The Instamatic stayed in a drawer until a friend borrowed it to use while rock climbing. It disappeared at some stage, but I did not plan to use it again. If you have an Instamatic at home, buy a reloaded 126 cassette and test it - have some 1960s fun.