Vintage Melbourne

 Definitely time for a 'Now & Then'. This is from an article by Carolyn Webb of The Age.

"History buff's vintage Melbourne Instagram site is a hit"

"Today it’s known for its street art, but 50 years ago, Hosier Lane, off Flinders Street, was part of Melbourne’s thriving clothing district.

A sign in a 1972 photo of the bare-walled lane advertises the business of Bernard Rothschild, who sells underwear, knitwear, children's wear and hosiery.

Swipe right on the photo on the Instagram page Old Vintage Melbourne, and you'll see the same view in recent years. The walls are covered in art, with a sign indicating a recent focus of the precinct: a bar called Misty.

Melbourne lawyer Chris Macheras started Old Vintage Melbourne six months ago and it has taken off, with 28,000 followers.

"It's insane," says Mr Macheras, but he is happy it's helping connect Melburnians with their history.

One comment on the Hosier Lane post states: "Wow the graffiti is so ugly ... 1972 looks much better."

But another says: "I’m loving the graffiti. The laneways are so cool."

Someone called Yael Rothschild says that "the Rothschild sign was my father-in-law’s warehouse" and that he passed away just two years ago, aged 95.

"He worked so hard. He was a great man. We have this photo framed."

One of Mr Macheras' favourite historic shots is from about 1906: a Mr and Mrs Laycock pose for a photo outside their shop in Middle Park, with ads for The Age and Cadbury chocolates.

Mr Macheras was relieved to find the building still exists, although it is no longer a shop. A modern verandah has been added and its door has moved.

He learns something new with every post.

A circa 1870s photo of Melbourne GPO, by Charles Nettleton, shows the building with two storeys, not today's three, and a much shorter, more squat clock tower than the one added later.

Mr Macheras said that during the gold rush, large sections were often added to such buildings as Victoria’s wealth and population grew.

 

Right:  The Fish Market on the corner of Swanston & Flinders streets c1895, later becoming the site of the Flinders Street Railway Station (2020 Photo supplied by Chris Macheras) 

His Instagram efforts aren't all about buildings.

When he posted a 1981 photo by Rennie Ellis of a Greek family in Prahran cooking a lamb on the spit, a woman commented, "Wow this is a great photo of me and my family. We are still a very close family and we still celebrate every Christmas and Easter together."

Mr Macheras' own family has run a hairdressing salon at 216 Tyler Street, Preston, since the early 1970s. But the shop dates from the 1930s and he would love to see old photos of it.

The Old Vintage Melbourne Instagram project started in June, when Mr Macheras had more free time as a result of not having to commute from Preston to the city for work.

He discovered vivid digital photos on websites such as that of the State Library of Victoria and started digitally restoring a few.

Mr Macheras says he is allowed to use old photos for non-commercial purposes, where no copyright restrictions apply, provided credit is given.

He hopes to write an Old Vintage Melbourne book, incorporating people's stories. It has, he says, been good for his mental health to have this creative outlet."

I couldn't copy the cool way The Age article did the swipe across the photos, so go to the original article and try it for yourself.

And check out the Old Vintage Melbourne Instagram site for more old photos and Now & Thens. Here are a few of my favourites.

This has been a great exercise for during the changes wrought by COVID, a positive. Thanks Chris, and thanks too to the State Library's photo pool.

Lost Collective

 These images are from Lost Collective a project by Brett Patman. It is a visual and written record of the forgotten and neglected built environments that pervade society. The key focus of the project is documenting the important roles that people and places played in shaping the communities who collectively make up the identity of our societies, engaging everyday people through evocative imagery, to reconnect with past lives and even former friends. It encourages people to share their stories, stories that would otherwise be forgotten as society progress and generations age. 

Every location has a story of its past; it’s present state and in some cases, a plan for the future. From rural country towns to energetic inner-city suburbs, derelict power stations and heavy industry to the tiny farmstead. All these buildings had significance in one way or another. Finding this from the words of the people who made so is what Lost Collective is all about. Societies change, and abandoned buildings come and go, but it’s important to remember and record our heritage amongst the ever increasing rush to replace the old with the new. We only get one chance to do this.

In a recent post Brett showcased a couple of now-and-thens - the Terminus Hotel in Sydney.

