When Photographs Go to a New Home

My office at home holds boxes and boxes of photographic negatives, prints, slides, and Kodak Carousel trays. I needed to seriously downsize (i.e., discard junk). But I hated to throw this body of work in the trash. Did anyone want it?

Coastal and Beach Slides

Examples of pages containing slides

During the years I worked at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, I took thousands of photographs (mostly Kodachrome slides) of beaches, coastal features, harbors, and bluffs. They included the Great Lakes, Long Island, Florida, Alabama, California, Calabria, Chiapas, Greece, and more. I stored them in archival pages in black 3-ring binders. On each slide, I wrote a date and location. When I retired, the binders came home in cardboard boxes. But I never looked at them. Someone surely could use them. 

After some emails, the American Shore & Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA), the publisher of Shore & Beach, said they would like the collection. I promised that I had only saved technically good slides and they would not be receiving faded generic beaches with no location or date information. I had published some articles in Shore & Beach before, so we had a personal connection. ASBPA was in the process of scanning slides from Mr. Orville Magoon, a famous coastal engineer who practiced in Hawaii and California for decades. His pictures are on a very clever ArcGIS display of the California coast.

Binders organized by location

Boxed and ready to go, March 2023

I looked at each and every page and removed non-pertinent slides. I also added extra annotation to some of the labels. My steel bulk slide boxes also contained some coastal photos, especially extra photographs from Greece. I placed them into archival pages and added them to the binders. Finally, I made new labels for the binders, packed them in new cardboard boxes (U-Haul Small) and sent them to ASBPA. 

 

Examples USA

Here are a few samples of coastal photographs.

On the breakwater at Los Angeles Long Beach Harbor

A coworker and I went to the Los Angeles Long Beach harbor to change data tapes and batteries in the SeaData wave gauges. The tower at the end of one arm of the breakwater held one of our radio antennas. We stayed in a cheesy motel on shore, but then I discovered we could have slept on the Queen Mary within the per diem rate. I recall my coworker knew a lady at the motel.

Cape Hatteras view north over Diamond Shoals, February 1993

A coworker and I rented a plane from Naval Base Norfolk and flew the shore from Cape Henry south to Cape Hatteras. The light was hazy. The stormy seas outlined the double sand bars that extended almost this entire stretch of the Outer Banks. The rough water in the lower part of the picture is the infamous Diamond Shoals. These shoals were treacherous for sailing vessels and were called the "Graveyard of the Atlantic". In 1993, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was still in its original vulnerable location next to the ocean. You can see it in the photograph above (click to enlarge to 2400 pixels wide).

Cape Hatteras Light House at its original location. 

View north from the Hatteras light house. The town of Buxton is to the left.

The National Park Service generously opened the tower for the coastal processes class that we taught at the Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility (FRF). This was a beautiful day with a much gentler sea that the one during the 1993 flight. You can see the single offshore sand bar.

Rocky (granitic) coast, South Harpswell, Maine

South Street Seaport, Manhattan, New York City

Boardwalk at Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York

Erie Harbor North Pier Light, Erie Harbor Entrance Channel, Presque Isle, Pennsylvania

Dredging and maintaining the entrance channel at Erie, Pennsylvania, was one of the earliest civil projects conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers. President Monroe signed the first Rivers and Harbors Act in 1824, which directed funds toward initial improvements of the harbor at Erie. 

Examples Europe

Guardia Piedmontese, Calabria, Italy, June 2000

The Provincial Government of Cosenza sponsored three of us from the lab to conduct a survey of beach structures and coastal erosion and advise what could be done to mitigate the erosion. Note the train on the embankment just behind the beach. One critical problem was that during winter storms, sea spray caused arcing between the overhead electrical wires and train service had to stop. This is the main rail line between Naples and Messina.

Storm-cut scarp on a gravel beach, Agios Ioannis, Pelion, Greece

Greece has a rugged and complicated coast. Years ago, a coworker and I proposed compiling a book, Coastlines of Greece, which would have been one of the Coastlines of the World series by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Sadly, it never happened.  

 

Agios Dionysios Monastery, Moni Athos, Greece (founded in the 14th century)

Agios Panteleimonas Monastery, Moni Athos, Greece (founded in 1169; rebuilt after a major fire in 1968)

Moni Athos, or the Holy Mountain, is a peninsula southeast of Thessaloniki, Greece. It has been a semi-independent and self-governing community of monks for over a thousand years. The scenery is utterly spectacular because the mountains have never been forested. The coastal scenery does not get much better than this. 

The monasteries, some of which date back 700 years, are self-contained communities. They now constitute a Unesco World Heritage Site. The cultural aspects are extraordinary. For example, the Grand Monastery of the Lavron has frescos in the dining hall attributed to the painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco. 

