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Plattsburgh, New York, circa 1906. "Brinkerhoff Street, west from Park." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.
Someone on the right side is actually using a shutter on their upper window. Today shutters are just an ornamental element and most times the wrong size for the windows they're next to.
Plattsburgh would by 1911 host the Army's Plattsburg Training Camp and Officer Candidate School, home of the "Plattsburg Idea," a forerunner of the ROTC.
Brinkerhoff ends at SUNY if you're headed west.
Looks like a perambulator pushing a perambulator to me.
I lived on the neighboring block in the 1980s while I attended college in Plattsburgh. Many of the Victorian homes are still there, but have been converted into apartments. I'm not sure what "park" is being referred to in the caption. Brinkerhoff does start at the college campus, so that could be it.
When you look at the far left of the full size view, there's a ghost image of what looks like a tricycle
Remember, the poles and wires had only recently begun to change this scene from its preindustrial look. It's all downhill from here.
It's a wonder seeing a few auto tire tracks mixed in with wagon wheel tracks. Also, those hitching posts and mounting blocks won't be needed within a decade.
I was going to ask what the short white posts were for, thinking they might be hitching posts, but I didn't see anything obvious to hitch anything to. So I checked google images and found this page showing a leftover hitching post with a small ring on the top of it.
http://www.rockland.bc.ca/walking.html
The dogs in the neighborhood must have been ecstatic.
It appears the well appointed homes of 1907 featured stone hitching posts and dismounting blocks for the convenience of callers. No obvious signs of automobile tracks in the roadway, and if I had a bicycle I'd use the splendid sidewalks.
The Victorian houses, the picket fences, the magnificent trees, the seemingly endless stretch of road ... the stuff dreams are made of. That must have been a wonderful time to live, before the Depression, before the world wars. I know it wasn't perfect, but it's easy to get caught up in longing for a simpler, slower, more peaceful time.
I'd have thought that even without the Twilight Zone reference, as I do each and every time you post such a tree-lined jewel. As strong a synaptic anchor as the pig-nosed medical staff, Cliff Robertson's dummy and man-serving Kanamits.
I wonder if these are elm trees, soon to be doomed by disease.
A little difficult to see, but there is someone walking on the sidewalk to the left.
No streetcars, no tracks.
You could make a mint in the fall raking up all those leaves.
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