Philadelphia Suburban Trolley Cars of the 1930s

People joke about Brooklyn. And New Jersey (pronounced "joy-zee" when joking or actually from Hoboken).

Then there is Philadelphia, "city of brotherly love" and the subject of a few knife-twisters. For example (if I remember this right), W.C. Fields on the matter of death mused "on the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." Then there is the apocryphal contest where first prize is one week in Philadelphia and the second prize is two weeks there.

Me? I lived there the better part of three years as a Penn grad student.

Actually, I'm not telling the complete truth. For about six months of that time I lived in Lansdowne, a suburb just west of the city. Across the street in front of our apartment house and parallel to it ran the Red Arrow trolley line (Some links about the Red Arrow are here and here). The coaches were pretty old-fashioned looking even in 1967, but I found that kinda neat.

Inbound trains rolled past our place down the hill to the station at 69th Street where the line terminated and a Philly-bound passenger would have to transfer to a bus or subway line to continue his journey.

The 69th Street Terminal is also anchor to one end of the Philadelphia-Norristown interurban line (some links are here and here). In those days, the interurban ran fascinating coaches whose ends were shaped in a early Buck Rogers sci-fi fashion. I never had a reason to travel that route, but once upon a time decided that I had to do so, and did before some fool decided to get rid of those fabulously archaic-futuristic coaches.

Here's what I'm raving about:

Red Arrow car

Red Arrow car as seen in the 1960s

Philadelphia and Western (Philadelphia-Norristown) interurban Brill "Bullet" car

Lineup of Bullet cars in the 1970s

The Norristown Bullet cars were built around 1930 by Philadelphia's Brill company (Wikipedia link here). Since they ran as fast as 70 miles per hour (a bit more than 100 kph), end designs were tested in a wind tunnel -- a progressive and unusual practice at the time.

The bottom photo gives the better sense of the Bullets, but to fully appreciate their look, they had to be seen in motion -- particularly at speed.

Lawrence, the Neglected

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was one of those painters fated to be honored in his own time and rapidly neglected following his death. I originally titled this post "Lawrence, the Forgotten" but decided that was too extreme because he never became utterly unknown. Indeed, his some paintings have resided in important collections since the day they left his studio.

Somewhere I read that Lawrence's reputation fell because he specialized in painting portraits of the famous and wealthy. And maybe because of his ties to George IV as regent and king. Could be, though not many artists of his time devoted careers to depicting peasants and shopkeepers. That subject matter started coming into vogue around the time he died, so it's not really fair to fault him on that score.

Perhaps a more realistic possibility is that he wasn't Sir Joshua Reynolds who, along with Sir Thomas Gainsborough, dominated English portraiture for a good part of the 18th century: call it Reynolds-or-nothing for many critics. Then too, he had strong rivals such as Sir Henry Raeburn during his career, and these might have diminished his later stature.

For what it's worth, the Lawrence portraits I come across in major museums strike me as quite good (though they probably represent some of the cream of his crop). Like most artists, quality of his work varies; to see a cross-section (along with those ringers that creep into a search) Google on his name and then select Images.

The Wikipedia entry for Lawrence is here, and an item from the Telegraph about his swingin' bachelorhood is here

Below are examples of his work.

Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington - 1814
This was painted the year of Waterloo and probably is the definitive portrait of the Duke.

John Philip Kemble as Cato - 1812

Maria, Lady Callcott - 1819
This is almost surely unfinished, so it offers a window into Lawrence's technique; try clicking to enlarge.

William Wilberforce (detail)
Another unfinished work. Nowadays painters are urged to "work the whole canvas" while developing a painting. Portrait artists, given the problem of getting enough sitter-time, often have little choice but to get the face done first and then complete the work as best they can if the sitter can no longer sit.

Marguerite, Countess of Blessington (detail)

Blogging Note

We're off to Spain, Portugal and Morocco tomorrow and return the 29th of this month.

But posting at Art Contrarian will not cease -- provided that the blogging software by those kind geniuses at Google does what it's expected to do.

I've written 11 articles and stuffed them into a publish-date queue. A new post should appear every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (West Coast USA reference) while I'm away.

