To the Far East and Back Via Troopship: 1963-64

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with art. But Bill Shakespeare's plays give me license to change the pace now and then, so here is another post with a dump of old photos I took.

The occasion was my army assignment to Korea back in the days before 1970 or thereabouts when many troops were deployed overseas by ship rather than by air.

Nothing profound here, but I hope a few readers will enjoy seeing how some things were, those many years ago. I sailed from the Oakland Army Terminal in September of 1963, arriving in Korea early that October. I left Korea in August of the following year a few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that set off America's formal involvement in the Vietnam War, arriving in Oakland for my discharge at the start of September. Click on the images to enlarge.

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Hawaii: Waikiki as seen from the Punchbowl. That's Diamond Head at the left, and the long, flat structure on the right near the shore is the Ala Moana shopping mall that opened four years earlier. High-rise hotels were starting to sprout, but were still few compared to now.

Here is Kalakaua Avenue, Waikiki's main drag. This was probably taken near the Moana hotel. The tall building in the distance is still there, as can be seen below in the Appendix.

The beach at Waikiki. The pink building is the famous Royal Hawaiian hotel, and the white buildings to the right are the Moana hotel and its Surfrider annex. At the far left the new, tall Ilikai Hotel is rising. Today, the backdrop to this scene is high-rise structures.

Yokohama harbor, our first Far East stop.

On deck at sea aboard the General Hugh J. Gaffey.

Sergeants and other E-4 and higher ranks debarking at Naha, Okinawa.

The Gaffey docked at Naha. The 1944-vintage ship was 608 feet long (slightly less than 200 meters) and was designed to hold 5,200 troops. When I sailed, there might have been 1,500 aboard.

The port area at Inchon, Korea and Wolmi-Do island is at the right. On the far side of it is where on 15 September 1950 MacArthur's troops landed far behind the North Korean lines to turn the tide during the first phase of the Korean War. The Gaffey is in the distance at the left behind the masts of the landing barge. Tides at Inchon are extreme, so a ship as large as the Gaffey could not approach the shoreline and we had to use the barges to come ashore.  The army trucks by the barges will be taking us to Ascom City for processing and assignment to our units.

The plaza across from the Seoul, Korea main railroad station from where this picture was taken. The vehicles include Japanese-made sedans, hopsung vans and busses built on army truck chassis. I was on my way south to Taegu for duty at the headquarters of the 7th Logistical Command.

Approaching San Francisco on my way home aboard the General J.C. Breckenridge, the same class of ship as the Gaffey.

Still offshore. The Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point and Alcatraz are in the background. Many of the soldiers about to be discharged tore their rank insignia from their sleeves for some reason. I did not, for some reason.

Appendix

I visited Honolulu recently and took some photos in an attempt to do a "Then and Now" for some of the images shown above.

I couldn't duplicate the point-of-view of the Kalakaua Avenue scene due to the presence of more recent buildings, so this was taken from the opposite direction. The "tall" drum-shaped building in the 1963 photo can be found near the center of the image, above the cars.

A December 2016 view of the Waikiki beach area from a slightly different angle and closer. The Moana is at the right and the Royal is at the center.

More June, 1965 New York City Photos

Some readers have been enjoying viewing my old photos of New York City. So why not post more?

The current batch of June, 1965 photos has less quality that some of the previous sets, but I hope the subject matter will be interesting. Click on the images to enlarge.

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Airliners at JFK Airport
Shown are Boeing 707s, at least one DC-8, one or perhaps two Convair 880s or 990s, and an older Lockheed Constellation. The Aer Lingus in the foreground had boarding stairs positioned fore and aft. Casually approaching the plane are some passengers about to board. One is unlikely to see this at JFK nowadays.

Women on Sixth Avenue

People, Sixth Avenue

Across 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal
The bus might not be air conditioned: note the open windows.

Sherman Statue, Grand Army Plaza
Nowadays the ensemble of Victory leading General Sherman and his horse is covered in gold leaf. I prefer the more sombre version shown here.

Commuters on West 42nd Street
The Port Authority bus terminal was (and is) located between 8th and 9th avenues and 40th and 41st streets. So it's likely that some of the people heading towards the left of this photo are on their way to the terminal and then on to New Jersey and home.

West 42nd Street Store fronts
Second-run movie houses and stores selling cheap goods were the rule on 42nd Street west of Times Square in 1965.

Vanished and Vanishing New York: 1960s Photos

New York City has been demolishing its past and rebuilding since it was established by the Dutch in 1624. Recent decades have seen successful efforts to preserve buildings that otherwise might have been destroyed.

This post is a photo essay showing some photos I took in April of 1962 when I was stationed at Fort Slocum (also gone), the summer of 1963 when I was at Fort Meade, Maryland, and in June of 1965 when I was gathering information for my Masters thesis. Perhaps some readers who are New York fans might appreciate them.

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Art Students League, West 57th Street (1962)
The building still exists, but overshadowed and overhung by a large modern tower, as this Observer article reports.

