Category Archives: History

January 28, 2013

Winter Wear in the 1640s

By daseger

Like much of the country, it’s been really cold here in Massachusetts over the past week: starkly beautiful in that mid-winter way, but freezing cold. Every day I forsake one of my fashionable wool coats for a shapeless parka, which depresses me, as I’m a bit of a coat hound (I think this is in my blood: my Italian great-grandfather came over at age 13 and became a designer of what everyone tells me were the most beautiful ladies’ coats). There is plenty of current advice about how to look good while bundled up but I also like to look at the fashion plates of one of my favorite artists, the Bohemian etcher Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) for comparison, if not inspiration. Hollar’s costumed women were probably idealistically dressed, but they are nonetheless charming.

Wenceslaus Hollar, “Winter” Dress, 1643-44. Courtesy of the British Museum.

Wenceslaus Hollar was a professional etcher and printmaker with nearly 3,000 prints to his credit. He escaped war-torn central Europe and came to England in 1636 under the patronage of the “Collector” Earl of Arundel, but also pursued his own projects, including series of prints such as this which he sold individually and in sets. The inscription below this fashionable London lady reads: “The cold, not cruelty makes her wear/In Winter, furs and Wild beasts hair/For a smoother skin at night,/Embrace her with more delight.” The first couplet strikes me as an uncharacteristically modern sentiment to be expressed in the fur-crazy seventeenth century, and the second as rather racy! I must say that this seventeenth-century lady does not look that dissimilar from some of the New Yorkers captured by Bill Cunningham in this week’s “Antifreeze/On the Street” Times column.

Besides his seasonal series, Hollar produced two other sets of prints of ladies’ contemporary costumes, both available in their entirety at the University of Toronto’s extraordinary digital collection: Ornatus Muliebris Anglicanus, or The Several Habits of English Women (1640) and Theatrum Mulierum and Aula Veneris (1643). Below is another bundled-up English lady from the former, and Scottish, Spanish, Flemish and Bohemian ladies from the latter.

Muffs, muffs, and more muffs!

I am not a fur-wearer, but I can still appreciate Hollar’s amazing depictions of muffs, the must-have accessory of the seventeenth-century noblewoman (and men too). They were a relatively recent import to England from the Continent, first referenced as “snuffskyns” in Elizabeth’s time, and Hollar apparently admired them so much he often did away with the wearer and just etched the muff–with such precision that you can almost feel the fur.

It is interesting to see what a difference a century (or so) makes: in the later eighteenth century, British caricaturists would regularly mock muffs as an extravagant French accessory, the very symbol of sartorial excess. In Hollar’s time, however (certainly a more Puritan-ical era), they appear to objects above reproach!

Inigo Barlow, ‘Les Incommodités de Janvier’, etching published by Hannah Humphrey, London, 1786. Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

14 Comments | tags: Art, Fashion, print culture, Seventeenth Century, weather | posted in Design, History

January 26, 2013

Wonder on Display

By daseger

I’ve been wondering about wonder for much of my academic career, and particularly interested in its transformation from a spiritual concept to a secular one, from a manifestation of God’s will to an awe-inspiring curiosity or construction. I’ve already written about wondrous weather here, and of course witchcraft, most definitely a wonder of the early modern world, is something I can never abandon for long given my context. But perhaps the most direct way to approach wonder is through the wunderkammer, the “rooms of wonder” or “cabinets of curiosities” assembled in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by gentlemen of learning and leisure. These private collections are the forerunners of public museums, and the focus of a current exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York City entitled “Rooms of Wonder: from Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899″, which runs through the end of next week. This exhibition follows the Smithsonian’s “The Great American Hall of Wonders” exhibit from last year pretty closely, so it appears that wonder is having a moment.

From cabinet of curiosity to museum: iconic images from two exhibitions. From 1599, an engraving of the wunderkammer of Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato in Dell‘Historia Naturale (Naples 1599), and from 1822, Charles Willson Peale’s The Artist in his Museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison Jr. Collection), 1878.

As you can see, wonder was first connected to the natural world and only later became associated with human creations, artistic and otherwise. Imperato has an alligator on the ceiling of his room, and in his self-portrait, Peale is revealing his own natural history collection, which became America’s first public museum. Before the eighteenth century, cabinets of curiosity were encyclopedic in nature, with the goals of “capturing” nature and creating a worldly microcosm in one or more rooms. Specialization was not a goal, and so they appear to us rather random, a somewhat controlled chaos, or maybe it’s just the prominent and interesting displays of mummified alligators (or crocodiles?), which seem to be the must-have object in any cabinet of curiosity. In any case, many of the early modern images of wunderkammer show people really marveling at the wonders on display. People are part of the picture.