While on the road, I'll check the blog and my email as best I can. But be advised that it might be days or weeks before a comment gets vetted by me and published.

Happy reading!

Sinister-Looking Car

Selecting a styling theme for an automobile is a tricky business. For that reason, many car designs have tended to be bland or highly derivative -- remember back around 1980 when a number of brands featured boxy styling that clearly was inspired by Mercedes-Benz?

There is the related, but hard to put one's finger on, factor of "personality:" consider the various iterations of the cute Volkswagen "Beetle" or Plymouth/Dodge Neon from the mid-1990s. Luxury makes often attempt to look dignified -- stately and conservative. In general, where personality is consciously injected into a design, it is something positive that a potential buyer might relate to.

So why then did Honda's Acura brand move to a style image that strikes me as being sinister?

Acura TL - 2010

Acura has been a runner-up near-luxury make. It hasn't had a racing heritage image such as Mercedes or Maserati or a performance-sedan persona like BMW's. And so far as I can judge, it never was skewed to one driver-sex; not a "chick car" nor "guy car."

Well, now it's a male-image car; a sub-middle-aged male one. Note all those sharp cuts and angled shapes in the grille and trunk areas.

This is not to say that only youngish, car-performance freak guys will be the only buyers. Still, I can't believe Honda consciously wants to abandon other, larger demographic market segments. Perhaps they simply want the car to be "edgy" (in more than one context), and are placing a bet on the Bob Lutz concept: Intense approval for some buyers is better for sales than blandness that doesn't have much effect one way or another.

Me? I don't mind the looks of the Acura TL and would consider buying one if I had the money and was needful of a new car. Though it might not be my first choice.

Traveling "Victorian" in the 1960s

Even 50 years ago rail-based passenger conveyances tended to look sleek and sometimes even streamlined and racy.

But there was an exception that I stumbled across in the bowels of New York City in the early 1960s -- the Hudson & Manhattan rail line colloquially known as the "Hudson Tubes." During the 60s the New York - New Jersey Port Authority took over the H&M, re-equipped it and renamed it PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson), in which guise it exists today.

For a while during my three-year Army career I was stationed near New York City and got into town on pass every weekend. Some weekends I'd sleep over in Hoboken, New Jersey at the Stevens Tech chapter of my college fraternity. Normally when getting there I'd catch the Hoboken bus at the west side Port Authority terminal. But occasionally I'd ride the Hudson Tubes. There was a Tubes station at 33rd Street not far from Pennsylvania Station (the original building was still standing then) and I would work my way down stairs and through tunnels to that Midtown terminus of the H&M.

Once there, I beheld archaic train coaches whose design dated from more than 50 years previously. It was almost like stepping into a time machine. I hope the illustrations below give you at least a slight feeling of what I experienced.

(For a general history of the H&M and PATH, click here. More detailed information regarding the Hudson Tubes can be found here and here.)

Old Hudson & Manhattan route map

Crossover at 9th Street in Manhattan - photo from 1907

"Class B" coach
Such coaches were built from 1909 until 1928. They were still in service in the early 1960s.

H&M train as seen in New Jersey where the line ran mostly above-ground
This is how I remembered them. Dark, sooty-looking exterior; probably due to the paint-job, but a dirty appearance nevertheless. In a station all you'd see of the coach was the part above the bottom of the doors. This made the arched window and door shapes stand out -- very static looking, actually, and not at all the speed-style for transportation conveyances the began to appear in the 1930s. Another impression I had was that the H&M coaches were noticeably smaller than New York City subway cars, and this added to the quaintness of the Hudson Tubes experience in those days.

Groping for the Platonic TV Set

It's often interesting to examine design from the point when a type of product makes its first commercial appearance until things settle down to a "best" general solution that persists with relatively minor variations until the class of product becomes obsolete or a major technological advance requires a renewed design evolution.

Designers are literally making things up as they're going on, uncertain what the ultimate general solution will be. There are trials, errors and successes (measured by market acceptance) along the way.

Today's post deals with television set design evolution in a sketchy way from the late 1930s till nearly 1960. Call it 20 years -- 15 if the "time out" for World War 2 is factored in. By "sketchy" I mean that entire classes of TV sets such as tabletop or semi-portable examples are omitted from this review. Perhaps I'll get around to dealing with them another time.