Columbus Circle, Gallery of Modern Art under construction (1962)
Millionaire Huntington Hartford favored a more traditional variety of modern art, so he had this building created to display it. The exterior was sheathed in marble, but only bits were in place when I photographed it. Edward Durell Stone was the architect. I visited it once, and all I remember was that it seemed cramped. The museum closed in 1969 and this explains what happened since. Yes, that's the Empire State Building at the left, sighted down Broadway.

Savoy Plaza Hotel (1963)
It's the building to the right. This isn't a good photo and many fine ones can be found on the internet. I include it because it's mine. The hotel was replaced by the large, nondescript, General Motors Building. The tall building is the Sherry-Netherland hotel-plus-apartments that still stands. The Savoy Plaza Wikipedia entry is here.

Singer Building (1963)
This was for a short while (1908-09) the tallest building in the city. It was demolished by taking it apart bit-by-bit in 1968. Its tall shaft was capped by the slightly bulbous top pictured here.  It never looked right to me. More information is here.

Tribune Building (1962)
During the late 1800s some newspaper offices clustered near City Hall, and the Tribune was one of them. The building by Richard Morris Hunt was completed in 1875 and demolished in 1966. More information is here.

Subway entrance/exit, Park Avenue South & East 28th Street (1963)
This is what subway entrances often looked like early in the 20th century. They were disappearing when I made a point of taking this picture. The drab-looking neighborhood has been gentrified, if Google street views are any guide.

42nd Street, west of Times Square (1965)
This stretch of 42nd Street has been spruced up a little in recent times. Fifty years ago it was more gritty, as can be seen here. Those movie theaters were second-run houses. When a movie had its initial run, it would be seen around the corner in Times Square on Broadway or Seventh Avenue. When attendance fell off, the film would move to a house on 42nd where prices were lower and affordable for people with limited entertainment budgets. Back in those pre-internet days, one way of telling the commercial success of a movie was to take note of how long it lasted in Times Square before it went to 42nd.

Railroad yard revealed below new construction, Park Avenue (1965)
The Wikipedia entry on Park Avenue mentions that the street is partly built over railroad tracks. In my New York days, the New York Central and New Haven lines came down Park and then around 50th Street fanned out to Grand Central Terminal's gate system. The photo was taken while construction was getting underway at 299 Park Avenue, the Westvaco Building, as it was first called. The link mentions that the tracks under the building site were those of the New Haven. Since not many buildings are built along this stretch of Park, my camera captured a rare sight.

Ziegfeld Theatre (1965)
The Ziegfeld Theatre designed by Joseph Urban opened in 1927 and was demolished in 1966 as this Wikipedia entry reports. When my photo was taken it was clearly on its way out. So, like the subway entrance above, I made sure to photograph it.

New York City People: 1965

During the 1960s, rigid following of women's clothing and grooming fashions began to fall away. I find it fairly easy to guess the approximate dates of when photos taken in the years from around 1910 until about 1960, even if there were no cars in the background to refine my analysis. But after 1960, it isn't at all that simple.

Yes, the current scene of casual clothing with plenty of dominant logotypes is different from what one saw 50 years ago, but not by all that much. Today, 50-year-old scenes don't strike me as old-fashioned  seeming as 50-year-old scenes did in 1966 -- or 100-year old scenes do today (the same scenes, of course, from 50 years farther out).

Below are photos I took of people in New York City in June of 1965. While the subjects do not appear totally modern, they are close enough that they can be seen as simply people, and not participants in a retro costume party.

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Tourists on Sixth Avenue.

Women on Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center in background.

Women near Sixth Avenue.

Passing out pamphlets, Fifth Avenue & 49th Street.

Window shopper, East 49th Street.

Vendor, Downtown Manhattan.

Vendor, Sixth Avenue & 51st Street.

Carriages at the Plaza.  The building at the left across Fifth Avenue is the Sherry-Netherland, at the right is the Savoy Plaza.

Unloading a Cadillac, Central Park South.

Masked girls crossing Madison Avenue for some unknown purpose.

TWA Terminal at JFK Airport : Some 1965 Photos

There is little lack of photographs of the TWA terminal designed by Eero Saarinen at JFK Airport in New York City, but I'll add to that pile in this post.

For some background on the terminal, its Wikipedia entry is here.

It was an astonishing building when it opened in May of 1962, and remains so. TWA was staggering by the 1980s however, entering its first bankruptcy in 1991 and ten years later its remains were acquired by American Airlines. The terminal has had an equally uneven existence, and the plan is to transform it into a hotel -- the structure being the hotel's public areas (as best I can tell).

With one exception, the photos below were taken by me in June of 1965. They originally were slides that I scanned, cropped in many cases, and most had their color adjusted. They are not great photographic art, but might give you the flavor of the place when it was still fairly new.

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View of the TWA terminal when nearly completed.

The approach was through a parking lot that is long gone.

Heading towards the entrance from the passenger drop-off zone.

The clock says it's nearly 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

The tube-like shape in the background is a passageway to the airplanes.

View from the upper level.

A conversation nook.

The restaurant-bar.  The tail of a KLM airliner is seen at the extreme left.

Another view from the second level. It's now exactly 6 p.m.

Flight information board.  The parking lot can be seen in the background.

The building is visually entertaining because all those sweeping shapes have to come together here and there to create interesting details such as this.