October 1938. "Roadhouse. Raceland, Louisiana. Girls at Dano's for free Friday night crab boil." View full size. 35mm negative by Russell Lee for the FSA.

October 1938. "Girls from the Cajun country at Raceland, Louisiana." 35mm negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.

October 1938 at the Alamo. "Mildred Irwin, saloon singer at North Platte, Nebraska. She entertained for 20 years in Omaha before coming to North Platte." Medium-format safety negative by John Vachon. View full size.

Letter from John Vachon to his wife, Penny:

October 29, 1938

        Last night I had an adventure. Of the 1st water. To have it I had to get kind of stiff. And I did, dear. Pretty plastered. But it was all in the line of duty, eminently legitimate and justifiable. About eight o'clock I went into a corner saloon. It was a saloon in the grand tradition. I drank only beer, but great gobs of it. At the piano was a big huge large fat blonde woman of 45 to 50 yrs. With beautiful smeary red makeup on her puss, and huge mammy type bosoms. And her voice, O that you could hear her voice. She has Sophie Tucker in the wastebasket   . . .

"Bread & Coffee." The new Department of Public Charities municipal lodging house at 432 East 25th Street in New York, which opened in February 1909 after four years of construction. "The first municipal lodging house fitted up by the city was a boat moored at the foot of East 26th Street in 1895, followed a few years after by the building at 398 First Avenue, just north of 23rd Street." (NYT) 8x10 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. View full size.

July 1941. "On the Main Street of Cascade, Idaho." View full size. 35mm Kodachrome transparency by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration.

From July 1921, the Krazy Kat club off Thomas Circle in Washington, with Cleon Throckmorton to the right. View full size. National Photo Company Collection.

July 15, 1921. Cleon Throckmorton at the easel on the terrace of the Krazy Kat, an establishment described by the Washington Post two years earlier as "something like a Greenwich Village coffeehouse." Scroll down to the comments for more on "Throck," an engineering graduate who made his name designing sets for Eugene O'Neill's plays, and was the first art director for CBS in the early days of television. View full size. National Photo Company Collection.

July 15, 1921. Our third photo of the treetop table at the Krazy Kat club in Washington. View full size. National Photo Company Collection glass negative. (Coming Monday: Details on the Krazy Kat and one of the notables who ran it.)

July 15, 1921. More strange goings-on at the Krazy Kat. Our waiter has a ball and chain dangling from his sleeve. National Photo Company. View full size.

Washington. D.C. One of six National Photo glass negatives from 1921 labeled "Krazy Kat," showing a group of college-age kids painting and smoking in the yard of what seems to be a club or restaurant. Which has a treehouse. View full size.

December 1943. Washington, D.C. "Hugh and Lynn Massman eating lunch at a cafeteria after a day of sightseeing. Their eight-week-old son is being taken care of at the United Nations service center nursery." Medium-format safety negative by Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information. View full size.

1939. Ladies who lunch in Washington, D.C., with the toy department as a backdrop. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by David Myers.

Summer 1938. Hamburger stand at the Buckeye Lake amusement park near Columbus. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Ben Shahn, who goes on to describe the place: "Buckeye Lake is the weekend and summer months resort for all of central Ohio. Its patrons are clerks, Columbus politicians, laborers, businessmen, droves of high school and college students. The rich occupy one side of the lake, the rest rent cottages on the other side. It has an evil reputation and an evil smell. It has furnished Columbus and the neighboring small towns and cities with dancing, cottaging, swimming, etc. for several generations. This is the most unsavory place the photographer ran across in Ohio." But how are the hot dogs?

Summer 1938. More of Floyd's Place: "Roadside inn, Central Ohio. The figure of the body, originally distributed to advertise the Newark Indian Mounds, has been redecorated." View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Ben Shahn for the FSA.

Summer 1938. "Tourist signs in Central Ohio." From a series of photos taken along Route 40. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Ben Shahn for the FSA.