Factory Portrait Complete!

Adrienne Langer, 1241, 2012, pen and marker drawing.

I recently posted on artist Adrienne Langer’s visit to our collection to research a local factory in order to create a “factory portrait” of the exterior.  The Main Belting Factory, located on Carpenter Street in South Philadelphia, was an active manufacturing company in the late 19th century and its structure has since been turned into studio space and offices.  Langer has just completed the drawing above, which will hang in the lobby of the building.

Main Belting Company.  Philadelphia, Pa., The Book of its Bourse & Co-operating Public Bodies (Philadelphia , 1898).

We were excited to see how she incorporated historical elements of the building into her work, including a water tower (seen in the below photograph showing a rear view) and an operating smoke stack, providing the viewer with a glimpse of what the factory may have looked like when in operation.  The palette of browns she used is reminiscent of old sepia-toned photographs and the original railroad tracks and cobblestone street included in the foreground, as visible in the above photograph, add to the historical charm made possible by the documentation found in our collections.

Jackson-Cross Company, Rear of 1217-41 Carpenter St. on Montrose St., ca. 1940.

Langer was pleased to locate a variety of resources for her project at the Library Company and hopes to utilize our collections again soon.  We wish her well and hope to see more building portraits in the near future!

Nicole Joniec
Print Department Assistant & Digital Collections Manager

Revisiting the Past

Over the summer the Print Department hosted a half-day orientation for teachers attending a Library of Congress “Teaching with Primary Sources” seminar about the history of photography in relation to identity. In preparing for the presentation, I had the opportunity to revisit material I had researched and cataloged several years ago. One such item was a photograph album compiled 1892-1893 by Ida F. Drew, a student in her last year at the Ogontz School for Girls in Elkins Park, Pa. Having not had access to Ancestry.com during my initial work with the album, I thought I would take advantage of it now to find out a little bit more about Miss Drew. What had become of the girl who had compiled a volume of formal class photographs and views of her school in the early 1890s, as well as numerous snapshots of her school chums and family friends during outings and vacations?

 It turns out that Miss Drew was still Miss Drew and living with her parents, prominent lawyer and general Charles W. Drew and Anna Fleetwood, in Chicago in 1900.  By the 1910 census, she was the wife of Chicago lawyer Bertrand Walker whom she wed on September 14, 1901. From the census data, it appears that she had no children, though servants were regularly listed as part of the household. She died on September 2, 1946, outlived by her husband, and was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.  Much still remains a mystery about Ida Drew Walker—including which of the young ladies in the photographs is she! Nonetheless a little more about her life has come to light.

Erika Piola

Associate Curator, Prints and Photographs

 

Portrait of Once-Thriving South Philadelphia Factory Building

Recent photograph of former Main Belting Company building by Adrienne Langer

The Print and Photograph Department was recently visited by artist Adrienne Langer, who was looking for information about the Main Belting Company factory located at 1217-37 Carpenter Street in South Philadelphia.  Langer has studio space in the building, which has been renovated to house offices and artists’ studios.  She was hoping to locate historical images of the structure to use as a reference when she creates a “house,” or in this case “factory,” portrait of the building’s exterior.  

Main Belting Company.  Philadelphia, Pa., The Book of its Bourse & Co-operating Public Bodies (Philadelphia, 1898). 

Langer located the above image in George Engelhardt’s Philadelphia, Pa., The Book of its Bourse & Co-operating Public Bodies, a valuable publication in the Reading Room’s reference collection that describes the city’s businesses and industries in 1898.  This image will help her to understand the building’s former appearance.

Jackson-Cross Company, Rear of 1217-41 Carpenter St. on Montrose St., ca. 1940.

In addition, I was able to locate the rear view of the building above, which intrigued Langer. This glimpse back in time reveals how the windows looked with their original glass panes intact, and that there was once a passageway where there is now a loading dock.  Below is a modern-day photograph from the same vantage point illustrating how much the space has changed, with the home on the left no longer present.
  

Rear photograph of former Main Belting Company building by Adrienne Langer

We are pleased Langer was able to find historical photographs in our collections that give her a better understanding of the architectural makeup of the existing structure, especially since many of the original elements have been altered over time.  Langer plans on sharing the final product with us so expect a follow-up blog post in the near future!

Nicole Joniec
Print Department Assistant & Digital Collections Manager

Outtakes

One of my unrealized drawings

Inspired by my visit to the Library Company this spring, I have spent the summer as a Visual Culture Program Intern happily creating new works based on the Schoenhut circus toy catalog from 1917 and the other toy-related materials in the library’s collection representative of the period 1850-1950.

A preliminary sketch becoming a sculpture

For all the things that have gone smoothly, there have been a few others that have not. But trial and error, at least in my experience, are a normal occurrence in the art world. From accumulations of unrealized drawings and ideas, to making the same piece over and over because of an issue with a measurement, to gluing something on the wrong way; it has all happened.

In organizing my schedule, I gave myself about two weeks to work on each of ten toys that I planned to create during my internship. Some sculptures, like the Roly Polys and Rolley Sheep, went smoothly and--as I now know--gave me a false sense of security. When I began work on the more intricate toys, like my cam tiger tamer and voting bear, the pieces took much longer than I expected. Nonetheless, as I reached the final few days of my internship, I wrapped everything up nicely. The final details worked out well, except when I got distracted or tired or rushed and did something not very smart. This happened with my Walking Bear sculpture, the piece representing my final decade of research - the 1940s.

The infamous gear set

I purchased a gear set for the internal mechanics, thinking that I would just build around it. But that proved problematic until I finally figured out a good way to construct an outer design with which I was happy and that would fit around the inner workings. When I finally solved this problem, I glued on the outer layer to form the figure of the bear. A few days later I decided to test the bear.  Great job Jesse! He walks in the wrong direction. I had assembled the gears inside the body backwards. I couldn’t stop laughing. You just have to roll with the punches sometimes as an artist and I have decided he is “backwards” walking bear.

I am incredibly lucky to have had this internship and have learned so much about my craft and myself while working at the Library Company. This summer has been a really wonderful experience and I just want to end this post by saying thank you to everyone at the library who I came into contact with. I have always felt accepted here and I had a wonderful time interning under the Visual Culture Program.

Jesse Lentz

Moore College of Art ‘13

VCP Artist-in-Residence Intern

A Playful Record: Victorian Photo Collage

Recently, I was given the opportunity to design an event invitation for the Philadelphia on Stone book launch party on October 23 at The Library Company. As the party is an ode to the great lithography of the Victorian era, I played with styles and themes from the time period, namely Victorian photo-collage. 

Victorian photo-collage is a whimsical combination of photography, printmaking, and painting popular in the family scrapbooks of aristocratic Victorian women in the mid to late 19th century. One would find a cut-out of a portrait, a head or a whole body, placed in a painted scene or combined with lithographs. The scene could be somewhat realistic such as a drawing of a parlor or garden, but often the scenes achieved a surrealistic quality and portraits were placed in fantastical settings where heads did not match bodies, gravity was not a law of physics, and inanimate objects took on a life of their own. 

              (click to enlarge)

When putting together the invitation, I decided to take a more straightforward approach. I created a digital collage using the photographic heads of prolific lithographers and pen and ink drawings of their bodies, the library setting, and the lithograph press. I can see why the practice was so popular because once I combined the first photograph with my drawing I could not help but smile and laugh. In an era where a photograph could not capture a smile due to the long exposures needed, the whimsy of Victorian photo-collage brought a cheerful element of play that was lacking into family albums.

Concetta Barbera

Digitization Technician

You can see more of my work here:  http://www.growingdown.com