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Hartford, Connecticut, circa 1907. "Young Men's Christian Association building, Pearl and Jewell Sts." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.
This was the long gone YMCA building in my hometown.
The building is gone, but there's still a fire hydrant in the same place. Hartford is after all, the insurance capital of the USA.
I notice this building looks so similar to the YMCA building (long since used for college offices) on Dartmouth’s campus from the same period (Bartlett Hall) that I googled YMCA architecture and discovered that design historian Paula Lupkin produced a dissertation as a UPenn PhD candidate that became a book on this subject titled "Manhood Factories." The abstract sounds fascinating.
I totally admire the lady who barely made it into the photo. Her OOTD is stunning -- even from the back -- and she's so stylishly slender, with a confident posture. I wonder if she's looking at a person back to her left, or simply pondering whether it is safe to cross the street. Also was she in mourning, or did she merely enjoy making a fashion statement? Either way, more than a century later she remains a savvy fashionista for the ages in her LBD with fabulous hat and dainty reticule. How I wish I knew her name.
Here's the intersection today. Too bad a parking lot now occupies that great location. Across the street is Bushnell Park and the state capitol.
I wish the streetsweeper had paused so he would not be forever a blur. But I guess manure waits for no man.
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