He was inspired to blend a historical image into one of his own (as have I). The left side is from the Noel Butlin Archives, Australian National University, taken c1970. The right is one Brett took on 19 March 2015. As well as simply aligning and blending the images, he has taken elements from each era and masked them from one into the other in the same position as they were. The vine has arguably been one of the most recognisable features of this amazing old pub, and while the vine is now long gone (the pub has since been renovated and reopened to customers), he couldn't resist brushing it back into the past over the historical image. 

His other image is of the W.H Lucas/Delegate Motors garage. (Delegate is just over the border in New South Wales on the way to Bombala). To blend an old and new photo together but for it to work properly, the perspective of the two images really needs to be exact or at least very close. He has layered these images over one another and added a transparent gradient so that the old photo gradually blends into the new one. The original photo on the left side was taken by Alma Reed, c1940. The right side of the photo was taken by Brett on December 22, 2018.

Always a fan of the Now-and-then, hope he does more.

'Now and then' and gone

It must be time to resurrect 'Now and Then' images.
Unfortunately in the fast moving app development arena, apps come and go the National Trust's "Lost! 100 lost buildings of Melbourne" is no longer available, (I first encountered this Augment Reality app in 2012, the interactive 3D app enabled users to "ghost" - visually overlay buildings from the past onto the present, by augmenting the iPhone's existing camera function. A history, photos and stories of these often long-demolished buildings was also available), likewise the "StreetMuseum" from London.
Fortunately people have utilised the app and we can see the 'now and thens' they have created, and published in a Daily Mirror article.

This image shows Piccadilly Circus, Coronation day, June 1953. Crowds gather to witness the Coronation procession of Elizabeth II. The coronation went ahead in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, and at the Queen's request, the entire ceremony was televised throughout the Commonwealth, and watched by an estimated twenty million people.

People and traffic in Oxford Street around the turn of the 20th century. Christina Broom at this time photographed London street scenes to reproduce as postcards for sale.

 

Street scene at Covent Garden with underground station and horse and cart in the background. George Davison Reid photographed activity in the marketplace from opposite Covent Garden Underground station on Long Acre. A police constable was often needed to control the congestion of the horses and carts and increasing numbers of motorised vehicles. The long established market place was under pressure to move. The congested facilities were described at the time as 'altogether inadequate to the necessities of the trade'. However, the fruit and vegetable market did not relocate until 1973.

And my personal favourite, it is the children which really elevate its impression.

The pressure to build upwards is coming from demands on the Greater London Assembly and local authorities to come up with more housing at a time of very high land prices. Pictured here is the west side of Tower Bridge showing London as it is now and back in the 19th Century

Maintenant et puis

It is sometime since I've created any 'now and then' images, or showcased someone-else's, and since I've been hanging onto these - the time has come.
The vintage French postcards show the city of Nancy - the capital of the Duchy of Lorraine in north-eastern France - and have been used as the 'then'.

 

La Craffe Gate. The oldest gateway in Nancy. This former guardhouse, a fine example of military architecture built in the mid 14th century under Duke Jean I, was for centuries the main entrance to Nancy.

 

These photographs came from a book briefly on loan from a French exchange student, so sorry no bibliographic details.
And 'Maintenant et puis' ... is French for 'now and then'!

Vintage now & thens

I've seen copies of these on a number of sites, but this is from WebUrbanist, 10 Vintage London Paintings Superimposed on Street View Images

Blending fiction and reality, art and history, this series of super-impositions takes the ‘then-and-now’ imagery all the back to the 18th Century to the streets and rivers of England’s capital city. Most of the added classics (spliced with Google Street View shots) are largely unedited, a few are strategically cropped but many show a naturally stark contrast in colours, tones, lighting, and of course: street life.

These hybrids show historical structures in their built environments like ‘St. Martin in the Fields’ painting by William Logsdail in 1888, of a little Victorian girl selling flowers in Trafalgar Square in London. There has been a church on the site for at least 800 years.

And another Logsdail ‘9th of November, 1888’ by William Logsdail of the Lord Mayor’s parade passing through Bank Junction in London. To the left is the Old Bank of England (the building was demolished 50 years after the painting was done). The 9th was also more famous for the crime on the very day of this parade – Mary Kelly’s murder, the last Jack The Ripper’s victims, took place less than a mile away in Whitechapel.

'Blackman Street London' by John Atkinson Grimshaw in 1885. The church is St. George The Martyr, this is the Church next to the notorious Marshalsea prison where Dickens' Little Dorrit is born. The Brough Street Market in Southwark is south of the River Thames and one of the oldest fruit and vegetable markets. It was an area also famous for its inns, like The George, which still survives. Today, Blackman Street is called Borough High Street and offers a view of the Shard – the biggest spire you'll see looking north-east.