Engraved title page of Basilius Besler’s Continuatio rariorum et aspectu dignorum varii generis (Nuremberg 1622).

With the collections of the John Tradescents, father and son, we see a combination of natural and created wonders, or “rarities”, which became the basis of a family museum in greater London called “the Ark” which drew a steady stream of marveling visitors in the mid-seventeenth century. One such visitor, a German traveler named George Christoph Stirn, made this report in 1638:

“In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape’s head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk’s hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor’s MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones…….”

Now this is a collection that almost defies description, and one which would surely challenge any system of categorization or classification! The elder John Tradescent has risen to wealth and prominence as a gardener to the landed gentry, and so his early collecting interests were primarily botanical, but both his travels and that of his son gradually expanded their interests and their collection, which was cataloged in 1656 under the title Musaeum Tradescantianum and later (1683) became the basis of Britain’s first public museum, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several forces combined to push serious collecting more toward the public sphere: the development of taxonomic systems, the Enlightenment drive to educate and elucidate, urbanization, and the burgeoning “commercialization of leisure”. Certainly some quirky private collections continued to be assembled, but the trend was definitely towards the institutional. Here in America, natural history museums popped up all along the east coast, from the Charleston Museum to Peale’s Museum to the Peabody Academy of Science established here in Salem in 1869: the forerunner of the Peabody Museum and today’s Peabody Essex Museum.

Illustration of the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Sept. 4, 1869 / James M. Lindgren. “That Every Mariner May Possess the History of the World”: A Cabinet for the East India Marine Society of Salem. The New England Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Jun., 1995); Detroit Publishing Co. photography, 1910, Library of Congress.

I do wonder if the institutionalization of wonder (and pretty much everything else about our modern world) has lessened our capacity to marvel, or maybe it has increased it. I’m just not sure. Fortunately, however, the more whimsical wonder of early modern cabinets of curiosities has survived over the last century in the work of artists like Joseph Cornell and Massachusetts’ own Rosamond Purcell, who quite literally recreated the collection of a seventeenth-century Danish medical professor Ole Worm for the Santa Monica Museum of Art and Harvard University’s Science Center. Indeed, an influential art gallery in Italy includes the instillation of wonder in its mission statement: Wunderkammern adopts the inspiring principle of those homonymous collections of scientific curiosities and extraordinary objects that used to be gathered together in Renaissance Europe by rulers and aristocrats, merchants and early practitioners of science. Like those historical cabinets of wonders, precursors to museums, WK explores how such “amazement” is manifested within today‘s artistic discourse.

An illustration of the Museum Wormianum of Ole Worm (Leiden, 1655), and Rosamond Purcell’s installation. Photo by Dennis W. Purcell.

Appendix: Bring wonder home with these three great books; they are bibliographic cabinets of curiosities!

Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities (which seems to have been mined intensively by interior designers over the past decade) (Taschen, 2001); Cabinets of Wonder by Christine Davenne (Abrams, 2012); Alfred Russell Wallace’s Natural Curiosities (Parkstone Press, 2011).

11 Comments | tags: Art, books, Exhibitions, Flora and Fauna, Interior design, Renaissance | posted in Culture, History, Salem

January 22, 2013

Teaching with Tentacles

By daseger

I’m back at school for the Spring semester with the typical four-course teaching load, including a modern world history course that I have not taught for some time. So it is time to refresh my arsenal of Powerpoint presentations and maps. An interesting map can quickly catch a college student’s attention as easily as it does a blog reader, and after perusing my various digital collections a bit, I realized that I might be able to teach world history almost exclusively through octopus maps! Or at least nineteenth- and twentieth-century history: the creature does not seem to have been used as a metaphorical device before 1870. I searched in vain for a map or caricature depicting Napoleon as an octopus but could not find one, which is incredulous: few rulers deserve an octopus map to represent their regimes more than the little Corsican! There’s nothing too terribly original about this post: octopus maps have captured the attention of several bloggers before me (also see here), but I can’t resist putting my own take out there.

1870 marks a turning point in European and world history with the unification of Germany (as well as Italy): Europe was now “filled out” and further territorial ambitions could only be satisfied by global imperialism and/or war. The maps from this time forward reflect this jingoism and fear, but anthropomorphic satire dulls the edge. One of the first major octopus maps, Fred Rose’s “Serio-Comic War Map For The Year 1877” shows Russia as the octopus-aggressor rather than Germany, even though the Crimean War had revealed the severe weaknesses of the Russian Empire (this is reflected on the map below by wound on one of the octopus’ tentacles–that which is located in the proximity of the Crimea). From the British perspective that this map represents, it’s a bit early to portray Germany as the aggressor, and so Russia becomes either the ferocious bear or the reaching octopus.

