11/12/2008

Corner Clocks


The TPWP architecture contributor showed me this brilliant idea of a wall covered in panels made from a vintage map of Washington DC (picture at left from Apt Therapy). Since I love everything vintage I became obsessed with the idea of recreating this for my non-existent blank wall - so I set out searching for antique maps, and then my search evolved to anything I could find that was vintage-DC-related and found some marvelous little treasures - a lot of 9 DC area high school yearbooks from the 1930s, a 1859 complete issue of "The Semi-Weekly Constitution Newspaper," a porcelain license plate from 1907, and most fascinatingly - a dozen images of streets and people in Washington DC from the 1920s.

The city is so charming in those pictures, so cosmopolitan it seems, so vibrant. Delightfully for me, most of the pictures were taken around my current neighborhood - and now I've spent hours analyzing the images, wondering what each of the little people in the photographs was doing there, where they lived, how they got there, what they thought of the city. I've also been trying to figure out what the un-labeled buildings were, and researching the labeled ones. Below are my favorites:

Oh yeah, and you can purchase the reproductions of these images for ~$15 by following the links under each.


11th and F St. NW Washington DC - Trolley Scence from 1918 - can you recognize this corner?


9th and G St. NW Washington DC - The famous Moore's Rialto Theatre - 1925


New Hampshire Ave and 8th St NW Washington DC - Traffic lights with old Model-T - 1925


F Street NW Washington DC - Treasury building in the backround - 1915


13th and F Street NW Washington DC - Rapid transit bus - 1925


905 F Street NW Washington DC - 1920s - A record store that also sold sporting goods (right window), this is actually one of windows of the current McCormick & Schmick's, back then each window was a different little store.


9th and F Street NW Washington DC - Movie theatre street scene - 1928



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You would love shorpy.com

So many of the photos are from DC, and the commenters are generally a wealth of little-known (at least by me) information about the city...

Liz Lizo said...

omg New Hampshire and 8th st. has not changed much. Thanks for posting.