'The River Thames with St. Paul's Cathedral on Lord Mayor's Day' by Canaletto.The Millenium Bridge cuts across this patch of the river now. You still get a great view of St. Pauls dome from the south side of the river but in 1746 - only 40 years since they had finished building it - it must have totally dominated London's skyline. St Paul’s was the city's tallest building for over 300 years. Giovanni Antonio Canal (known as Canaletto) was a Venetian painter remembered for his renditions of building landscapes in Venice & England.

'The Strand Looking East from Exeter Exchange' by Caleb Robert Stanley.The Strand has changed massively since this painting of St Mary Le Strand. It was half demolished and widened in 1900 removing all the alleyways and narrow residential roads. The church is a replacement for another one demolished to make way for Somerset House. In 1822 all the roads on the right would have still led right down into the Thames before the embankment was constructed. Most of those buildings are gone, but some of the roads remain and retain their slope down towards the old Thames riverbank. 

These images are a logical extension of the ‘now & then’ photo concept, and I believe have been improved by imposing the old masters over them.

Music memories

What are the chances - two of the sites that I monitor both featuring music location posts.
There is Twisted Sifter's 'Famous album covers superimposed onto their actual locations' This is Bob Egan again, see my earlier post 'The photography of music' that one was in New York, this one is a 'Now & then' of album covers in London, England.
Firstly there was the iconic one that everyone wants to emulate - The Beatles on Abbey Road. The cover photo of the Abbey Road album was taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI studio on Abbey Road. And here, superimposed, is the album over the modern street, from Google Street views.

Personally I'd love the excuse to actually shoot on location rather than use Google from home. As I said it is iconic and there are a multitude of takes on the original, including a number with Lego.

 Then David Bowie as Ziggy from 'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars' recorded in 1972, the photograph was taken outside of 23 Heddon Street, a small, block-long, dead end street in central London, just west of Carnaby Street. Apparently photographer, Brian Ward, had his studio on Heddon Street and shot stills of Bowie using black & white film. The resulting pictures were later colourised to give Bowie an alien appearance.

There's Liam & Noel Gallagher on the Oasis What's the Story, Morning Glory? album. The cover photo was taken on Berwick Street, a street featuring several popular record shops in the Soho section of London in 1995.

The Clash's self-titled The Clash, the album cover photo location is an outdoor stairway near the band's rehearsal studio in Camden ("Stables") Market in Camden Town in northern London, shot in 1977.

And, in addition to the Bob Egan post is this one from Gondwana (who don't immediately shout 'music'), but here is their link to an Interactive map which pinpoints every New York City reference in song. There are virtually a countless number of songs that refer to New York - from its neighbourhoods to familiar & famous streets - and now you can see them all on a map, and link to the song on YouTube, from Greshwin to The Killers. Apparently Paul Simon's 'Me & Julio down by the schoolyard' refers to a location between 48th & 49th Avenue. There are about 200 songs referenced.

Growing cities

Must be time to combine a WebUrbanist post and 'Now & Then' images. I had seen some of these photos before, but hadn't recorded it, now here are just some of the more dramatic examples from "Then & Now: the stunning speed of urban development"
We complain about the pace of change, as old buildings are ripped down to be replaced by often uglier, utilitarian replacements. That pales against the mammoth pace of change in some overseas cities.

The well-known gambling mecca of Las Vegas was carved out of the Nevada desert, when hotels and casinos began construction in the 1930s.

The top black & white photo with the early hotels the Dunes and the Flamingo, is from 1954, and the colour image is from 2009.

China is in a building boom at present, and this is evident from these two photographs of Shanghai. The daylight image was taken in 1990, and the night-time image just 20 years later in 2010.

 Dubai may be where all the oil money is, and it shows in the architecture. 
You can recognise the 3-part apartment building in both photos, but everything else appears to have changed from 1990 to 2003. And it will have changed again in the past 10 years.

You knew Tokyo would make the list - on the left is the Japanese city in the 1960s and again on the right in 2010.

Finally - Panama City is one of the fastest growing urban areas in the world, and these two photographs illustrate the sharp contrast between the two eras. The black & white town sprouts into a maze of skyscrapers between 1930 and 2009.

 Check out other famous cities London, Paris... on the WebUrbanist post.