Saint Panteleimonas is the Russian monastery and houses exclusively Russian monks, sent by the Russian Orthodox Church. The liturgies are spoken in Russian. President Vladimir Putin visited the monastery on September 9, 2005.

An unusual note: Most of Athos still uses the Julian calendar. After all, we are the ones who switched to that new-fangled calendar. But I suspect the monk's mobile phones show the new calendar, unless they have a conversion app.

Moni Athos is a popular trekking area, but for men only. Access is strictly controlled. You must get a permit to visit the peninsula.

Family Photos

Oh, oh, where did these hundreds of family photographs come from? I love the children but can't store the prints, negatives, and slides forever. They have gone to the appropriate parents. Here are a couple of examples.

A quiet afternoon with a book, Nerantza, Greece

Discussing beach processes on a gravel beach, Nerantza, Greece

This has been a lot of work, but I hope my old photos have gone somewhere to have another life. Will the recipients eventually discard them? Maybe, but I tried.

20-Year Memorial: Destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City

Background

Dear Readers, 20 years ago, the unthinkable happened. On September 11, 2001, foreign terrorists commandeered commercial jet airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center Buildings in New York City. The first plane went into the North Tower at 08:46 am. The second plane flew into the South Tower at 09:03 am. Within an hour and 42 minutes, raging fires caused both towers to collapse into a gigantic pile of twisted steel, smoldering debris, concrete, and rubble. Several other buildings in the complex also collapsed. In total, 2,977 victims died and over 25,000 sustained injuries. At least 8,000 first responders have died since then from toxic dust at the site.

The War on Terror

America changed forever. We engaged in a "War on Terror," which had profound consequences on the countries involved, our adversaries, our allies, and us. In some ways, we prevailed. Jihadist organizations have not mounted a successful external terrorist act in the USA since 2001. 

But for 20 years, officials in the US Government lied to the American public about the success or lack of success in the wars. Deceit became entrenched, an unspoken conspiracy to hide the truth. We never learned the real goals of the war, the definitions of success, or the cost. The longer the war lasted, the more its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism moved to the foreground of American politics (Spencer Ackerman, 2021. Reign of terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Viking Press). Thom Hartmann observed, "Bush’s presidency had devastating consequences to America in terms of international credibility, faith in our government domestically, the waste of trillions of dollars in tax cuts, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of human lives in unnecessary wars."

Many of the divisions, hatreds, suspicions, intolerance, and viciousness that we see today in our domestic politics stem from those two decades of warfare. In a long article by The Washington Post by Carlos Lozada titled, "9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed," Lozada points out,

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror.

America was indeed knocked off balance. As William Galston wrote in American Purpose, the fact that the USA is now "weaker, more divided, and less respected than it was two decades ago" was due to our own choices, not prescience by Osama bin Laden or other jihadist theorists. 

• Now we have renewed domestic right-wing terrorism here at home, although the state's security apparatus may be able to keep it under control (or will it?). 
• We lie to and deceive ourselves, and we have the Covid pandemic running rampant, with anti-vaxxers engaged in a death cult. 
• The 9/11 terrorists did not manage to fly a plane into the Capitol, but American traitors attacked it on January 6, 2021. 
• We invaded Iraq to dispose an autocrat, but several contenders here in USA are trying to impose autocracy on the USA. 
• We tried to teach Iraqis and Afghans to hold free and fair elections, but in many US states, Republicans have undermined voting access for minority citizens, gerrymandered voting districts, and corrupted the vote certification mechanisms.
• The forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan soured the world's opinion of democracies as agents of development and good. 
• The endless wars led to today's revisionism and inward-thinking.

Civil war has come to the USA, and we did it to ourselves. 

How will history books a century from now describe the war and its consequences? Who will write these history books? What mythology will those writers try to relate to their readers? 

Will schools honestly relate the story, or will they be muzzled as per the racist restrictions on "critical race theory" and the banning of books?

Some Photographs

World Trade Center, May 30, 1997 

This is the view of the WTC from the rooftop of 270 Broadway. I attended a meeting in that building on the top floor, and the view was too good to resist. This is a vertical panorama using an Olympus Zuiko 35mm ƒ/2.8 shift lens, with one frame shifted fully down and the second frame shifted up. I joined the frame with Photoshop's >Automate>Photomerge function. It is amazingly effective. Click to see the panorama at 3000 pixels

South Manhattan panorama from 270 Broadway, May 30, 1997

This is a horizontal panorama from the roof of 270 Broadway. My lens was not wide enough to include the top of the World Trade Center towers. Click to see 5000 pixels wide.

