What Happened....

[HudsonHawk]

Early 1940s, same park, another hot afternoon. Improvised headgear in action.

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No doubt there will eventually be a thread about reproducing these in exact period detail.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You've got to use pages from the News, the Mirror, or the Brooklyn Eagle. Ha ha, look at the dope using the Herald-Tribune.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In the photo of the shirtless man smoking a pipe, there is a man behind him to his right holding cards in his hand. Do you suppose those are playing cards?

Yep. A lot of gambling went on in the bleachers. Somebody's got a game of gin rummy going on, which was the card game du jour in 1940.

Here's some more hot pasteboard action, outside Ebbets Field before the first game of the 1951 playoff series against the Giants, as fans wait for the ticket booths to open. A few hats, a few caps, and OMG a leather jacket! And the African-American gentleman at center-right leaning over to kibitz the game seems to be smoking an old-fashioned Irish clay pipe. Multiculti before multiculti was cool.

Also, that seems to be a bottle of G&D Sweet Vermouth on the table. Strictly a high class crowd.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Yep. A lot of gambling went on in the bleachers. Somebody's got a game of gin rummy going on, which was the card game du jour in 1940.

Here's some more hot pasteboard action, outside Ebbets Field before the first game of the 1951 playoff series against the Giants, as fans wait for the ticket booths to open. A few hats, a few caps, and OMG a leather jacket! And the African-American gentleman at center-right leaning over to kibitz the game seems to be smoking an old-fashioned Irish clay pipe. Multiculti before multiculti was cool.

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Notice that most of the gentleman have their pants cuffed in the "Brooklyn" style, typically 2 and 7/8ths inches, but the card player on the left, in the hat, has his at 1 and 1/2 inches, popular in Manhattan, mostly Washington Heights north of 181st Street. No doubt the lone Giants fan.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And gawd save us, those kids to the left have on JEANS. On the street! In public! What's the world coming to?

 

[Fading Fast]

The jeans "thing" is hard to get a consistent story on that seems to reflect what happened.

I've read and been told that jeans were a big part of the late 1960s social / cultural revolution, but there is plenty of pictorial (and moving picture) evidence of people wearing jeans in public prior to the late '60s. It's pretty easy to find pictures of college kids - "clean cut," etc. - wearing jeans in the '40s and '50s and what look like "respectable" dads doing so in the '50s in the suburbs.

My mom wore jeans in the '40s and '50s because other kids and young adults did and she grew up in a Jersey City - a lower middle class / blue collar neighborhood - but not a rebellious or anti-establishment one (her family or the neighborhood - as she said, we just wanted to have enough money to pay the bills - politics / social change didn't hit our radar as we were worried about paying the rent).

And back in the '40s and (less so post GI bill in the) '50s, college was for the established / upper class kids, so jeans couldn't have been that "out there" politically / socially. And again, if you watch TCM, you'll see plenty of 1940s and '50s WASPY Connecticut families where the young adults (even the younger dads and mom) are wearing jeans "in the country."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Jeans were universally worn by teenage girls in the mid-1940s, usually with an oversized men's dress shirt worn untucked, and a "Sloppy Joe" sweater. The idea that they're some kind of rebel sixties thing is simply a sign that that generation has little or no awareness of anything that happened before they were conscious.

The idea that all people in the Era stood around striking Esquire/Harper's Bazaar poses in immaculately tailored clothing is a fantasy of Hollywood, the Boys From Marketing, and internet clothing fora. The Era was actually a pretty rumpled time -- there were a lot of baggy shiny-seated pants, wrinkled cotton dresses, gravy-spotted lapels, run-over shoes, mended stockings, moth-eaten coats, and worn-out hats. To believe otherwise is to believe that human beings of that time were somehow a whole different species from those of today.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, like I said in an earlier post, they were different, but not in that sense.

