The photograph above, of a Detroit street scene in 1910, became an immediate favorite of ours when we turned it up for an article about banking in the April 1984 issue. Later, a staff member who grew up in Detroit glanced at the picture and recognized the location and the bank building itself. Built in 1900, the People’s State Bank of Detroit was the first and, as it turned out, only example of the work of McKim, Mead, and White in the city, occupying a prime location at the corner of Shelby and Fort. Here, in the central business district, on the site of eighteenth-century Detroit, archeologists recently uncovered timbers of the British-built Fort Lernoult. Upon discovering that the bank building still stood, we started wondering how this same spot might appear today. A photographer was dispatched to the scene, and the results appear at right.
There have been some changes; whereas in 1910 the building occupied an area of 100 by 158 feet, a cleverly matching extension completed five years later doubled the space, creating one of the largest banking offices in the country. Another office building has sprouted behind the bank. And the handsome Hiram Walker residence, its porch just visible across the street in the 1910 view, was razed in 1926 to make room for a Federal Reserve Bank branch. Another federal building, not seen in this picture, has risen on the opposite corner; its exceptionally high first-floor window provided a good vantage for our photographer as he went about duplicating the scene.
Today the People’s Bank building serves as world headquarters for an office supply company. Although it was entered on the National Historic Register in 1982, lately there has been talk of erecting a twenty-five-story addition above it. Fortunately, for those of us who like to find some evidence of “then” in a “then and now” feature, that plan seems to have gone aglimmering.
Built in 1900, the People’s Bank later gained a cleverly matching extension that doubled the space.
… and New York …
The photographer William Henry Jackson set up his camera in 1890 a continent away from the magnificent Western landscapes that had made him famous. He picked a spot just above 182nd Street on the west shore of New York City’s Harlem River and produced the view above. We are looking south toward two unusually significant bridges. The distant one is the earlier: High Bridge was built in 1848 by the indefatigable engineer John Jervis to carry the two big cast-iron pipes that would bring water to Manhattan from Croton.
With its fifteen masonry spans, Jervis’s twelve-hundred-foot bridge looks as noble as any of its Roman predecessors. It stood intact for seventy years, but in 1920 the War Department declared it a threat to navigation and called for its destruction. This sparked fierce public protest, and the issue was finally settled two years later when a 322-foot single span replaced five of the original arches. The uneasy marriage of two unrelated structures at least preserved some of the old stonework, and High Bridge survives today as the earliest bridge connecting Manhattan to the mainland.
Washington Bridge, in the foreground, opened just a year before Jackson took his picture, which shows one of the bridge’s two 510-foot river spans. The ambitious structure met with a blasé reception, and Scientific American complained that “a few years ago a single span of this length, save in a suspension bridge, would have been considered wonderful. At the present day we are inclined to the opposite extreme, and accept all engineering achievements with too little appreciation of their merits.”
Scientific American would have been impressed even more by the interloper: the Alexander Hamilton Bridge flung a fifteen-hundred-foot span across the river in 1964. It carries the Cross Bronx Expressway to Manhattan and is, according to Norval White and Elliot Willensky’s superb AIA Guide to New York City, “serviceable, but dull to look at.” Perhaps, but standing as it does with its stone and steel colleagues, it makes a brave show, one that offers up at a glance a century and a half of engineering history.
In 1920 the War Department started calling for the destruction of the handsome old bridge.
… and Santa Barbara
On a hot day around 1910, Santa Barbarans have ridden the streetcar out to the northern end of the line to take in a band concert at the Plaza del Mar. Santa Barbara early became a center of California tourism, and the Potter Hotel, at the far left, offered palatial shelter to the likes of Andrew Carnegie and Philip Armour after it opened in 1903. The string of black dots along the roof line of the nearest building are paper lanterns, and they signal an attraction that was as much a fixture of the era as band concerts and streetcars: the Japanese tea garden.
The three-quarters of a century that stands between the pictures has seen sweeping changes overtake the shoreline, and they are eloquent not only about the wages of time but also of the difficulties of exactly pairing modern pictures with old ones.
The original photograph was taken from the top of a low building that bordered the plaza. In 1943 the plaza disappeared when Cabrillo Boulevard was extended through it, and the closest our photographer could get to his predecessor’s vantage point was a hillside beyond. The big municipal pool, seen at the right of the recent photograph, was completed in 1939. The Potter Hotel burned down in 1921. The site of the Japanese tea garden has been taken over by a motel, although the palm trees in front of it are still there, now grown much taller. And, of course, the spine of the Santa Ynez Mountains runs unchanged along the horizon. It remains a pleasant place—there are still band concerts, in Plaza del Mar Park on the inland side of Cabrillo Boulevard—and yet it is difficult not to regret the vanished plaza with its little iron fountain.
There is, however, one surprising survivor: the 2,100-foot ocean pier at the right in the background of both pictures. Built in 1872 and restored in 1981, and now housing restaurants, shops, and a seafood market, Stearns Wharf is flourishing as California’s oldest working pier.
The changes here are eloquent of the difficulties of matching modern photographs with old ones.
