If I had to list my Top Five blogs, Shorpy* would be among them.
Beautifully reproduced photographs, in very high-density, taken primarily in pre-World-War I America. They’re rich, oh-so-rich in detail and, like the one below, often images of a vanished world, even when some of the buildings are still around to compare.
It’s the context, obviously, that’s changed – and the mechanism of that change was in large part the automobile and the way we designed urban environments as a consequence. This is the pre-Motordom world, and it was a very different place.
So about once a week, I take a sip of Shorpy.
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Broad Street and curb market, New York, 1906
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*Shorpy Higginbotham worked in a coal mine about a century ago. No, the connection is not clear to be me either.