It is true that we get our images and impressions of previous decades from the movies, even while ignoring some of the more obvious things, even in the movies. But the movies never pretended to be documentaries, although they (sometimes) attempted to be historically accurate. More often, though, they reversed the historical timeline. But they're just movies and it doesn't matter. Not much, anyway. Still, movies made in the 1930s sometimes clearly showed the depressing side of the depression, while post war movies rarely did. Wartime movies also had an evolution, too. The first movies tended to be set in stateside training camps. Not many movies were made of troops actually in combat, though, but the exceptions are noteworthy. After the war was over, war movies became more common and popular.

My favorite image from older movies, even into the 1950s, is when a character pulls up in front of a fancy apartment building--and parks right in front of the door! The setting inside is usually a fancy penthouse apartment which always had a padded bar in the living room. So that has always been my idea of luxury: a parking spot right out front.

 

[Fading Fast]

...My favorite image from older movies, even into the 1950s, is when a character pulls up in front of a fancy apartment building--and parks right in front of the door! The setting inside is usually a fancy penthouse apartment which always had a padded bar in the living room. So that has always been my idea of luxury: a parking spot right out front.

In general, I chuckle at any movie or TV show set in New York City that shows anyone parking, anywhere, at anytime, near where they want to with ease.

I purposely haven't owned a car in almost thirty years now as parking in NYC is absolutely, completely ridiculous. Forgot getting a spot where you want, just figuring out the byzantine rules of "alternative side of the street" parking, where you can park, what the signs mean, etc. takes an advance degree in NYC-ness.

Getting ticketed, towed or the dreaded boot is a constant fear and running out to feed the meter consumes people here.

Any movie or TV show that shows someone driving up and easily parking where they want in this city fails the reality test completely.

The true luxury "lifestyle" in this city is having a chauffeur as that is the only way one can drive up to and be picked up from right outside of where they are going. Of course, the vast majority of people here don't have chauffeurs, but this being NYC, there is small minority that (I bet) is still a meaningfully number that do as I see chauffeur-driven black SUVs and Mercedes (and I'm not talking Uber or Uber-like services, I mean the real deal - your car, your driver) all over this crazy city.

 

[BlueTrain]

People are confused about what luxury is. Luxury is not a granite countertop in the kitchen or leather seats in your car. Luxury is having a cook in the kitchen and a chauffeur in the car. I believe it used to actually be more common to have household help but what do I know. Luxury is having someone else do things for you instead of you doing them yourself.

At one time, people didn't spend a lot of money on the kitchen, even if they had a lot of money. They might have had newer or more elaborate kitchen equipment but the kitchen wasn't a place to show off. If you had company, they stayed in the living room and the dining room. That does raise the question of who is company and who is "just family," but that's beside the point. Anyway, the kitchen was probably going to be more utilitarian than it would be now and probably smaller, too, sometimes a lot smaller. It could still be a lot nicer than some people's kitchens, of course, and probably had more cabinets. That doesn't apply so much to places out in the country, though, which would invariably had larger kitchens.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In the Era, demographic researchers defined "middle class" as households with at least one servant, usually a cook-housekeeper. Think of all the movies where you have a nice young couple, or even a single woman, with a chucklin' lovable maid to deal with the dirty work. All the rest of us were working class.

When I was a kid, the idea of a house with a "dining room" was exotic -- we didn't know anybody who didn't eat all their meals in the kitchen. The idea of having a whole separate room to eat in was something we saw only on television, and had no idea why anyone would need that.

 

[Fading Fast]

I'm winging this from memory of several articles I've read - but I believe it is accurate - today, of those defined as "poor" by our gov't, well more than half have TVs, air-conditioning, cars, cell phones, computers and washers and dryers, but most middle class people do not have full-time help (they might have a "girl" who comes in and cleans once or twice a week).

This, IMHO, is do to the country's wage scale getting better from the '20s, '30s, '40s (on a relative basis, it's more expensive to hire a full-time householder helper today than it was before), appliances getting relatively much cheaper than before and our social net being more robust.

