FARGO, N.D. in Faux Day for Night

Another day for night postcard. As if the sky weren't enough to give it away; the flag should not be flying at night. I know, these days flag etiquette is a thing of the past for most people, but once upon a time people made a point of taking flags down at night. The "laws" are that it must come down unless displayed with some sort of light source. This flag does not have its own light source.

Click on image to see it larger.

It is fascinating to look at the card and count how many ways the artist had to add to the image to make it a night scene. The sky, the moon, lighted windows, headlights, tail lights.... The road surface looks a little on the antiseptic side; no shadows or tread marks.

And then imagine the photographer standing in the middle of the road shooting this. Most certainly would not be doing it night, even a full moon night.

The card was published by the Bloom Bros. Co. of Minneapolis. I'm not finding any historical information, but there is a souvenir and gift shop listed in Minneapolis named Bloom Bros. Perhaps someone will verify if this is the same group that once upon a time published postcards.

TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER at night

Continuing with my "theme" this week of nighttime postcards I give you one I bought a very long time ago, probably around 1970.

It was published by Hartmann, a card publisher in Great Britain.

Frederick Hartmann 1902-1909 
45 Farringdon Street, London, England

A publisher of postcards as fine tinted halftones. While most of his cards covered views from all over Great Britain, he also produced cards on various other subjects many of which were artist signed. In addition to having his cards printed in Saxony, he imported many glamour cards from the Continent as well. He was the British distributor of postcards for Trenkler & Company. Hartmann was a strong advocate of the divided back postcard and was instrumental to its establishment in England. Hartman may have issued the world’s first divided back card. (SOURCE: Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City)

Click on either image to see it larger.

I always liked this card with its mysterious look. The horse drawn cabs waiting beneath the street light. Though it's not London I can easily imagine Jack the Ripper lurking in the shadows or perhaps Holmes and Watson are in one of the cabs. Make up your own story.

CARTHAY CIRCLE THEATRE

Another nighttime postcard, obviously a drawing from a photograph.

The Carthay Circle Theatre was one of the most famous movie palaces of Hollywood's Golden Age. It opened at 6316 San Vicente Boulevard in 1926 and was considered developer J. Harvey McCarthy's most successful monument, a stroke of shrewd thinking that made a famous name of the newly developed Carthay residential district in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, California.

Design

The exterior design was in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, with whitewashed concrete trimmed in blue, with a high bell tower and neon sign that could be seen for miles. The architects were Carleton Winslow and Dwight Gibbs. The auditorium itself was shaped in the form of a perfect circle set inside a square that fleshed out the remainder of the building. The iconic octagonal tower was placed in the front corner spandrel space left between the circle and the square. The auditorium's cylinder-shaped wall was raised up above the roof line, to create a parapet visible from the outside that resembled a circus tent. "Simple, massive and dignified, the building stands out for its intrinsic beauty," raved The Architect and Engineer. Pacific Coast Architect wrote that it was a theatre "masked as a cathedral".

There was a drop curtain that featured an homage to the pioneer Donner Party, which perished crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Bronze busts of Native American leaders and photographs of Lillie Langtry and other 19th century actors adorned the lounges and lobbies. Paintings of historic scenes forty feet tall graced the walls.

Premieres

The theatre hosted the official premieres of The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Walt Disney's first animated feature length film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939), among many other notable films. For Disney's Fantasia (1940), the most elaborate audio system in use at the time, Fantasound, a pioneering stereophonic process, was installed at this theatre.

For the glamorous world premiere of MGM's Marie Antoinette (1938), with Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power, the gardens around the theater were restructured and enhanced to resemble the landscaping of the Palace of Versailles. In the 1930s and '40s, props from the sets of such premiered films as The Great Ziegfeld (1936), The Good Earth (1937), Captains Courageous (1937) and Gone With the Wind (1939) were displayed on the grassy median of McCarthy Vista, from Wilshire Boulevard south to San Vicente Boulevard. The premieres were red-carpet events, with the stars of the motion picture arriving in limousines at the entrance to the covered walkway to the theater south from San Vicente and cheered by hundreds of fans in bleachers there, accompanied by searchlights scanning the sky. Only Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood also had such elaborate premieres in that era.

Decline

By the 1960s the Carthay was considered obsolete, overshadowed by modern cinemas; its customer base had also been sapped by suburbanization. The theater was demolished in 1969; today, two low-rise office buildings and a city park occupy its former site. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

I'm not finding any information about the manufacturer, Tichnor Art Company of Los Angeles. So who were these artists that toiled in the back rooms creating these images. Was it freelance work or in-house?

Are the STARS OUT TONIGHT?

Another vintage postcard with a nighttime scene; this one an original drawing. Unlike many of the other cards which are hand tinted photographs, this is purely an artist's rendition. I'm sure they worked from a photo, but would it have looked half as clean and fresh if the underlying image were a photo?

Click on either image to see it larger.

It's a shame that the person who created this will most likely never be known.

Go here to see the first nighttime postcard image that started this series for me.

BLOB PEOPLE IN THE PARK after dark

The artist who worked on this must have been bored adding the color to the audience. They skipped around as if playing Chess for the first time. Red here, blue here, and then "what the heck do I do with the pukey lemon/lime color?" One poor woman, in the middle got an orange coat and a puckey lemon/lime face and hair. The pukey lemon/lime seems to have been the most odd color to use. And I'm not sure, but I believe there is a floating lemon/lime jello mold floating above the chorus on stage. The flag is most certainly an artist's rendering.

Click on image to see it larger.

This is truly a very odd odd world that was created in this image. The Blob people in the park.

This is a Curt Teich Linen card distributed by Aero Distributing Co., Inc., Chicago, Illinois. I'm not finding anything about Aero; a lot of cards, but no historical information.

To see other nighttime postcards click here, here, and here; all inspired by the book Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities.

VIEWS OF AMERICA AT NIGHT

I recently bought a fascinating book called Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities by John A. Jakle, a professor of geography at the University of Illinois. The book was published in 2003 by the Museum of New Mexico Press.

Page after page of beautiful nighttime postcard images from all across the U. S. There's one of the Pittsburgh Pirates stadium at night that I'd love to own. And some amazing shots of San Francisco at night, including Chinatown.

The introduction written by Mr. Jakle is fascinating. I'll quote just one small bit:

"Postcard publishers engaged freely in the alteration or manipulation of photographs, producing highly "fictionalized" pictorial art masquerading as realistic. Touch-up work produced cleaner, simplified images, making the places pictured seem less complicated and tidier and, perhaps, more salable as postcard views. Conversely, places might be made to appear more complicated and thus, presumably, more interesting.... Many if not most postcards, she concluded were a 'composite of fantasy, boosterism, wishful thinking, simplification, and outright lie.' Especially was nighttime postcard depiction a product of revision. As a matter of fact, most nighttime views were contrived from daytime photographs and were not, strictly speaking, nighttime photos at all." (SOURCE: Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities)

Just as I often suspected when looking at some of the nighttime skies, they were fake.

And to read more about the book simply go to the second item down in the Tattered and Lost What-Not Suggestions column to the left.

This is my contribution to this weeks Postcard Friendship Friday.

Click on either image to see it larger.

Over the next few days I'll be featuring some more of my nighttime postcards.