THE ROCKAWAYS
Richard Kostelanetz
Scarcely a great
enthusiast for photography in general, I’ve never collected photographs
or books about photography and don’t often use my 35-mm. camera. Since my
disinterests don’t much concern me, I’m not sure why I ignore photographs.
Perhaps I find them limited, much like newspapers, which I don’t often read
either.
Nonetheless, I’ve
recently begun a rich collection of picture postcards from the New York City
beach town where I plan to live—the environs of Arverne in the New York
City Rockaways. These cards portray not Arverne now but the beach town as it
was a century ago. That’s why I collect them. Unlike most self-consciously
artful photographs taken a century ago, these picture postcards feature not particular
people but common scenes especially familiar to Arverne at that time. Indicatively,
commercial postcards, rather than personal photographs, provide most of the historic
pictures in Old Rockaway, New York, in Early Photographs (Dover, 2000).
Given that the
under-populated Rockaways today are less fashionable than beach towns further
out on Long Island, these postcards in sum evoke a more prosperous, more crowded
earlier time that should not be forgotten. Recalling that I made two decades
ago a film about Berlin in the early twentieth-century as reflected in the great
Jewish cemetery surviving there, I suspect that my enthusiasm for these cards
depends upon a similar historical imagination. Just as Berlin was once a greater
city, so the Rockaways were formerly greater beach towns. How can we surmise
now about how people lived then from how Arverne looked then.
A recent show of
photographs of New York City at the Metropolitan Museum included a display box
with several picture postcards collected from the 1920s to the 1950s by the noted
photographer Walker Evans, whom the caption says amassed over nine thousand cards.
Returning to his exhibition a second time, I once again found these anonymous
pictures of my home town scenes more engaging that the framed photographs around
them, produced though the latter were by identifiable, often famous artists.
Most of these old postcards I purchased through the internet auction named called
Ebay, which fulfills a postcard collectors’ dream, much as Advanced Book
Exchange on the Internet fulfills a used-book maven’s dream, because I can
quickly summon all the Arverne or Rockaway cards currently available from many
sellers around the world. (One came from Norway; another from Czechslovakia.)
I’ve yet to pay more than ten bucks for any of them and am not planning
to do so.
What the old picture
postcards show first of all is grand hotels at the beginning of the 20th century,
mostly near the beach. Most are less than seven stories high, presumably lacking
elevators, and thus for grandiosity compensate with width what they lack in height.
Indeed, one that didn’t survive long looks to be a few blocks in length
parallel to the ocean. In front of some are black automobiles beside buggies
drawn by horses. Other cards show rows of three-story detached houses. What makes
the cards nostalgic is the fact that none of these buildings—absolutely
none—survived fire or the urban-renewal bulldozer.
Other cards feature
summertime clothing that by current fashions looks uncomfortably cumbersome—jackets,
ties, and hats not only for men but even for boys; foot-length skirts for women.
One card postmarked in 1909 shows a young couple from behind, facing the ocean,
their heads tilted into one another, looking from the neck upwards much like
lovers would today. While he is dressed in a tank top exposing his shoulders,
she wears a dress that appears to include long sleeves. (You naturally wonder
what they wore while making love.) A final theme of the cards is pre-air-conditioned
ingenuity, as in a theater located on stilts that extend into the ocean whose
temperature would usually be cooler than that on land.
The overall theme
of the cards is evoking an earlier time. They show boardwalks and beaches, still
extant to be sure, but then filled with many more people than the same locations
have nowadays. One card portrays “Charley, the Hermit, at Rockaway Beach,”
in front of a shack that would be nowadays be condemned as uninhabitable. Another
card titled “Villas” portrays not elegant suburban homes but single-story
bungalows bunched together. A third card portrays rows of tents—a literal
tent city—some of which have front fences, creating a kind of porch, reminding
us of kinds of cheap summer housing that, though physically feasible, would be
legally unacceptable today. People are seen in the ocean, surrounded by networks
of ropes on vertical poles some of which have donut-shaped life-preservers hooked
onto them, I guess in lieu of human lifeguards; but nobody is seen doing the
ocean equivalent of lap swimming. The shock to those familiar with the Rockaways
now is that all the people portrayed in these cards look Caucasian.
Some of the Rockaway
cards are based on photographs, others are paintings; some seem reproduced from
hand-colored photographs. Most were mailed; others not. Some have trivial messages
on the same side as their stamps; on others, handwriting defaces the picture.
In their artlessness is not only information but, in sum, an extraordinary evocation
I treasure.
–
website: www.richardkostelanetz.com