I live in a 1920s apartment in NYC that is not fancy and was never in the fancy part of town. It was middle class when it was built and is that way today (for those who know the city, I live on the Upper East Side, east of 3rd [even worse, , I live east of 2nd] where no respectable society person would be caught dead - and never would have), but the apartment - according to the original prospectus - was sold with a live in maid's room in the basement (now converted to a storage unit).

 

[Paisley]

People are confused about what luxury is. Luxury is not a granite countertop in the kitchen or leather seats in your car. Luxury is having a cook in the kitchen and a chauffeur in the car. I believe it used to actually be more common to have household help but what do I know. Luxury is having someone else do things for you instead of you doing them yourself.

At one time, people didn't spend a lot of money on the kitchen, even if they had a lot of money. They might have had newer or more elaborate kitchen equipment but the kitchen wasn't a place to show off. If you had company, they stayed in the living room and the dining room. That does raise the question of who is company and who is "just family," but that's beside the point. Anyway, the kitchen was probably going to be more utilitarian than it would be now and probably smaller, too, sometimes a lot smaller. It could still be a lot nicer than some people's kitchens, of course, and probably had more cabinets. That doesn't apply so much to places out in the country, though, which would invariably had larger kitchens.

I totally agree with your definition of luxury. It's like being rich: your money works for you, not the other way around. A fancy car or kitchen shows good taste (maybe); a look-at-me washer and dryer with matching pedestals is taste run amok.

Eat-in kitchens and breakfast nooks were popular; around here (east side of Indianapolis with houses from the 20s and 30s), those are common. Where I lived before (Denver area from around 1910), small kitchens were added on to houses.

I look at huge, overdone kitchens in magazines and all I can think of is how hard some of them would be to keep clean; marble and granite take special chemicals to maintain, and kitchens with unfinished stone and wood are virtually impossible to de-grease. Maybe the idea is to show that you can afford to either eat out all the time or tear out and replace your kitchen every ten years.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I have granite in my kitchen...in my living room...in my bathroom...on the hearth (with a real Texas limestone surround)...not because I'm trying to show off, but because I'm a geologist and think everyone should surround themselves with as much rock as they possibly can. And to that end, rocks are not delicate pieces of art. They are meant to be sat upon, kicked, poked, scratched, cut, and burned. They were here millions of years before you put them in the kitchen, and will last for millions of years after your house has turned to dust.

 

[HudsonHawk]

In general, I chuckle at any movie or TV show set in New York City that shows anyone parking, anywhere, at anytime, near where they want to with ease...

Kind of like watching Friends, where young, semi-employed 20-somethings lounge around in huge, well-appointed apartments in Greenwich Village, which rent for $10,000/month?

 

[Fading Fast]

Kind of like watching Friends, where young, semi-employed 20-somethings lounge around in huge, well-appointed apartments in Greenwich Village, which rent for $10,000/month?

I was in my twenties and lived in NYC when that show was on and - as you said - none of those guys / girls could have come close to affording those apartments. Even my friends who were doing well didn't come close to living in those type of apartments. Hey, it's TV, it's fun, but not reality at all.

 

[Fading Fast]

I have granite in my kitchen...in my living room...in my bathroom...on the hearth (with a real Texas limestone surround)...not because I'm trying to show off, but because I'm a geologist and think everyone should surround themselves with as much rock as they possibly can. And to that end, rocks are not delicate pieces of art. They are meant to be sat upon, kicked, poked, scratched, cut, and burned. They were here millions of years before you put them in the kitchen, and will last for millions of years after your house has turned to dust.

We put carrera marble counter tops in our kitchen because (1) they are very period appropriate to our 1920s coop, (2) it was one of the least expensive options - shockingly to us as we never thought we'd be able to afford it, (3) it's been used since ancient Rome and holds up very well (as long as, as you note, you are good with it showing some wear and tear) and (4) like you, we like having it around.