F.W. Rose, “A Serio-Comic Map of the Year 1877”, London: G.W. Bacon & Co., British Library; (an earlier Dutch map at the University of Amsterdam upon which this map is based is identical except for the wounded tentacle).

A later Rose map, even more obviously depicting the British perspective, is “John Bull and his Friends” from 1900 in which John Bull (Great Britain) faces a continent full of hostile, disinterested, or preoccupied “friends” and an even more threatening octopus-Russia, reaching out in all directions. On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), a Japanese take on the Serio-Comic map shifts the focus decidedly eastward and portrays Russia as the “black octopus”. And for a completely contrary view, a Japanese print self-identifies with the octopus after the war commenced with the Battle of Port Arthur.

F.W. Rose, “John Bull and his Friends: a Serio-Comic Map of Europe”, London: G.W. Bacon & Co., 1900; K. Ohara, “A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia”, 1904; “Tako no asirai”, The Japanese Octopus of Port Arthur, 1904, Library of Congress.

In addition to aggression and domination, whether threatened or realized, the octopus is just the perfect symbol, visual metaphor, avatar of imperialism, and the period between 1870 and 1914 was the golden age of the “new” imperialism, in which Europeans divided up the world, eager to get their piece before Britain gobbled it all up. Consequently there are probably more images portraying John Bull as the octopus rather than John Bull confronting the octopus, like this famous American cartoon, which was published in Punch in 1882.

Anonymous American cartoon, “The Devilfish in Egyptian Waters”, 1882: John Bull makes a grab for Egypt, initiating the “Scramble for Africa”.

The octopus was not just used externally to criticize an opposing or competitive nation’s policies but also internally on a partisan basis, particularly in America and Britain. This particular sea creature can symbolize greed just as well as territorial expansion, and this was a gilded age as well as an age of imperialism. Consequently we see octopuses portraying greedy capitalistic monopolists and associated special interests, on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, Puck magazine illustrator Udo Keppler used the octopus to characterize Standard Oil in 1904 and President Wilson’s fight for “business freedom” a decade later, while in Britain its use was more literally land-based: as a Socialist critique of urban “landlordism” around London just prior to World War I, and to depict urban sprawl from a traditional planning perspective.

Udo Keppler octopus illustrations for Puck magazine, 1904 & 1914, Library of Congress; W. B. Northrup’s “Landlordism” postcard and book cover of Clough Williams-Ellis’s England and the Octopus (1928), British Library.

As the octopus was a well-recognized symbol of aggression by the time that World War I broke out, it was only natural that it would appear on several anti-Germany maps. The English and French maps below, from 1915 and 1917 respectively, both single out Prussian aggression, an indication that the militaristic reputation of the new Germany’s northernmost region was still relevant, and the second one (“war is the national industry of Prussia”) is explicitly racist, with its German “hun” looming very large indeed.

The “Prussian Octopus” (1915; University of Toronto) and “La Guerre est l’industrie Nationale de la Prusse” (1917; Library of Congress).

There’s an easy transition to the propaganda maps of World War II,when both sides used octopuses to put forward their points of view. Hitler is obviously an easy octopus, as the title and cover of a prescient book published by a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly in 1938–just before the Germans moved into Czechoslovakia–boldly asserted. Henry C. Wolfe was trying to wake up the west and he used the octopus to do it.

Once the war began, the very clever German propaganda machine issued an anti-British poster from the perspective of France, which they had occupied: Winston Churchill as octopus reaches out toward French colonial possessions in Africa and the Middle East, echoing the imperial competition of the later nineteenth century. The bleeding tentacles–the amputations– indicate that Germany is preventing an English takeover of the French empire, even as it occupies France itself!

“Have Faith”: German anti-British propaganda poster, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

As you can imagine, when the real war is over and the Cold War commences, the octopus continues to flourish as a symbol of rampant (anti-American) capitalism and rampant (anti-Soviet) communism, as well as rampant consumerism, evangelical Christianity and Islam, and a host of other perceived threats. However, cephapodal cartography is not subtle, and I think it lost much of its resonance in the later twentieth-century world, after the very literal 1950s.

British Economic League anti-Communist pamphlet, Archives of the Trades Union Congress and Warwick University Cold War Archive.

