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Collecting Century-Old Postcards from the Rockaways (2004)

Scarcely a great enthusiast for photography in general, I’ve never collected photographs or books about photography, don’t often use my 35-mm. camera, and still haven’t purchased a digital camera, though I envy its owners for circulating their images over the Internet. Since my disinterests don’t much concern me, I’m not sure why I ignore photographs. Perhaps I find them limited, much like newspapers, which I don’t often read either.

Nonetheless, I’ve recently begun a rich collection of picture postcards from the New York City beach town where I plan to live—the environs of Arverne in the New York City Rockaways. These cards portray not Arverne now but the beach town as it was a century ago. That’s why I collect them. Unlike most self-consciously artful photographs taken a century ago, these picture postcards feature not particular people but common scenes particularly familiar to Arverne at that time. Indicatively, commercial postcards, rather than personal photographs, provide most of the historic pictures in the unique book Old Rockaway, New York, in Early Photographs (Dover, 2000).

Given that the under-populated Rockaways today are less fashionable than beach towns further out on Long Island, these postcards in sum evoke a more prosperous, more crowded earlier time that should not be forgotten. Recalling that I made two decades ago a film about Berlin in the early twentieth-century as reflected in the great Jewish cemetery surviving there, I suspect that my enthusiasm for these cards depends upon a similar historical imagination. Just as Berlin was once a greater city, so the Rockaways were formerly greater beach towns. How can we surmise now about how people lived then from how Arverne looked then.

A recent show of photographs of New York City at the Metropolitan Museum included a display box with several picture postcards collected from the 1920s to the 1950s by the noted photographer Walker Evans, whom the caption says amassed over nine thousand cards. Returning to this exhibition a second time, I once again found these anonymous pictures of my home town scenes more engaging that the framed photographs around them, produced though the latter were by identifiable, often famous artists.

Most of these old postcards I purchased through the internet auction called Ebay, which fulfills a postcard collectors’ dream, much as Advanced Book Exchange on the Internet fulfills a used-book maven’s dream, because I can quickly summon all the Arverne or Rockaway cards currently available from many sellers around the world. (One came from Norway; another from Czechslovakia. One from Britain was inexplicably postmarked in Liverpool in 1904.) I’ve yet to pay more than twenty bucks for any of them and am not planning to do so.

What the old picture postcards show first of all is grand hotels at the beginning of the 20 th century, mostly near the beach. Most are less than seven stories high, presumably lacking elevators, and thus for grandiosity compensate with width what they lack in height. Indeed, one that didn’t survive long looks to be a few blocks in length parallel to the ocean. In front of some are black automobiles beside buggies drawn by horses. Other cards show rows of three-story detached houses. What makes the cards nostalgic is the fact that none of these buildings—absolutely none--survived fire or the urban-renewal bulldozer. Another cause for nostalgia is that no cards date from later than 1950. Indeed, I’m not aware of any Rockaways postcards being published today.

Other cards feature summertime clothing that by current fashions looks uncomfortably cumbersome—jackets, ties, and hats not only for men but even for boys; foot-length skirts for women. One card postmarked in 1909 shows a young couple from behind, facing the ocean, their heads tilted into one another, looking from the neck upwards much like lovers would today. While he is dressed in a tank top exposing his shoulders, she wears a dress that appears to include long sleeves. (You naturally wonder what they wore while making love.) A final theme of the cards is pre-air-conditioned ingenuity, as in a theater located on stilts that extend into the ocean whose temperature would usually be cooler than that on land.

The overall theme of the cards for me is evoking an earlier time. They show boardwalks and beaches, still extant to be sure, but then filled with many more people than the same locations have nowadays. One card portrays “Charley, the Hermit, at Rockaway Beach,” in front of a shack that would be nowadays be condemned as uninhabitable. Another card titled “Villas” portrays not elegant suburban homes but single-story bungalows bunched together. A third card portrays rows of tents—a literal tent city—some of which have front fences, creating a kind of porch, reminding us of kinds of cheap summer housing that, though physically feasible, would be legally unacceptable today. People are seen in the ocean, surrounded by networks of ropes on vertical poles some of which have donut-shaped life-preservers hooked onto them, I guess in lieu of human lifeguards; but nobody is seen doing the ocean equivalent of lap swimming. The shock to those familiar with the Rockaways now is that all the people portrayed in these cards look Caucasian.

Some of the Rockaway cards are based on photographs, others are paintings; some seem reproduced from hand-colored photographs. Most were mailed; others not. Some have trivial messages on the same side as their stamps; on others, handwriting defaces the picture. In their artlessness is not only information but, in sum, an extraordinary evocation I treasure.