West panorama from 138 Lafayette Street, New York, Dec. 9, 1994

I took this panorama from the rooftop of the old Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette Street. Back in the mid-1990s, this was one of the few hotels in lower Manhattan. Now there are dozens of trendy hotels. The Holiday Inn was a bit grungy, but it was convenient to the Federal Center, where I had business. The smog is over New Jersey.

New York view south from roof of 138 Lafayette Street (Leica IIIC, 5cm ƒ/3.5 Elmar lens, Kodak Tri-X film)

This is another view south from the roof of the Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette Street. The tall building in left center is the Jacob Javits Federal Center. Click to see the photograph expanded.

Manhattan view north from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, April 29, 2001. Panorama consists of four frames from a Rolleiflex 3.5F camera with 75mm ƒ/3.5 Xenotar lens. The north tower is on the left of the scene. Click the photograph to see the full-size image.

Notes from the 10-Year Anniversary

I wrote about the World trade Centers on the 10-year anniversary. Please refer to these earlier articles:

The early years before 2011:

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2011/08/before-and-after-new-york-and-world.html

The later years and destruction:

 https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-york-and-world-trade-center-later.html

Thank you for reading. I hope I can write an article in 2031 at the 30-year anniversary. Will we still be the USA then?

From the Archives: New York City in 1938

Envelopes containing negatives and contact prints, pre-1940

Dear Readers, you may remember that I recently experimented with film packs, in my case GAF Versapan in 4×5" size. I had little experience with this format, but early in the 20th century, various size film packs were common. Before 1939 or 1940, my dad used film packs for all his photography. He bought his first roll film camera, a 35mm Perfex, in 1941 or 1942.

Envelope containing processed negatives from Block-Jones Co., Boston, Massachusetts

He stored his negatives in the envelopes that came back from the processing laboratory or drugstore and neatly filed them in an office box. I recently decided to recheck the negatives. Looking through the envelopes, I saw one labeled "New York Nov. 1938." These negatives were 2¼×3¼ inch size (close to the 6×9 that is common today). I think these were from a Certosport or Certotrop camera. I recall using it a few times around 1970, but cannot remember what lens was on it. My photographic results were quite unsatisfactory, and the unit suffered from light leaks. Back then, you could still buy the small pack film. These 1928 sheets are all nitrate film stock.

Queen Mary SS Normandie with Ellis Island in distance, New York Harbor (scan of a toned contact print) 

Queen Mary SS Normandie and unknown dredge, New York Harbor (scan of portion of 2¼×3¼" negative)

The Battery, Manhattan (scan of contact print)

The Battery, Manhattan, New York (scan of of 2¼×3¼" negative)

My dad and his friends took a boat trip, possibly one of the circle-Manhattan excursions that are still popular. He was lucky to see the Queen Mary Normandie heading out to sea. At that time, the Normandie was the peak of luxury, sophistication, and glamour for those with the funds to travel abroad. Only a year later, the start of the Second World War ended most Europe-bound tourism.

View towards Central Park from Rockefeller Center

View towards East River (?) from Rockefeller Center

View SW towards Empire State Building from Rockefeller center

This group of night photographs may be from The Top of the Rock at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. According to Wikipedia, 

30 Rockefeller Plaza is an American Art Deco skyscraper that forms the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Completed in 1933, it was designed by Raymond Hood, Rockefeller Center's lead architect. 30 Rockefeller Center was formerly called the RCA Building from its opening to 1988, and later the GE Building from 1988 to 2015. It was renamed the Comcast Building in 2015, following the transfer of ownership to new corporate owner Comcast, though its name is often shortened to 30 Rock. 

In 1938, this was a glamorous example of American architectural and engineering excellence.

Prometheus Statue (1934)

This is the famous Prometheus statue, by sculpture Paul Manship, located in the lower plaza at Rockefeller Center.  "Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends."

This ends our short 1938 tour. I will slowly look for more New York negatives as I go through the box.

Appendix

The Model A shown in the catalog from Burleigh Brooks may be my dad's  Certo camera, but I just cannot remember.

Update: A reader alerted me that the ocean liner in the photographs above was the Normandie. He was right. I compared there profiles of the Queen Mary and the Normandie, and the vessel in the photographs is the latter. 

On the Erie Canal trail: Lockport and Medina, New York

Lockport

Room with a view, houses overlooking the locks, Lockport, New York (Fuji X-E1 digital file)

Lockport is the county seat of Niagara County in northern New York. It is known for the fascinating locks which lift (or lower) boats and barges on the Erie Canal. According to Wikipedia,

The canal reached Lockport in 1824, but the Flight of Five Locks were not completed until 1825. By 1829, Lockport was an established village. The community was centered on the locks, and consisted mainly of immigrant Scottish and Irish canal workers brought in as labor. The workers remained in Lockport after the completion of the locks, giving the city a heavy Celtic influence still discernible today, especially in the Lowertown and North Lockport neighborhoods.

