{"id":1675,"date":"2012-01-01T11:55:42","date_gmt":"2012-01-01T16:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=1675"},"modified":"2012-01-06T10:28:01","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T15:28:01","slug":"picture-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2012\/01\/picture-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Picture of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"Purchase <\/a> \"View <\/a>
\n12th and Market Streets-Northwest Corner, 1911.<\/span><\/div>\n

PhillyHistory.org<\/a> offers up in excess of 84,000 photographs, more than what the most hopeless visual addict would care to peruse. Even a decade\u2019s worth is daunting. (From 1900 to 1910 you\u2019ll find 4,287 images online.) But if you parse PhillyHistory more closely and narrow your search down to a single year (there are 333 photographs from 1911<\/a>) you’ll have something that\u2019s not only reasonable, but rewarding<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One blogger\u2019s opinion: The Best Picture Of The Year <\/em>is the illustrated photograph of 12th and Market Streets. Are there runners up? Not really. But a number of other images made their way into a list of top choices. Each in its own way gives a feel for Philadelphia a century ago. <\/p>\n

We were delighted to come across this classic image<\/a> of the doorway at 305 Delancey Street. The door as artifact speaks to the city\u2019s perennial interest in the past; the children make it a distinctive moment in the present of 1911.<\/p>\n

Halfway across town, near City Hall, we see some aggressive commercial signage<\/a> on Juniper Street. Around the corner at 1427 Arch Street, E.R. Williams made and sold much needed \u201cArtificial Limbs.\u201d<\/a> We found both images compelling.<\/p>\n

Why would a city photographer record the side-by-side Philadelphia School for Nurses and the Florentine Art Plaster Company? The peaceful pair of buildings<\/a> at 2217-2219 Chestnut Street would soon be disrupted by the widening of the bridge over the Schuylkill.<\/p>\n

Nineteen eleven saw an impressive improvements to the city\u2019s infrastructure. See the tracks and trestle at Pier #6<\/a>; an impressive bridge superstructure<\/a> as Passyunk Avenue crossed the Schuylkill; a monster sewer project<\/a> at Mill Creek (48th Street and Haverford Avenue) and the fresh, new \u201cNortheast Boulevard,\u201d<\/a> before it acquired the Roosevelt name. <\/p>\n

But the image of the intersection at 12th and Market beats all. It displays every form of transportation known to Philadelphians at the time: horses, automobiles, trolley cars and the railroad, by proximity. (There\u2019s a meager slice of the Reading Terminal Head House visible on the right, but anyone and everyone knows the building dominates the intersection like a cliff hovering over a canyon.) It\u2019s a photographic capture of the spirit of busy Market Street, a retake of John Sloan\u2019s 1901 painting at East Entrance, City Hall, Philadelphia<\/a><\/em> which hangs today in The Columbus Museum of Art. <\/p>\n

The idea of both images is not about buildings, or transportation, but the liveliness of the street. When Sloan\u2019s friend and mentor Robert Henri saw the partially-finished painting he urged Sloan to: “get the figures below to give as much of that eternal business of life – going in and coming out.” <\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s it. Our anonymous photographer from 1911 captured that \u201ceternal business of life,\u201d something we\u2019ll always be looking for\u2014no matter what the year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12th and Market Streets-Northwest Corner, 1911. PhillyHistory.org offers up in excess of 84,000 photographs, more than what the most hopeless visual addict would care to peruse. Even a decade\u2019s worth is daunting. (From 1900 to 1910 you\u2019ll find 4,287 images online.) But if you parse PhillyHistory more closely and narrow your search down to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}