The Case of the Missing Photographs: Finding Images from Historical Newspapers

Thanks to the copyright laws relating to public domain, it’s fairly easy to find newspaper articles relating to World War I on the internet.  While researching the impact of World War I on Greenwich Village, for example, I found many resources in the New York Times digital archive.  However, while almost all of the paper’s articles since 1851 are available online, there are very few pictures available to accompany the text.  In many cases, older editions of the New York Times didn’t feature many pictures, but in some cases, they were just not included when the article was clipped and scanned.  Line after line of printed words does not make for a very exciting digital archive or web exhibit, though, so I set out to find the missing newspaper photographs.

The first resource I’d like to share is one that was recommended by a classmate of mine: the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Database.  This database contains scanned copies of 25 newspapers, dating back as far as the 1700s.  The New York Times archives from 1851 to 2009 can be found here, just as they can on the New York Times website.  Much like the New York Times archive, ProQuest allows you to view whatever pictures were clipped along with the article.  However, ProQuest also gives you the option to view the article in “Page View.”  This allows you to see the article in context, with all of the articles and pictures that would have surrounded it.  In the regular article view there is no way to know whether an article has pictures or not without doing a lot of “guess and check.”  Sometimes one article on a topic will have no pictures, while a related article right next to it on the page will have accompanying photographs.  Article view, which the New York Times uses exclusively, forces you to look through every article on a given topic to find photographs.  ProQuest’s page view, though, allows you to flip through the pages of a newspaper to find related articles and photos you might have missed with a simple keyword search.

This is article view: clicking the circled words will access page view instead

Viewing the same article as above, this time in page view

There is one major disadvantage to ProQuest Historical Newspapers, though.  The database is available by subscription only, which means that grad students like me can enjoy the opportunity to flip through hundreds of years of digitized newspapers, but an independent researcher would have to pay to access this collection.  Also, while the pictures are easier to find than they are on the New York Times website, I still felt that there had to be a better way to find good newspaper photographs from the early 1900s.

One of the best resources that I found for these photographs is the newspaper pictorials collection in the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project.  American Memory is a digital archive of items from the Library of Congress that aims to document the “nation’s memory.”  It includes over 5 million photographs, documents, sound recordings and videos from colonial times through the 20^th century.  Some of these items are only available online through the Library of Congress and not through their creators.

The American Memory homepage

The American Memory site can be browsed by topic, collection or time period, or by doing a general keyword search.  In my case, it was the keyword search that turned up the best results.  I searched for “27^th Division,” a unit in the US Army in WWI that was welcomed home with a large parade up Fifth Avenue.  The results were extensive, and very helpful.  Among the long list of articles from the Army’s “Stars and Stripes” newspaper for troops, I found a New York Times result from an entire collection of newspaper pictorials.  Feeling intrigued, I clicked the link to the question and a found a wealth of photographic knowledge at my fingertips!

Search results for “27th Division”- Newspaper Pictorials results are fourth, sixth and seventh on the list

Pictorial sections became popular features of American newspapers during WWI.  A new process of photoengraving, known as rotogravure, meant that newspapers could produce high quality images on cheap quality paper.  With Americans taking part in their first European war, rotogravure pictorials became a useful way to show the American people on the homefront the harsh realities of the war abroad.  Each Sunday, the New York Times and the New York Tribune would feature a full section of rotogravure images.  The New York Times also published a pictorial section in the middle of the week, and later compiled images from these sections into a book entitled The War of the Nations: Portfolio in Rotogravure Etchings.  This volume included images from the mid-week pictorials published from the start of World War One in 1914 until the signing of the armistice in 1919.

A sample (partial) PDF page from a newspaper pictorial

The Newspaper Pictorials collection in the American Memory Project includes images from this book, as well as those from the Sunday pictorials in the New York Times and the New York Tribune.  The Tribune features a number of hand-drawn images, but the Times has pages of photographs from the war and the homecoming of the troops.  While the newspapers themselves are available online or on microfilm, the difficulty of properly scanning the rotogravure sections has made them difficult to obtain until now.  Thanks to American Memory, though, the images can be clearly viewed online or downloaded as a PDF.  Finally, I had found my missing photographs.

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The East Village: Birth of a Neighborhood

The East Village is often viewed as a younger, edgier sibling of Greenwich Village. A depiction that is accurate considering that the neighborhood is quite new as far as New York City neighborhoods are concerned. Throughout much of New York City’s history the area located east of 3rd Avenue between Houston and 14th Street was simply known as the Lower East Side. By the mid-20^th century, however, the neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village began to merge, and as boundaries changed the area’s population transformed as well.

The term East Village first appeared in the early 1960s when artists from Greenwich Village started moving east to escape the rising cost of rent. This move to the Lower East Side was partly tied to the destruction of the Third Avenue El in 1956 that had served as a physical and social divide between the two neighborhoods. As the artist community spread east, real estate brokers followed closely behind hoping to cash in on the areas’ growing connection to the bohemian scene. Relators began referring to the neighborhood as “East of the Village” or the “Village East” and hippies began flocking to the area. Indeed, the first mention of the East Village in The New York Times came on Feb 7, 1960, and even at this early stage the article remarked upon real estate interests in the neighborhood.

At the same time East Village had begun experiencing other serious demographic changes. The older immigrant community largely of Eastern European descent was being replaced by the city’s rapidly growing Puerto Rican population. Between 1940 and 1970 the city’s Puerto Rican population exploded, growing from a minority of about 100,000 to over a million. Many of the new immigrants settled in the Lower East Side, and by the time the hippies arrived there was a large Puerto Rican presence in the neighborhood.

Through the influence of hippies, artists, and real estate agents the name East Village had become common among New Yorkers by the late 1960s. In a June 5, 1967 article titled “The 2 Worlds of the East Village” the Times pointed to the general acceptance of the term noting that the area had already “come to be known” as the East Village, but it also hinted that some New Yorkers were uneasy with the changes in the neighborhood. Referencing clash between city police and about 200 hippies, the article claimed that there was a large divide between the officers and residents of the “seething streets”. The author, which tellingly only interviewed police officers, declared that cops in their “trim, blue uniforms and highly polished shoes find it difficult to understand the world of the unkempt, long haired hippies, the Puerto Ricans with their strange language and customs, and the Negroes.” Indeed, for this author and the officers he interviewed, the residents of the East Village did not conform to what he called “middle-class society and values”. One of the officers described hippies saying, “You feel like vomiting,” while another complained of Puerto Ricans that they “like to congregate on the streets,” and “play their guitars at all hours of the night”. These descriptions did not represent everyone’s view of the East Village, but for the author and his clean-cut cops, the neighborhood seemed like an unfriendly place.

Despite the critics, the East Village continued to grow in popularity and became a large draw for tourists in the 60s and 70s. One young hippie described the appeal of the neighborhood the best simply stating, “You go where the action is.”

Sources

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/01/nyregion/fyi-649895.html

 

Edmond J. Bartnett, “‘Village’ Spills Across 3D Ave.” New York Times, February 7, 1960: R1.

 

Sylvan Fox, “The 2 Worlds of the East Village,” New York Times, June 5, 1967: 63.

http://search.proquest.com/docview/118054771?accountid=12768

 

Paul Hoffman, “Hippies’ Hangout Draws Tourists,” New York Times, June 5, 1967: 63.

http://search.proquest.com/docview/118054771?accountid=12768

 

Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 174.

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