2013-03-18
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Many thought the old-fashioned streetcars assigned to Geary looked more and more antiquated, almost like the cable cars on Powell.
Certainly that belief was shared by many merchants on Geary Boulevard, the wide section of the thoroughfare running westward from Masonic Avenue through the Richmond. They were lobbying City Hall for a ‘Great Wide Way’, replacing streetcars with buses … and more parking for automobiles.
Planners who were eying the part of Geary between the Richmond and Downtown echoed this pro-auto sentiment. The Western Addition had been a vibrant community of Victorian homes before World War II. The section along Geary was populated mainly by Japanese-Americans. When World War II started, they were infamously hauled away to internment camps. African-American newcomers, who had come west to work in war industries, largely took their place. By the mid-1950s, there was talk of ripping down the Victorians along that part of Geary to gouge out a broad expressway to get automobiles downtown more quickly.
”What Might Have Been - Geary, a 2008 update of a story from the Market Street Railway’s newsletter in 2002.
This pretty much encapsulates the bad transport decisions of the 1940s and ’50s in the US: replacing streetcar (tram) tracks with widened roads served by buses (always subservient to private cars), a willingness (some would say eagerness) to demolishing houses in minority neighbourhoods in favour of freeways, and merchants demanding more parking.
At least the latter two arguments tend to have fallen out of favour, but business still seem to complain about parking all the time.
In the end the B Geary survived until the late 1950s, but the desired expressway was built in the early 1960s. Current plans for a “bus rapid transit” scheme seem to be as far away as they were in 2008.
2013-03-15
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A Bell Telephone design with push buttons and a vestigal dial shape, taken from this animation of designs. It’s possibly a 1500 series prototype.
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c86:
How to use a Dial Telephone, 1951
This is a whitened version of a scan of Bell Telephone’s booklet for schooldchildren, The Telephone And How We Use It.
2012-05-18
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Cameras from This Is Japan 1957, available at Press: Works On Paper.
2012-04-05
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From the Computer Conservation Society’s page about a talk by Simon Lavington on The Story of Elliott-Automation:
“An Elliott 405 at Norwich City Council in February 1957. Norwich is believed to have been the first UK local authority to install a digital computer”.
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Norwich City Council’s first computer, an Elliott 405, being delivered. 1957. (via, via)
2012-03-29
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F-102 Delta Dagger images, from Wikipedia, Life Magazine (via, via), and Jet Pilots Overseas. (The two Life images feature future astronauts.)
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“Freedom Has a New Sound”, a Convair advert from the 1960s. Posted by x-ray delta one on Flickr (via).
2012-03-27
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Another Magnum contact sheet, this time from Marc Riboud’s series on the Eiffel Tower, along with Man Painting the Eiffel Tower, one of the images from that roll.
From an interview with Kristen Lubben, author of a book on Magnum’s contact sheets and curator of the exhibition in New York:
Martin Parr was the photographer representative on the project and was a guiding force throughout. He was the person who really identified that the contact sheet would make a good subject now because of the transition to digital. We were meeting in Paris to do the first edit and he just sort of tossed out the comment that the book would function as an epitaph to the contact sheet. His words really stuck with me and gave me a lens through which to see the project and its timeliness. None of us think that any of these things are going to end, but of course they are.