The city of Lockport was incorporated in 1865.

The Erie Canal was supplanted by the larger New York State Barge Canal in 1918, and the famous south "flight of five" locks was replaced by two much larger locks E34 and E35. The north "flight of five" lock chambers still remains as a spill way.

Lock 35, Lockport, NY, with full capacity

View from gate at Lock 35 looking down to Lock 34

The photograph above is complicated. In the foreground is one of the gates that keeps the water in the pool at Lock 35. Looking down, you see the lower lock then beyond, the Erie Canal.

1839 engraving of Lockport by William Henry Bartlett (1809 – 1854), from Wikipedia 

Erie Canal view upriver towards Locks 34 and 35 (left) and former locks (right)

The bike trail took us steeply downhill past the locks.

One of Lockport's most infamous former residents was Timothy McVeigh, the convicted terrorist responsible for Oklahoma City Bombing.

Medina

Example of Medina Sandstone used in architecture

Main Street, Medina, NY

The Village of Medina is a charming little place where we stayed at the end of our 1st day of biking the Erie Canal tour. The previous night in Buffalo was rather interrupted and unrestful, so Medina looked like it would be a peaceful stopover. The bike group set up tents at the Clifford H. Wise Middle School, which had very nice grounds.

The buildings along the Main Street Historic District consisted of brick or Medina Sandstone commercial structures in excellent repair. Look at the craftsmanship in the arches over the windows.

The side streets, such as Gwinn St. in the photographs above, were lined with early 20th century wood frame houses and cottages. This is small-town Americana at its best. Will our McMansion ghettos age as well as these neighborhoods after a hundred years?

The Medina Railroad Museum is on Gwinn Street. We arrived in town too late to enter the depot, but I read that it contains one of the largest model railroad layouts in the country. That would have been fun.

Dear Readers, this ends my short set of memories of my 2018 Cycle the Erie Canal tour. It was a lot of fun, the other cyclists were very nice, and I lost weight. Maybe try again in 2021? Will we have figured out the virus by then? We can only hope....

On the Erie Canal Trail: Canajoharie, New York

Canajoharie is a handsome little town south of the Mohawk River in Montgomery County, New York.  It was an important trading area for the Mohawk Peoples before the Revolutionary War. Because the Mohawk and Iroquois allied with the British, the natives were forced to leave after the war, and the State of New York sold land to speculators. According to Wikipedia, the town of Canajoharie suffered major fire three times. As a result, the town passed an ordnance prohibiting wood construction for homes. As a result, many of the handsome older homes in town are brick or locally-quarried stone.

This was Day 6 of the Erie Canal Bicycle Tour, and it had been a long 62 miles from Rome. And the last part of the day included a hill! But Canajoharie was really interesting, and the architecture was classic small-town Americana and photogenic. As usual, the residents were cheerful and welcoming.

Junction of Church, Mohawk, and Montgomery Streets

Elegant stone building, Church and East Main Streets

Mohawk and Church Streets

Brick boarding house(?) or apartments at the junction of Mill and Rock Streets

Church Street historic buildings

I was pleased that most of the handsome 1800s buildings were clean and appeared to be occupied or in use commercially. Nice job.

Handsome cast-iron store front, 47 Church Street, Canajoharie

Millions of storefronts throughout the United States used cast iron as both structural and ornamental elements in their construction in the late-1800s. As documented by the National Park Service,

In the second half of the 19th century, the United States was in an era of tremendous economic and territorial growth. The use of iron in commercial and public buildings spread rapidly, and hundreds of iron-fronted buildings were erected in cities across the country from 1849 to beyond the turn of the century. Outstanding examples of iron-fronts exist in Baltimore, Galveston, Louisville, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Richmond, Rochester (N.Y.), and especially New York City where the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District alone has 139 iron-fronted buildings. Regrettably, a large proportion of iron-fronts nationwide have been demolished in downtown redevelopment projects, especially since World War II.

Ah, yes, "redevelopment," which in USA often means let the developers pillage and raze older structures so that they and corrupt politicians can make a quick profit, regardless of the damage to social and architectural structures in the community. Quick, tell me how much mall architecture will be valued in the 2100s, let alone in decade. Quick, how many strip malls are worth anything architecturally?

Fortunately there is growing appreciation for cast iron construction and its decorative elements. The National Park Service Technical Brief 11 covers some of the issues in rehabilitation.

A final historical note: this little town played a role in the Revolutionary War. You are always surrounded by history in New York, which added so much to the Erie Canal Tour.

These photographs are from a Moto G5 mobile camera. I used Photoshop Elements 11 to correct converging vertical lines for some of the frames.