Tag Archives: salem streets

January 5, 2020

A Portfolio of Prints

By daseger

This is kind of a housekeeping post: the blog has gotten so big (over 9 years!) that I have lost track of what’s in it, so I’m going to gather together a few portfolios of images for ready reference. Today: some of my favorite Salem prints. I could spend hours going through every one of Frank Cousin’s photographs of Salem (especially now that so many have been digitized) but there’s something about prints that really captures the essence of a structure—or a street—so I’m always seeking them out. Below are some of my favorites: most from the nineteenth century, and most from books; some from the twentieth century and some “stand-alone” imprints. Some are from engravings; some from drawings. I think most have been featured in the blog before, but I’m not sure! In any case, they are all my go-to images when I want to conjur up a time and space in Salem’s history.

My favorite pre-restoration print of the House of the Seven Gables, 1889; prints by two women artists—Mary Jane Derby (North Salem) & Ellen Day Hale (Corner of Summer, Norman, and Chestnut Streets, where now we have a traffic circle!)–and pioneering lithography firms from the Boston Athenaeum’s Digital Collections.

These next images will seem familiar: they are from John Warner Barber’s Historical Collections of Massachusetts, which was first published in 1839. They have been reprinted many times, but my favorite version of them is in antiquarian George Francis Dow’s Old wood engravings, views and buildings in the county of Essex, a beautiful little volume published in 1908. Dow supplements Barber a bit with information and images he found in the Essex Institute, of course.

As you can see in the caption for the (Downing-)Bradstreet house above, Joseph Felt’s Annals of Salem, first published in 1844, is the source of some classic Salem printed images, as are the guidebooks published in the later nineteenth century and national publications like Gleason’s/Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s. Salem got a lot of press once Hawthorne started selling, and the national Centennial and Bicentennial of the Witch Trials in 1892 also focused attention on “Old” Salem. And another great source for graven images is of course ephemera: the front and back pages of the successive Salem Directories are full of imagery, and many invoices, billheads, and other business paper contain beautiful prints. Fortunately the Salem State Archives is digitizing whatever comes their way.

Prints of the James Emerton Pharmacy in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum and the Salem Directory; Seccomb Oil Works billhead, Salem State Archives and Special Collections.

On the verge of the twentieth century, a lot of the classic images above were started to look a bit dated, so we get new versions of Salem’s most characteristic buildings and streets in periodicals and guidebooks like Moses Sweetser’s Here and There in New England and Canada, first published in 1899. Most architectural publications from this time and after used the photographs of Frank Cousins or (a bit later) Mary Harrod Northend for illustrations, with the notable exception of the measured and drawn renderings of “Colonial Work” contained in the Georgian Period portfolios. I can never get enough of these! More impressionistic, printed illustrations return in architectural books aimed at the general public in the mid-twentieth century: I particular like Ethel Fay Robinson’s Houses in America (1936, with drawings by her husband Thomas.

Illustrations of Salem architecture from Here and There in New England and Canada, The Georgian Period, and Houses in America.

4 Comments | tags: Architecture, Art, books, Custom House, ephemera, House of the Seven Gables, Illustrations, Salem Common, salem streets | posted in Architecture, Art, books, History

November 11, 2016

Memorial Markers

By daseger

Look up: at many intersections of Salem streets, intensively but not exclusively in the center of the city, you will see bright black and gold markers with the names of veterans who sacrificed their lives in twentieth-century wars. I really don’t remember focusing on these plaques until late last spring, when all of the faded markers were replaced with new and shiny ones: just in time for Memorial Day, as I recall. Then suddenly they were very conspicuous to me–and hopefully to others. The markers are placed adjacent to the soldiers’ neighborhoods, so you can also ascertain the various ethnic neighborhoods of Salem in the last century, now not quite as distinct. They are as detailed as possible: name, rank, service, conflict, exact date and place of death: I immediately noticed how many young men died in the closing months of the Great War, just before Armistice Day.

Squares of service in Salem, beginning with that dedicated to Private George C. Trask at the beginning of Chestnut Street. Nichols Square at Federal Street is dedicated to Captain Henry C. Nichols, who served in both world wars and Korea and was a “man about town” (and also the author of a popular little pamphlet titled Bewitched in Historic Salem). The distinct red marker designates veteran firefighter Raymond McSwiggin, killed in the line of duty in 1982. You can see a map of all of Salem’s Veterans’ Squares here: https://www.mapsonline.net/salemma/index.html.

5 Comments | tags: Commemoration, holidays, Local Events, salem streets, Veterans Day | posted in Current Events, Paper

April 26, 2016

Bridge Street Neck

By daseger

Salem is a city of extremities in terms of its physical shape: two “necks” jut out into the Atlantic Ocean from a central peninsula. You can easily see that this was a settlement oriented towards the water rather than the land. Once transportation shifted towards the latter, traffic problems emerged for Salem, and they still present a major challenge to the city. One interesting Salem neighborhood which seems to represent the shifting impact of transportation very well is Bridge Street Neck, the first area to be settled by Europeans and the main gateway to the north. Its central corridor or “spine”, Bridge Street, first led to a ferry, and by the end of the eighteenth century the first bridge to Beverly was completed. From that time the area developed in typical mixed-use fashion, with commercial structures and residences rising up on Bridge Street, smaller houses on the side streets leading down to the water on both sides, and manufacturing sites interspersed: first maritime-related uses, later lead and gas works. There are all sorts of references (though I can never find images) to horticultural uses as well, from the first fields of the early “old Planters” to nineteenth-century greenhouses and pleasure gardens to today’s parks. In a few months Salem’s newest park will open at the very end of the Neck, dedicated to the work and memory of the Abolitionist Remond family.

The North Shore coastline from Edwin Rowe Snow’s The Romance of Boston Bay, 1970; 1903 Map of Salem and surrounding places, Henry M. Meek Publishing Co., Leventhal Map Library, Boston Public Library.

Carriages, trains, trolleys, CARS: for too long Bridge Street Neck has simply been a place to get through.It’s never been a destination, unlike Salem’s other neck, home to the Willows. But over the past decade, a series of infrastructural changes have (perhaps) transformed this Neck’s functional status: a new bridge attached to a new bypass road which skirts the neighborhood rather than running through it, and a “revitalization plan” implemented by the city to address its aesthetic and economic challenges. I think this is a Salem neighborhood that is really primed for change, but in what direction? Its diverse building inventory–ranging from late eighteenth-century Georgians to post-war Capes–is protected by the recent designation as a National Register Historic District but not the more stringent review of a local historic district. And there is much to protect: there are some great old houses interspersed among the streets of Bridge Street Neck, better appreciated if you get out of your car and walk.

LOVE this Gothic Revival cottage and its mansard-roofed neighbors on Arbella Street, named for the ship that brought John Winthrop to Salem in 1630.

Very pretty Victorian two-family; two early nineteenth-century houses: a Georgian (behind the addition) and the stunning c. 1805 Thaddeus Gwinn House, an unusual Salem two-story Federal (today and in the 1980s, courtesy MACRIS); two cute cottages on the North River side of Bridge Street.