Monthly Archives: October 2019

2019, put it in the books

31 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Washington, D.C.

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Nationals Ballpark, June 2019

This was the view from our seats at Nationals Ballpark this past June when we saw the Nats take on the Braves in a game that ended on a sliding catch by the Nats center fielder in the ninth that saved the game. Last night the Nationals defeated the Astros in seven to give a Washington D.C. team its first World Series since the 1924 Senators. Of course the Senators were not the only game in town back in the day; the Homestead Grays played there as well–and would have given the Senators a run for their money.

I have always been entranced by baseball in the nation’s capital, an interest fueled by the fact that my mother was born there. I reached out to numerous family members these past few weeks to ask if anyone knew if our grandparents (or parents, depending on the generation) attended Senators games while living in the District during the Depression and Second World War. No one knew for sure, but alas the consensus seemed to be no. In the 1980s my grandfather also had a Redskins Starter jacket. I never knew if his interest in the Redskins came from his time in D.C., or grew from the fact that that football team played in Boston for a time in the 1930s. He and his growing family would have been living in Anacostia when the team moved from New England to Washington in 1937. My grandparents moved back to Boston in 1945 when the war ended, with three daughters all under the age of ten in tow. The family turned, or returned, its rooting interests to the Red Sox, which is as it remains today.

It was a great season and post-season and it is so good to see championship baseball return to Washington.

Rainy Sunday winding down

20 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Federal Hall National Memorial, Robert Moses

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I hope everyone’s weekend was good. Here was the scene yesterday at Federal Hall when Charles Starks spoke about the life and legacy of George F. McAneny. Few today know who McAneny was, but the public official and urban planner was one of the most influential figures New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Among other things he helped turn Federal Hall into a national memorial. Starks did a good job capturing McAneny’s significance. Here we see the speaker showing an image of Robert Moses and his never-built Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. The reason that project never came to fruition was in part due to McAneny, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others.

It was so good to be in front of the public again. There is nothing like that interaction with a live audience, especially a curious audience. There was a big turnout for Open House New York, with some coming from Westchester for the day to take in Federal Hall and other venues sponsoring Open House NY events in the downtown area. There were many good questions, many of which I was able to answer and some that I was not. That is always humbling. At the same time it is also unavoidable. When it comes down to it, we know very little.

Open House New York 2019

18 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial

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If you are looking for something to do this weekend and live in the Greater New York area note that it is Open House New York weekend. The weather will be nice and there will be a lot going on around town. I know someone whose mother is coming in from Rhode Island so the two of them can hit some art galleries that are opening their doors just for the special, annual event that is OHNY. Federal Hall itself will be open tomorrow. Yours truly will be there for at least part of the day. It will be good to be back. In what certainly will be an informative presentation Charles Starks will be speaking about George F. McAneny, one of the most important and sadly forgotten New Yorkers of the twentieth century.

Whatever you do on your Saturday and Sunday, go out and get some.

The photographers’ Great Depression

12 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, New Deal

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Okies in Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency migratory labor camp, Calipatria, Imperial Valley, February 1939. This image was taken by Dorothea Lange, a colleague of Arthur Rothstein whose images are included in the current exhibit at Roosevelt House.

I’m sorry about the lack of posts recently. I have spent much of the past several weeks finishing the draft of a project that proved more difficult and time-involved that I had imagined. I submitted the draft the other day. We’ll see if comes to pass toward the end of the year. People were asking me at work yesterday what I intended to do over the three-day weekend; when they did I answered with a negative: “not writing and editing.”

Last night I went to Roosevelt House on East 65th Street for the opening of the exhibit “A Lens on FDR’s New Deal: Photographs by Arthur Rothstein, 1935-1945.” Rothstein was one of the great visual chroniclers of Depression Era America. It is not going too far to say that he, his friend and colleague Dorothea Lange, and others shaped our awareness and memory and of what the country was enduring in the 1930s and early 1940s. Part of the reason the Roosevelt Administration created the initiative to photograph the severity of the economic crisis to begin with was to press the need for its New Deal programs.

Rothstein was the son of refugees from Eastern Europe. Like so many immigrants and first-generation Americans, he was eager to make his contribution. Born in 1915, Rothstein attended Columbia University at fifteen and in the mid-1930s, just a young man in his early 20s, found himself driving across the country on dirt roads, sleeping in his car, eating off a hot plate, and shooting 80,000 images in migrant camps, farming communities, and elsewhere.

Rothstein’s daughter, Dr. Annie Segan, put the exhibition together in with her husband and the Roosevelt House historian. With over 125 photographs it is the biggest exhibit of Rothstein images to go on display in more than a quarter century. Other photographers are included as well. Many of the images were taken from tiny negatives. Rothstein’s daughter in her talk called them “picture stories.” Incredibly the trove of 175,000 images taken by Rothstein and the nearly twenty other photographers working for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) were nearly discarded by indifferent bureaucrats in the years after the Second World War. Thankfully they were saved and are available to the public at the Library of Congress and online.

The exhibit runs into January 2020.

(image/Library of Congress)