Now octopuses are rather whimsical, rather than threatening. I superimposed one on a cropped frame of a beautiful 1771 map of Salem and its vicinity and found it charming rather than ominous: what would they have been afraid of then? Definitely redcoats and tax collectors. What are we afraid of now?

65 Comments | tags: books, ephemera, maps, Teaching | posted in History, Salem

January 20, 2013

On Gossamer Gowns

By daseger

As part of my own little Inauguration celebration, I’ve been looking at the Smithsonian’s collection of Inaugural ballgowns of our past and present First Ladies and one thing is clear: the lighter in color and more crystalline the fabric, the more timeless the dress. Nellie Taft, one of my very favorite First Ladies (think cherry trees, subtle support for the Suffragettes and attendance at the opposition Democratic National Convention to quell criticism of her husband) and the first to walk in the Inaugural Day parade alongside her husband and donate her ballgown to the Smithsonian, started the trend with her embellished white silk dress, and those First Ladies who chose more vibrant frocks pale by example. Certainly Mrs. Obama followed Mrs. Taft’s example with her 2009 Jason Wu gown–a century later.

Mrs. Taft in her 1909 Inaugural ballgown (Library of Congress), and the gown in the Smithsonian First Ladies Exhibition, along with the Jason Wu gown worn by Mrs. Obama in 2009. Though Mrs. Taft’s dress has discolored with time, both dresses are made of white silk chiffon.

I don’t have any historical evidence, but it seems to me that two more fashionable First Ladies were mindful of Mrs. Taft’s example when they chose their Inaugural ballgowns: Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Reagan, twenty years apart. Both ladies chose gowns that were creamy and embellished, regal and ethereal.

The Bergdorf Goodman gown of Mrs. Kennedy (1961) and the James Galanos gown of Mrs. Reagan (1981), Smithsonian Institution First Ladies Exhibition.

Two First Ladies who abandoned the Taft tradition for their first Inaugural balls and then reverted to form for their second galas were Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Bush. The fashion parallels seem striking with these two ladies! Both picked lesser-known designers from their home states and bright partisan colors for their first Inaugural gowns–Democratic blue for Mrs. Clinton and Republican red for Mrs. Bush–and then chose more neutral gossamer gowns in gold and silver by Oscar de la Renta for their second balls, in 1997 and 2005, respectively, making them look above-the-fray, transcendent.

Mrs. Eisenhower’s 1953 Inaugural gown was not really neutral, but rather (and of course) pink and with a distinct 1950s silhouette. Still, I think its 2000 rhinestones render it rather regal–and it is pale pink. I think it might be my favorite, even though it is not as timeless as the columns that came before and after.

Mrs. Eisenhower’s Nettie Rosenstein Inaugural ballgown, 1953, Smithsonian Institution First Ladies Exhibition.

While looking for Mrs. Johnson’s Inaugural gown, I had a happy surprise. Lady Bird wore a buttery yellow, very 1960s satin gown to the 1965 Inaugural ball, but four years earlier, just before President Kennedy’s Inauguration, she and her daughters posed in their gowns: on the right, Lynda Bird Johnson is wearing my wedding dress: the same Harvey Berin dress that I bought from a Boston vintage dealer years ago. It’s really fun to see it on her.

Lady Bird Johnson with her daughters Luci Baines Johnson, left, and Lynda Bird Johnson, right (in my dress!), 1961. Getty Images.

One last Inaugural gown: this one worn by a mere guest rather than a First Lady. Actually, I don’t think the word mere is appropriate when referring to someone who wore this gown: the “Four Leaf Clover” gown designed by Charles James for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Jr. to wear to the 1953 Eisenhower Inaugural ball. Too conspicuous and architectural for a First Lady, perhaps, but WOW.

Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. Cornelius V. Whitney, 1953.

14 Comments | tags: Fashion, holidays, material culture, Presidents, Smithsonian | posted in Culture, Current Events, Design, History

January 18, 2013

Absinthe Accessories

By daseger

Since its (re-) legalization a few years ago, I have somehow acquired three bottles of absinthe. I found them while I was cleaning out the liquor cabinet the other day, all largely untapped. I think I tried a few sips, and a few more cocktails, and then put all three bottles on the top shelf and forgot about them. Even though it comes in my favorite color green, is made of one of my favorite herbs (wormwood–which grows vigorously in my garden every summer), and I find its long history fascinating, I cannot seem to acquire a taste for la Fée Verte. Maybe it’s too strong for me, maybe I just haven’t found the right cocktail recipe (please forward if you have one), and maybe I just don’t have the right stuff: my tea strainer is clearly no substitute for an absinthe spoon, and my sherry glass can’t compete with the Pontarlier glass of the proper absinthe set-up. And then there are special fountains, decanters, seltzer bottles, sugar tongs, and saucers: the Absinthe Ritual was quite a production.

