Enthusiasm

"Having a passable time."

Apparently the attractions of the Jersey Shore in August 1909 left something to be desired, at least in the neighborhood of Bayonne.

A Mr. Henry J. Lehman of the same Walworth Street address as the recipient is listed in several city directories of the period as an insurance agent; I've found no evidence that he was related to the famous Lehman Brothers banking family.

The January 7, 1913 edition of Brooklyn's Daily Standard Leader reports that one Benjamin Silver, who had previously been arrested for attempting to pick Henry Lehman's pocket, was charged, along with a bail bondsman named Abraham Treibitz, with offering the intended victim a $50 bribe to fail to identify Silver in court. Two detectives, tipped off by Lehman and concealed in his house, promptly arrested the pair and charged them with bribery. The charge may not have stuck: an Abraham Treibitz was still active as a bail bondsman in New York City at least as late as 1931, when he arranged for the release of five Communist leaders arrested during the International Unemployment Day demonstrations. His name also seems to have surfaced during the Seabury Commission's investigations of municipal corruption in the early 1930s, which suggests that perhaps Mr. Treibitz was not one of the more ethically scrupulous members of his profession.

Brant Rock

View cards by their nature tend to depict static scenes, with at most a few distant figures strolling on a beach or in the park, but occasionally you find some that capture more focused activity. Below are two images of a demonstration of lifesaving equipment and techniques by members of the US Coast Guard station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Clusters of onlookers, some with parasols, stand in the background.


The large building with the adjoining tower — the printer seems to have been a bit uncertain about the color of the roof — was not part of the Coast Guard station but is the Union Chapel, which still stands. I believe the Coast Guard building is the one at far right in the image at the top of the page; it was built in 1892-93 and the keeper from then until 1915 — possibly the man with the flag — was Benjamin B. Manter.

There is at least one additional postcard in this sequence, "U. S. Life Saving Crew with Beach Apparatus" (G7302), and there were also monochrome versions of some or all of the cards.

Below is the beach at Brant Rock. The tower at left in the background may be the Union Chapel but I'm not sure.


Around the time these images were created an inventor named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden built a wireless station on Brant Rock, where the first radio transmission for music and entertainment was reportedly broadcast on December 24, 1906. The Brant Rock station is also credited with the first two-way radio transatlantic transmission, with a station in Scotland, also in 1906. Its antenna was more than 400 feet high, so when completed it probably would have been easily visible to anyone in the vicinity of the Union Chapel as well as from the beach.

On the beach

Here's a selection of seaside images moving roughly from north to south along the coast of Massachusetts. Printed in vivid colors with multiple plates that are not always well-registered, some of them seem to hover between the real world and one that only exists in the mind.


If you look carefully at the two images immediately above, which may have been taken on the same day, you'll notice that the colors of the hotel roof and the chalet-like structures lower down change from one postcard to the next.

Cape Tragabigzanda

Here are a series of Rotograph images of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the peninsula to which Captain John Smith once gave the outlandish name that is this post's title, in honor, he claimed, of a Greek woman who had aided him during his captivity in Turkey. Sadly, Smith's tongue-twisting onomastic flourish was overruled in favor of the more prosaic "Cape Ann."


The above images are relatively conservative in their coloring; not so the pair immediately below, for which the printer pulled out all the stops, creating a psychedelic seaside world as alluring as it was unreal. Brilliant streaks of orange and purple flare above the horizon. These are by no means "merely" documentary images; they are miniature, bizarre works of fantastic art.


The rock formation shown above, dubbed "Old Mother Ann" and sometimes compared to New Hampshire's now-fallen "Old Man of the Mountain," was the subject of an 1892 book by the formidable Ada C. Bowles, a Gloucester native who became a leading suffragist, temperance campaigner, and ordained Universalist minister. In a capsule biography written while she was still alive, we learn that

She was born in Gloucester, Mass., in 1836. She grew up with a passionate fondness for the sea and is, as she has always been, equally at home either in or on the water. She is an expert swimmer, and her undaunted courage and rare presence of mind have enabled her upon different occasions to rescue persons from drowning.

Nature gave her a sound mind in a sound body, and her early life among the rocks of Cape Ann gave her the well balanced physical development which resulted in a perfectly healthy womanhood.

Among her other talents, "Mrs. Bowles is possessed of remarkable mechanical dexterity and handles a hammer and saw as cleverly as a rolling pin."


The Colonial Arms, above, burned on New Year's Day, 1908. The other hotels shown on this page are also apparently long gone.

Sources: Tolles, Bryant Franklin, Summer by the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels 1820-1950, University Press of New England, 2008.

Marblehead

The town of Marblehead, Massachusetts is set on a peninsula across the harbor from Salem. This selection of view cards includes structures, rocky promontories, and beaches, all as photographed ca. 1905. Nanepashemet, the namesake of the hotel above, was a Sachem of the Pawtucket Confederation until shortly before the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620. Though he was killed by members of a rival tribe, a contributing factor to his downfall was the smallpox epidemic that decimated much of Native New England in the aftermath of the first contacts with Europeans. The Nanepashemet was destroyed by fire in 1914; the the Rockmere below, which was only a few years old when the image shown was captured, was demolished in 1965.


In the postcard above an additional line of explanatory text was added below the title: "Built 1714 of Materials brought from England." The church still stands.


I at first assumed that "Moll Pitcher" above was an error for "Molly Pitcher," the famous Revolutionary War heroine, but not so; she was a Marblehead (and later Lynn) woman (ca. 1736-1813), renowned as a clairvoyant, who was the subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, a four-act drama by Joseph Stevens Jones, and an 1895 volume by Ellen Mary Griffin Hoey entitled Moll Pitcher's Prophecies: Or, The American Sibyl.


Above, two nearly identical scenes.


I assume that "Highlaud Ave." was an error for "Highland Ave." Such spelling errors are not uncommon in Rotograph cards.


Sources: Tolles, Bryant Franklin, Summer by the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels 1820-1950, University Press of New England, 2008.