Harry R. Gelwicks
A North Shore family posing in its Mors automobile in 1904, part of an exhibition presented by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities.
COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. — A boy gripping his baseball bat stares out at us from a photograph with the solemn determination of any young slugger. A family poses proudly for a portrait in its French-made automobile, perhaps before taking it for a spin. A fish peddler, seemingly oblivious of a camera nearby, peers into the cart from which he sells his wares to residents of the homes lining a wide, unpaved road.
The ballplayer, the family in the car and the peddler are among the Long Islanders whose images are on display in “Long Island at Work and at Play: Early 20th-Century Photographs From SPLIA’s Collections,” presented by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, or Splia. The exhibition, on view through Jan. 31, is the first in Splia’s new gallery in a 19th-century former church in Cold Spring Harbor. It includes three dozen images, many of them never before displayed by the society.
“This collection really was brought together by happenstance,” said Robert MacKay, Splia’s director and the co-curator of the exhibition. “For much of our existence, we weren’t focused on period photographs.”
Formed in 1948 to preserve historic structures and artifacts on Long Island through the creation of house museums — it oversees three — Splia acquired its first photographs only in the 1960s. A board member, Huyler C. Held, had heard of the photographs, 52 images, taken between 1906 and 1930 by Clarence A. Purchase of Queens, that depicted scenes from Flushing to Water Mill; Mr. Held negotiated with Mr. Purchase’s daughter for their sale to the society. (The exhibition is dedicated to Mr. Held, who died last year.)
Another collection of 95 glass plate negatives, images taken between 1901 and 1907 by Harry R. Gelwicks, a newspaper reporter and photographer who covered Queens and Long Island for newspapers like The Long Island City Star, was donated to the society in 1989 by a descendant of Mr. Gelwicks. In 2011, the society acquired the work of two more photographers: 450 glass plates by Arthur S. Greene, who was born in England, arrived in Port Jefferson in 1894 and captured life in the village and its surrounding areas for the next half-century; and 40 images by Adolph Schwartz, a pharmacist who chronicled Brooklyn architecture and attractions at the turn of the 20th century. (Queens and Brooklyn are represented in the show.)
For this exhibition, Mr. MacKay and his guest co-curator, Lynn Stowell Pearson, sifted through the society’s whole collection — some 650 images — for what they believed were the most striking photographs. “What spoke to me were images with people,” Ms. Pearson said. “They really sorted out to people at work and play. I said, Wow, that’s what we’ve got here.”
Despite changes in fashion and sporting equipment, much of the “play” in the early 1900s seems similar to outdoor activity today. We see young female and male bathers on the North and South Shores; ice skaters on an East Norwich pond; children, organized into uniformed teams, playing baseball on a lot in Queens or North Hempstead. On the other hand, Ms. Pearson said, “I don’t think any of us would consider having a family portrait taken in the family car.” At the time of Harry Gelwicks’s 1904 photo of a North Shore family in its Mors automobile, however, a car “was the great new possession,” she said.
The images of people working seem more often rooted in the past. In one, a farmworker sharpens his cradle scythe, with its fingerlike projections, to gather straw in East Meadow, circa 1905; in another, men sit in the linotype room of The Long Island City Star, around 1908; yet another photograph captures the bustle of Brooklyn’s Wallabout Market, once a major destination for farmers, including those from Long Island, and the grocers who bought from them. (The market closed in 1941.)
And then there’s the oddity of a dirigible, photographed in 1919 as it landed in Mineola, almost out of fuel after a 108-hour flight from Britain.
“It was the first dirigible to come from Europe,” said Mr. MacKay, a font of knowledge about all things pertaining to Long Island. He and Ms. Pearson will lead a gallery talk on Jan. 13.
Despite the exhibition’s focus on people, a few photographs emphasize the changing turn-of-the-century landscape, inevitably suggesting the congested suburbia to come. One haunting image, by Mr. Purchase, shows the spire of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City looming in the distance, beyond the corn stalks of the Hempstead Plains.
With its cathedral seeming to rise from the cornfields, the scene is “sort of like medieval Europe,” Ms. Pearson said. “You can’t see that today.”
“Long Island at Work and at Play: Early 20th-Century Photographs From SPLIA’s Collections” runs through January at the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 161 Main Street, Cold Spring Harbor. Open Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call weekdays for reservations for the gallery talk on Jan. 13 from 3 to 5 p.m. (631) 692-4664; splia.org.