A contemporary absinthe service and the absinthe ritual in 1910: photograph from the Virtual Absinthe Museum, a great site for all things absinthe.

I do like the slotted spoons: they were made in many different designs and seem to be quite collectible. I’m sure most of them have been serving as pie knives for the last century or so. With the lifting of the ban on absinthe and the diffusion of steampunk culture (which seems to give absinthe pride of place, right of there with gears and octopuses), new absinthe accessories are also being produced, including all manner of spoons. The possibilities are endless.

A selection of antique absinthe spoons from Absinthe O riginals; Green Fairy Wing Absinthe Spoon by Etsy seller DangerAwesomeLasers.

The other type of absinthia (it is a word) that seems to be very collectible are images. Obviously the café paintings produced by nearly every French Belle Epoque artist are out of reach, but there was also a lot of more ephemeral absinthe art produced in the period as well: posters, photographs, cards. I particularly like the posters produced around 1910, when a fierce debate was being waged over the Green Fairy. Advocates for and against the prohibition of absinthe put out very compelling images, like these posters below. In the first one, published by A.H. Gantner is Switzerland in 1910, a menacing man representing the coalition of religion and medicine (strange to have faith and science on one side!) is literally skewering the green fairy and Swiss freedom at the same time. That was the central pro-Absinthe argument at the time: temperance is anti-freedom, not just freedom to drink absinthe, but civil liberties in general. Five years after absinthe was banned in Switzerland, France followed suit, and an Audino poster from 1915 presented the Green Fairy as Joan of Arc, burning at the stake while her ghostly Swiss sister looked on. In the last image, an advertisement for a 1913 film titled Absinthe produced by the Gem Motion Picture Company in New York, an absinthe addict stares at the evil substance, mesmerized.

Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London.

Well I think I’ve gone off on a tangent: the suppression of absinthe is another subject altogether, really, as is its early history, before the nineteenth century, when it was perceived as medicinally beneficial rather than addictive and destructive (as well as pleasurable). I’m talking about stuff today. Though I haven’t acquired a taste for absinthe, I do like its smell (and color), especially as contained in my candle from Witch City Wicks.

4 Comments | tags: Antiques and Collectibles, ephemera, Etsy, Food and drink, Home, Shopping | posted in Culture, History

January 16, 2013

Salem Murder Mystery

By daseger

For some time I’ve been curious about the death of a patent-holding, pioneering Salem photographer named George K. Proctor in 1882: I’m not sure whether he died by his own hand, or that of his wife, so while his death might not have been murder, it remains a mystery to me (and I could not resist the dramatic title).

First a little about his life. Proctor operated what looks like a successful photography business here in Salem from the early 1860s until his death. Part of his success was no doubt due to his marketing techniques, and part due to the process for which he received a patent (no. 83,545) in 1868 for an artificially-lighted, oval-shaped photographic room which allowed photographs to be taken with a 15-second exposure, day or night. His studio on Essex Street produced tintypes and stereoviews upon commission and for sale, including this charming portrait of an anonymous woman, captured early in Proctor’s career (and at the very beginning of the Civil War).

G.K. Proctor, Anonymous Woman, 1861, Salem, Massachusetts. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The instant I saw this image I wanted to know more about this woman, and the man who captured her on film. Sadly, I haven’t been able to turn up anything on her, and just a bit more on Proctor. He was a prolific photographer (or photographist, as he is sometimes called) so many of his images survive, but most of the literary and documentary evidence of his life is primarily concerned with his death. Before I get into that, a few more of his images, which do seem to fall into two categories: the tintype portraits like that of the woman with the Mona Lisa smile above, and stereoviews of scenes that he captured while traveling around the region in his special photographic van and marketed in collections entitled “Views of Salem and Vicinity” and “American Views”. The Chestnut Street header at the top of my blog is a Proctor view, as are those below, all from the Dennis collection of the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Essex Street, Salem, unidentified students (and their teacher?) on the steps of their unidentified school, and the interior of a Peabody funeral car, 1870s stereoviews by G.K. Proctor, NYPL Digital Gallery.

With this last (strange) image providing some sort of segue, I’ll turn to the circumstances of his death in 1882. Mr. Proctor was found unconscious in the basement of his home (I’m not sure of the address: according to the Salem Registers, he and his family seem to have moved between Endicott, Essex and Bridge Streets every two years or so but in 1882 they appear to have been living on Dodge Street) by his wife Sarah on the morning of July 27, 1882. She summoned the authorities, who confirmed that he was dead. From that point on, I followed the story in the New York Times, which was much more forthcoming than the local papers. The original judgment of natural causes quickly turned to suspicions of suicide and/or murder. And Mrs. Proctor quickly became the prime suspect.