Marconi - 1937

RCA sets displayed at 1939 New York World's Fair
For some reason many of the very earliest television sets that people could actually buy had a top with a mirror underneath that could be propped open when one was about to turn it on (the controls were under that top along with the cathode ray tube - CRT). The CRT was set up so that it projected a reversed image that the mirror then righted so that the image was normal -- that is, so any text images could be read normally. Actually, the reason is pretty obvious: the console containing the television set was simply another sort of cabinet when not in use, just another piece of furniture. (See below for later examples of this design strategy.) The problem with the mirror feature was that viewers had to be positioned almost exactly opposite the set and have their eyes at the correct height to be able to view the image properly. Direct-viewing TVs were less restricted. Even so, CRTs were small in the early days, so viewers still had to huddle and stay closer to the screen than later on. Mirror-top televisions were still being sold in the late 1940s, but then disappeared from the marketplace.

Advertisement showing Dumont console - ca. 1950
For many years television sets resided in living rooms, where families tended to gather before the "family room" gained popularity in America starting, say, in the mid-1950s. Therefore the expensive TV set (and they often cost more than today's largest flat-screen TVs, adjusting for inflation) was a major item of furniture that many wives wanted to fit well with the rest of the décor. Note that the console has doors than can be closed to hide the screen when not in use.

Crosley TV with radio/record player - 1950
This Crosley is a pretty typical less-than-a-console TV with respect to price and style. (Actually, the ensemble shown is contained in a console -- but the set itself in the upper-right corner could just have well be freestanding, and probably was in most cases.) It just sits there on one side of the living room and its big "eye" stares back at you all the time. Of course, this is how most television sets were over the last 60 years, console models having gradually faded from the scene.

Zenith with round screen - 1950
For some reason Zenith built a line of sets with round screens for a few years. They seemed odd at the time, but at least a few people bought them. Why a round screen? Well, cathode ray tubes were round in those days and perhaps designers felt that a round "frame" for the image was "functional," the holy grail of purist industrial design and architecture. But source images were essentially rectangular, so the round format clipped off parts that might be of interest to the viewer.

Philco Predicta - ca.1959
This TV set was built 10 years before the moon-landing image being shown on the screen. But hey, this design was really super-dooper space-age! Actually the modular screen/innards box concept wasn't a bad one; most desktop computers until recently followed the same practice. Philco's problem was that this line of TV sets was unreliable, thus helping to kill sales. Another negative might have been that the design would clash with traditional-style living room décor; TVs tended to reside in living rooms in those days, as noted above.

Crumbling Egos

Eric Felten's De Gustibus column in the 24 September Wall Street Journal (link here) has the intriguing title "Pardon Us, But Our Museum Is Falling Apart."

He cites defect examples that include the new Modern Wing of Chicago's Art Institute and I.M. Pei's National Gallery East Building -- the latter apparently needing an extensive re-skinning.

Then there are the cost over-runs. Felten mentions an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum that was budgeted at $35 million but came in at $125 million, nearly four times the estimate.

What is going on here?

Radically designed buildings are essentially massive inventions produced and sold without prototypes. Is it any surprise they tend to be glitchy?

There have always been building failures (you would not want to have been standing in the choir of the Beauvais Cathedral the evening of 29 Nov., 1284). But the impractical nature of much current architecture has made it a pressing modern problem.

And then there's this bit that warms the cockles of my black little modernist-distrusting heart:

"The forms of traditional buildings, such as pitched roofs and moldings, almost always contribute to proper weathering, shedding water, and protecting the structure," says Steven W. Semes, a professor of architecture and academic director of Notre Dame's Rome Studies Program. "Modern buildings often assume shapes that do the opposite, directing water into the building rather than away from it."

I've been aware of the last point by virtue of living most of my life in the drizzly Pacific Northwest: essentially flat roofs are harder to drain than peaked ones.

But the point about large, flash, ego-statement building being engineering experiments hadn't sunk into my brain even though it should have years ago. Thank you, Eric, for highlighting this.