The in-vogue options that people want today (and that the stone yard we went to tried to talk us into) like calcutta gold marble and some other stones whose name I don't remember were a multiple higher of the price we paid for what is, by today's standards, humble carrera marble. And a picture of our counter top at the sink:

 

[HudsonHawk]

We put carrera marble counter tops in our kitchen because (1) they are very period appropriate to our 1920s coop, (2) it was one of the least expensive options - shockingly to us as we never thought we'd be able to afford it, (3) it's been used since ancient Rome and holds up very well (as long as, as you note, you are good with it showing some wear and tear) and (4) like you, we like having it around.

The in-vogue options that people want today (and that the stone yard we went to tried to talk us into) like calcutta gold marble and some other stones whose name I don't remember were a multiple higher of the price we paid for what is, by today's standards, humble carrera marble. And a picture of our counter top at the sink:

Very nice. What bugs me about stone sellers is they label everything as "granite". Granite has a very specific compositional definition, it's not a catch all for any type of natural product. It drove my wife nuts at the kitchen store when I'd start with "that's not granite, it's diorite..."

 

[BlueTrain]

We had a housekeeper when I was little but only because my mother was an invalid. My father had to work extra to pay for that. But like Hazel the maid, she was thought of as a servant, which she was, but practically as part of the family. The one I remember the best (out of a total of two) was an elderly widow whose own house was only a few blocks away. Our house seemed bare to me, even then, but her house was ever barer. She had no television but she did have a wind-up Victrola.

We have granite countertops in the kitchen and they aren't at all difficult to maintain, although they aren't intended to be scratched, kicked, poked, burned or cut. Other surfaces, including other stones, may be somewhat more trouble. Previously the countertops were tile. We also have a plain wooden floor in the kitchen and it is trouble-free, too, mostly. Personally, a large kitchen is no more trouble to keep clean than any other large room, although we never fry meat. But perhaps our standards are lower. In any event, these days, the kitchen is also an entertaining area, if it's large enough. So-called great rooms at the end of the kitchen are common. And the living room has reverted to what was once referred to as the parlor, which was actually rarely used, probably as often as the dining room. The parlor was traditionally where the body was laid out when there were viewings at home. We only used our dining room two or three times a year and there would be a big crowd there. Different families do things differently for a variety of reasons and one of them is what your living space lends itself to. If your kitchen is so small that you can stand in one place and touch opposite walls, then your guests are unlikely to congregate there except when you and your guests are "young singles" and don't even mind sitting on the floor in the living room.

Standards and definitions change over the years but luxurious and comfortable are not necessarily the same thing. A large house a hundred or two hundred years ago could be luxurious but still be cold and drafty in the winter and hot and stuffy in the summer. When we visited London a couple of years ago and toured Buckingham Palace, we were surprised to note that they actually opened the windows when it was a warm, dry day. I don't know that it is air conditioned, although I suspect it is comfortably heated in the winter.

 

[Fading Fast]

Very nice. What bugs me about stone sellers is they label everything as "granite". Granite has a very specific compositional definition, it's not a catch all for any type of natural product. It drove my wife nuts at the kitchen store when I'd start with "that's not granite, it's diorite..."

Thank you.

The stone sellers pushed obnoxiously hard to "up-sell" us ("this will last so much longer," "will cost less in the long run," "will be easier to maintain," "is what every does / is our most popular seller," blah, blah, blah), but we did our homework before going and are seasoned enough in life (i.e., we've already made the mistakes in the past) and tired enough of the BS that up-selling doesn't work, but it is still annoying to have to push through it.

You are clearly more knowledgable about geology than the "guy in the kitchen store" who knows a few facts and buzz words about stones that help him sell. I trade and manage money for a living and I almost start to bleed out of my ears when I overhear some guy in a our local bank branch try to explain investing to someone - the inaccuracy and "selling" BS is excruciating. I'm sure the professional in each field feels the same when they encounter a salesman in their area of expertise.