And what did the District Attorney decide to do? According to The New York Times, Sarah Proctor was arrested for the murder of her husband some two and a half years later. In a short article headlined Charged with her Husband published on February 2, 1885, the Times reported:

So I expected to find a trial, but instead all I have found is a brief note in the 1886 Annual Report of the Massachusetts Commissioners of Prisons indicating that the case of Mrs. Proctor, indicted on charges of murdering her husband, was discharged by the state Attorney General. No details, no explanations as to why, no news of a long–lost suicide note finally brought to light! That same year, there was another legal action involving Sarah Proctor: a suit brought against her by her daughter Lilla (Proctor v. Proctor, 141 Mass. 160) referencing money rather than murder. Lilla, who was a minor, had nevertheless removed herself from her mother’s house (now in Beverly), moved in with her aunt in nearby Malden, and become engaged. There was an accusation that Sarah “was not maintaining an establishment or family home”, and several references to the “difficulties” that existed between mother and daughter, but basically what Lilla wanted was her promised inheritance, or one-third of Proctor’s estate, which was still under the control of Sarah and her fellow trustees. The judge ruled in Lilla’s favor, and there is no further mention of either of them in the legal records. I am left wondering why, and how, the charges against Sarah Proctor were dismissed, and what, or who, caused George K. Proctor’s death.

Appendix: see another charming Proctor tintype portrait here.

4 Comments | tags: ephemera, media, Photography | posted in History, Salem

January 12, 2013

End of an Era

By daseger

The razing of St. Joseph’s Church in Salem began this week, with the steeple coming down on Thursday and some serious demolition ongoing yesterday. This was the parish church of the Point neighborhood of Salem, closed by the Archdiocese of Boston in 2004. Since that time, plans for its removal and/or redevelopment have divided the community. Preservationists, represented by Historic Salem, Inc., sought to save the mid-century “International Style” structure (it was built in 1949-50, finally replacing the more majestic church that was destroyed in the great fire of 1914) while others favored the affordable housing plan put forward by the Archdiocese’s development arm, the Planning Office for Urban Affairs. The two sides/goals could not be brought together, and of course affordable housing always trumps historic preservation, so the church is coming down.

St. Joseph’s before the fire of 1914, and the shiny new building of the 1950s.

While I did not care for the style of St. Joseph’s, I fear that something far worse will be erected in its place. This is a very vulnerable, and prominent, location in Salem, where the once-grand boulevard of Lafayette Street meets downtown, and it has been neglected for some time. And while the exterior left me cold, the cruciform-planned interior was apparently something to behold. I regret that I never saw it while in use: all I have to go on now are pictures, like the one held by one of the witnesses to yesterday’s demolition.

11 Comments | tags: Architecture, Historic Preservation, Local Events, urban planning | posted in Current Events, History, Salem

January 10, 2013

Vanished Vantage Points

By daseger

There’s no better way to see how a landscape, or a streetscape, changes over time than to compare images of the past and the present. I am always on the hunt for nineteenth-century photographs and drawings of Salem, before urban renewal, before the great fire of 1914, before the CAR, so I can see how these forces altered the city, for better or for worse (mostly for worse).

I’m going to ease into what is often a shocking contrast of past and present with two photographs of a section of Federal Street, taken about a century apart. This is the street looking east from the vantage point of the Peirce-Nichols House, one of Samuel McIntire’s most important commissions, looking toward North Street and the courthouses on the other side. The new (hugely out-of-scale) courthouse (or “judicial center”), which opened up for business just last year, is mostly out of the frame of the modern picture, or the contrast would indeed be shocking. What you do see, or what I see, is the brick former Baptist church, now law library, which was moved to its present location and situated on an angle so to accommodate the curve in the road and effect a transition from residential to institutional buildings on the street. This was an absolutely brilliant idea, whoever thought of it (I know that Historic Salem, Inc. advocated for it) as the courthouse project mandated the demolition of the smaller wooden buildings you see in that location in the earlier picture: without the in-scale angled brick building, the judicial center would have even less connection to the street.