Now & Then fantasy

Moving into the realms of fantasy or science fiction, I came across this photographic gem -

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. From the movie 'Star Trek IV : the voyage home' starring Captain James T. Kirk and Mr Spock.

The movie poster art

The plot of the film follows on from 'Star Trek III : The search for Spock' with the characters returning to Earth in a captured Klingon Warbird, re-christened by Dr. McCoy as the "H.M.S. Bounty". A strange probe is also on course for Earth, transmitting signal that disables all the technology that it encounters. The crew of the Bounty realize the sprobe is attempting to communicate with the now long-extinct humpback whales. The only way to answer the probe's signals and save the world, is to travel back in time and obtain some humpback whales. 



The Bounty travels back to present day San Francisco, where the crew splits to accomplish three different missions: locate the whales, build a tank within the Bounty to transport the whales, and locate an energy source. This is where the humour really takes off with all the cultural & technological clashes - Spock diving to mind-meld with the whales; Scotty flexing his fingers on an archaic computer; Russian Chekov captured on the U.S.S. Enterprise nuclear 'wessel'; Spock's misuse of colourful metaphors; the need for 'exact change' bus fares...

The Enterprise's crew blending in

The idea of a 'Now & Then' photo of a time travel movie image just seems right somehow. I now need a Tom Baker one!

 

Daily News - now & then

The Daily News : Now & Then by Marc A.Hermann – are photo composites from the archives of the New York’s picture newspaper.

This project was originally inspired by the early visual sleuthing of William Frassanito who sought out locations of photographs taken on the Gettysburg battlefield. Since then, the work of people like Sergey Larenkov (my post on Sergey) who blend historic pictures of war-torn Europe with modern-day views of the same locations has brought the concept of 'then-and-now' into the digital age.
Marc Hermann who was born and raised in Brooklyn is a professional photographer and official historian of the New York Press Photographers Association. Having covered breaking news since 1997, he has shot various locations throughout the city where both the momentous and routine had occurred. Using the Daily News' massive photo archive he combined the modern scenes with the vintage images that had been made at those sites. 
Marc recalls that a common reaction of passers-by when they were shown the original pictures of what had once transpired at the places where they now walked was "I had no idea...". Most importantly, to him, is that work of his predecessors' work is getting another look. It is his way of reminding people that they are part of the same continuum of time, and by seeing these sites in a familiar, modern way, that the 'then' of history is also a 'now'.
Sourcing his pictures from newspaper files means that there are many dramatic shots of fires, crashes and other 'news worthy' articles, like - 

497 Dean St, Brooklyn on 19th March 1942

 Edna Egbert had not heard from her son since his enlistment, she became distraught and climbed onto her ledge. Police officers Ed Murphy & George Munday distracted her so she could be pushed into a safety net. (Original photographer Charles Payne).

Corner of Hicks & Summit Sts, Brooklyn on 11th January 1951

The bells in the steeple rang out even as the flames consumed the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary one chilly afternoon. The 90 year old landmark was practically destroyed by the blaze, it was rebuilt and is still standing (Original photographer Paul Bernius).

Classon Ave & Pacific St, Brooklyn on 28th July 1957

 A recently released inmate of the Brooklyn House of Detention stole a car with two friends, but they came to a crashing stop against a light pole at the intersection. The auto body shop in the background is still in business but relocated across the road (Original photographer Paul Bernius).

137 Wooster St, Manhattan on 16th February 1958 

 A massive fire in the Elkins Paper & Twine Co claimed the lives of 2 firefighters and 4 members of the New York Fire Patrol. The building was a total loss and was demolished (Original photographer Charles Payne).

923 44th St, Brooklyn on 1st July, 1928

Frankie Yale (the Al Capone of Brookyn) a gangster was shot by his rivals as he drove a Lincoln coupe through the streets of Borough Park (believed to be the first New York mob hit using Thompson sub-machine guns). He lost control of the car and smashed into the front of the house (the house and the tree are still standing) (Original photographer unknown).

7th Ave & Sterling Pl, Brooklyn on 17th December 1960

The wreckage of United Airlines Flight 826 fills the intersection in Park Slope. 134 people were killed after the jet collided with a smaller TWA plane over Staten Island, killing everyone on board both planes and on the ground. Many of the buildings including the Pillar of Fire Church were destroyed beyond repair (Original photographer Leonard Detrick).

This project, then, is meant as a tribute to the New Yorkers—on both sides of the camera's lens—who have gone before, and as a window into the past for those who appreciate it.