Old Street View

There was an interesting but, not surprisingly, somewhat irritating article from James Lileks in the Star Tribune today. It's about an archive of historical photos along the streets of the Twin Cities, now located at the Minnesota Historical Society but created mostly by two men named Walter Norton and Clifford Peel. They ran a commercial photography shop here from 1924 to 1965 (and they also had the photos from the earlier Hibbard studio that started in 1886). 

They were hired by businesses to take photos of what the world looked like: stores, housing developments, commercial buildings of whatever kind. Three-hundred-thousand photos in all, of which 20,000 are online. 

The example given in the Lileks story, from 4300 Nicollet Avenue, is instructive:

I love the detail of noticing the hand-painted Rosedale Fruit and Vegetable Market sign in the window of this small chain store. Rosedale, like other inner ring northern suburbs, was a truck-farming area during the streetcar era. It was where the cities' food came from, and so putting that name in the window was a stroke of branding genius, I can imagine.

That same building currently (image from Google Street View) has lost its cornice, and most of its display windows have either been covered or replaced by smaller ones. If it weren't for the patriotic pop art, it would be almost a generic box, compared to the older building's form.

Lileks bemoans some of what was lost from the many thens you can see in the archive to our now:

When I started googling the photos, I was surprised to find that so many big old buildings they shot were long gone and presumably long forgotten. Often, I would plug the address of an interesting looking building into Google, only to find its location marker in the middle of a freeway. It was a stark reminder of how much of the heart of the cities was demolished to build interstates.

But since it's him writing, he has to be wrong about some of it, too:

In many of the photos, the city streets look chockablock with small shops, each one dedicated to a particular item; shoes, hats, baked goods.

Stores were crammed with signs, too. Big, eye-catching signs, often attached perpendicular to the building. At night the neon signs brought color to the streets.

The world is simpler now, and cleaner. A block that was once a jumble of stores with oversized signs and display windows crammed full of merchandise, lined with newspaper boxes and handbills for the circus is now home to a sleek, single skyscraper that fills the entire block.

Over the decades, we have traded the small and individual scale for the collective. And the commercial districts may be the poorer for it.

But many buildings have survived and thrived. And some city blocks look a whole lot better now than they did in the past.

Judgments about looking "better" or "sleek" with single skycrapers that fill blocks... we can bet that none of those work better for a person on foot or using a street car or its modern equivalent, the bus. They might look better from a car, after you return from the suburban big box store that has replaced all of those separately owned small businesses that used to animate the street.

Don't you want that little corner fruit and vegetable market to be just a block or two from the place where you live? I do.

Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis (looking north, near 8th Street), some time between 1924 and 1926. From the C.J. Hibbard photos within the overall collection.