Now for a comparative vantage point that is a little more jarring: Church Street in the 1890s and today. This was an old residential street in Salem, which was also the site of the original Salem Lyceum building, which you see here (the image is from Winfield S. Nevins’ Witchcraft in Salem Village, 1892 & 1916) as well as St. Peter’s Church, the source of its name. In between the church, the Lyceum, and the great old firehouse (fortunately still there) were rows of primarily eighteenth-century houses, now all gone. The old wooden Lyceum was built about 1831 and burned down at the turn of the century, but it was replaced by a very elegant brick structure that was long the site of the Lyceum Restaurant, now 43 Church. Despite the unfortunate designs of both the District court on the right and the office building past the Lyceum on the left, the upper (foreground) part of Church Street is aesthetically pleasing and commercially successful (the site of an organic grocery store, a wine shop, and a coffee shop in addition to 43 Church), primarily because its buildings line up with the sidewalk, just like those in the older photograph. But in the background of the modern photographs, you see the ravages of urban renewal: a large parking lot on the right, and a faux-Federal condominium building and brutally ugly parking garage/mall on the right.

From the vantage point of St. Peter’s Church, looking west towards the Lyceum: all those house removed to accommodate cars.

My last group of images shows a completely obliterated street: Norman Street, a short street that has been transformed beyond all recognition in the twentieth century. Not a shred of its built historical fabric remains, including this wonderful house, the Benjamin Cox house at 21 Norman Street (with the man standing in front of it). It is gone, along with its garden, and all of its neighbors, replaced by office buildings and a wide, wide road so that commuters might easily speed through Salem on their way to the university, or Marblehead. The historic photographs below, which date from about 1875-85, are from the Brown Family Collection of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and the modern photograph was taken this morning. It’s difficult to reconcile these two settings: I think that the Cox House was located somewhere in the vicinity of the white car (the one driving, as opposed to the one parked) in the 2013 photograph.

18 Comments | tags: Architecture, Historic Preservation, Photography, Samuel McIntire, urban planning | posted in Design, History, Houses

January 8, 2013

Salem Savior

By daseger

She was not the only hero(ine) in the story, but rather in good company: still Ada Louise Huxtable played a big role in the prevention of the complete annihilation of historic Salem by the forces of urban renewal in the 1960s. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning architectural critic for The New York Times and The Wall Street Post, often referred to as the “dean” of American architectural criticism, died yesterday at the age of 91. The dominant themes of the obituaries that I am reading this morning are Mrs. Huxtable’s influence over both architectural criticism and the architecture of New York, but she shaped the architecture of Salem as well. So here is my little parochial appreciation.

Ada Louise Huxtable in her New York apartment, 1988. Arnold Newman/Getty Images

Mrs. Huxtable. who summered in nearby Marblehead, heard of the urban renewal plans for Salem and was moved to write a rather passionate piece that the Times put on its front page on October 13, 1965: “Foes Fear Plans Will Mar Old New England Heritage; Urban Renewal Plan Threatens Historic Sites in Salem, Mass.” She reported on what was going on, but definitely put her own viewpoint in the article: By setting up “design controls” for the new construction, the city guarantees itself, at best, “instant Georgian” (apparently she detested Colonial Williamsburg!) to replace the genuine example. The spurious product is a much better economic deal than the real thing…As things stand now, it will take some potent modern witchcraft to save Salem’s historic past. A series of follow-up articles were published in the Times from 1967 to 1974, culminating, happily, with the latter year’s “How Salem Saved itself from Urban Renewal (September 29). During this period, local preservationists were galvanized to fight the demolition of 103 buildings in the city center in the name of “urban renewal”, and the plan shifted to the redevelopment and revitalization of Essex Street, Derby Square, and Front Street. Many buildings were lost, but not as many as would have been without the advocacy and inspiration of Mrs. Huxtable, I believe.

Many years later (1993), Mrs. Huxtable was interviewed by Robert Campbell, the architectural critic of the Boston Globe, and he asked her where in New England she thought she had had the most impact. She replied: I think I had more impact on Salem, because Salem had a hideous urban renewal plan. I remember going over it with the then-mayor and planner, and they were going to eliminate the beautiful Japanese garden next to the museum and they were planning roads that would take away whole blocks. So I went back to New York and sold it to the Times as a Page 1 piece … and that brought whoever was on the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in Washington to Salem. “What are you doing here?” That resulted in the change of planners and the total change in the plan.

Essex Street today: a road does NOT run through the Japanese garden of the Peabody Essex Museum, but unfortunately the Brutalist parking garage with its first-floor shops did replace earlier commercial buildings.

Front Street, revitalized not destroyed, a far more successful shopping district than the nearby Essex Street pedestrian mall, and the Ash Street house (built in 1811) of another preservation heroine, Bessie Munroe. She fought urban renewal in the 1960s while she was in her 80s! Unfortunately the house now looks over a parking lot, and a very ugly modern building built on the site of jail where the accused witches were held in 1692.

4 Comments | tags: Architecture, Historic Preservation, media, urban planning | posted in Current Events, Design, History, Houses

January 7, 2013

A Two-Comet Year

By daseger

Looking forward to the year ahead, as we all tend to do at this time, I notice that not only is this the “year of the snake” and the year of the (Pantone) color emerald green, but also a year in which there will be two great comets visible in the northern hemisphere. I’m working on an academic project on changing perceptions of wonder in the early modern era, and few things were as wonderful as a truly “Great Comet” blazing a very visible trail through the sky, so this is one of those times where past and present, scholarship and blog intersect, which is very exciting. It’s a rare year that one comet is visible to the naked eye, so the possibility of two is extraordinary. Comet PANSTARRS will be the first comet of 2013, appearing only in the southern hemisphere for the first two months of the year, but by the middle of March it should be visible in the north. The recently-discovered Comet ISON, so bright that it might even be visible at daylight if it doesn’t break apart or flame out, will make its appearance towards the end of the year.

Both before and after the sixteenth century, comets were portents of a potentially cataclysmic event or great change: plague, earthquake, the fall of a regime, all of course the wrath of God bearing down on sinful people. Omens were always ominous. In political terms, comets were “the terror of kings”, and one of the first images of a comet, likely Halley’s comet, is in the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry, which records the Norman Conquest from the Norman point of view. Isti mirant stella: they gaze in wonder at the star, blazing over King Harold II’s head, foretelling his defeat and death.

Halley’s Comet did not return until 1456 (when it was associated with the conquests of the Ottoman Turks in eastern Europe), but there were bright “hairy” stars recorded by European chroniclers in 1264 (predicting the death of Pope Urban IV) and 1402 (again–the advances of the Turks). The first image below, from a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript, shows a man looking upon a particularly bright (and hairy) comet with wonder, a mixture of fear, awe, and curiosity, and I think that balance tips towards the latter in the early modern era. As evidence, look at the amazing second image below, of what I often describe in class as a “comet party” viewing (and drawing) the Great Comet of 1577: these people are not quaking in fear; to the contrary, they look rather celebratory.

British Library MS Royal 6 E VI, c. 1360-75, England; Woodcut by Jiri Daschitzsky, Von einem Schrecklichen und Wunderbahrlichen Cometen so sich den Dienstag nach Martini M. D. Lxxvij. Jahrs am Himmel erzeiget hat (Prague: Petrus Codicillus a Tulechova, 1577).

The changing perception of comets isn’t quite as straightforward as these two images indicate; in fact, early modern descriptions and representations of comets are a mixed bag, some very “scientific”, others very allegorical. Below, two sixteenth-century men of science depict comets of their time in very different ways: while Peter Apian attempts to chart the course of the comet of 1532, physician Ambroise Paré presents blazing stars as fearful “swords of the heavens”, like the “mortal darts” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost a century later: Incensed with indignation, Satan stood Unterrified, and like a comet burned, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In th’ arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.

The comets of Peter Apian (1532) and Amboise Paré (1579), Wellcome Library, London.

The comets of the seventeenth century provoked fear and trepidation, but they also provided empirical celestial evidence of a more predictable universe. The Great Comet of 1680 (to which ISON might be connected) was viewed through the telescope and utilized by Newton to verify the accumulated theories and hypothetical laws of the previous century and therefore “complete” the Scientific Revolution, and the Comet of 1682 became “Halley’s Comet” after his colleague Edmund Halley utilized historical and scientific analysis to connect it to comets of the past and the future. I don’t really see much of this rational spirit on display over here in the New World, where Increase Mather called the Comet of 1680 a “terrible sight indeed” and the colonial government of Massachusetts proclaimed a general fast in order to cease “that awful, portentous, blazing star, usually foreboding some calamity to the beholders thereof.”

Engraving of the Comet of 1619 after Adriaen van de Venne, British Museum; The Great Comet over Rotterdam, December 26, 1680 by Lieve Verschuier, Historisch Museum, Amersterdam (note the crowd below with their measuring devices).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially after Halley was proven posthumously correct with the return of “his” comet in 1758, comets were perceived with a more modern sense of wonder on the part of both the scientific community and the general public. The blazing comet of 1811 inspired all sorts of cultural expressions, and was tied to a positive outcome (for once): a conspicuously good year for wine production. And even better than wine (or at least on a par), the return of Halley’s comet in 1835 inspired a completely new category of jewelry: comet pins.