What a 1910 Postcard Remembers

The card is five and a half inches across. Thin cardstock, faded rose at the edges where a thumb has held it. On the front, a lithograph of a New York street in summer, 1910 or thereabouts—a horse-drawn streetcar at the curb, women in white shirtwaists with their hair pinned, the masonry of a commercial block rising behind in soft ink wash. On the back, a handful of scribbled lines addressed to a woman in Albany, signed with a first initial.

There were, at the time this card was mailed, perhaps a billion others like it crossing the United States each year.

The golden age of the postcard

From about 1905 to 1915—the decade collectors now call the "Golden Age" of the American postcard—the U.S. Post Office moved roughly a billion cards a year. Penny postage, tidy inks, a visual epidemic. Postcards were, for ten brief years, the dominant mass medium. They were how people said I arrived safely, the weather is fine, think of me. They were also, quietly, how a country started to picture itself.

New York was both subject and subject matter. Publishers like Detroit Publishing, Rotograph, and the American News Company issued tens of thousands of cards depicting the city's streets, buildings, parks, and parades. Most of what we now think of as the look of pre-war New York—the elevated trains on Sixth Avenue, the ferry landings at the Battery, the department stores on Ladies' Mile—survived as public memory largely because of these cards.

What survives is uneven

What a postcard actually captures is not history as the guidebook tells it. It captures what was considered worth sending. Which buildings were new and impressive. Which parades drew a crowd. Which corner the photographer decided to stand on. Which version of the city the publisher thought the buyer would want to mail to an aunt in Scranton.

The horse-drawn streetcars in a 1910 card would be gone within a decade. The buildings in the background are mostly still there—but the typography on their signage, the hand-lettered awnings, the gold leaf on the plate glass, is gone almost without exception.

This is what makes an archival postcard a particular kind of witness. It is not neutral. It is a commercial artifact edited by a publisher, staged by a photographer, colored in by a retoucher with a small brush, printed in a lithographic run of thousands, and then sold for a penny. But what survives inside that commercial frame—the patterns on a woman's dress, the curl of smoke from a stack, the way a street-level sign reads—tends to be exactly the kind of detail that doesn't make it into official history.

The reverse side

The back of the card, what collectors call the "divided back," often tells a quieter story than the front. A single line: Safe arrival. Love to mother. A cryptic update: He has changed his mind about the investment. More when I return. Sometimes just weather: The harbor was rough coming in but we are well.

These are fragments of private lives threaded through public images. Most postcards were written in a hurry, by hand, in a language of abbreviated tenderness—a form of writing that is almost entirely extinct outside of condolence cards and the occasional wedding thank-you. Reading a hundred of them in a row is a strange exercise. You start to notice that the interior lives of 1910 are not nearly as distant as the streetscapes.

Why these images translate to silk

There is a particular pleasure to wearing an image that once lived in someone else's pocket. A 1910 lithograph—cleaned, re-composed, and scaled onto a 36-inch silk habotai square—is a different object than the original card. It is slower. It is more intimate. It is printed to order, in editions of 100, folded into a scarf, tied around a throat, and walked into a February morning on the very same streets the lithograph was made to describe.

The archival impulse—preservation, digital layering, careful reimagining—is what moves an image out of the flat-file drawer and back into ordinary circulation. A print on a wall does the same thing more quietly. A scarf does it more publicly. Both are arguments against forgetting.

Where ours come from

Every piece in our Vintage Postcards Series begins with a real card. Most are from New York—the Chrysler Building, Grand Central's Beaux-Arts façade, the Woolworth and Singer and Flatiron silhouettes that built the early skyline, the Metropolitan Museum's Fifth Avenue steps, Lady Liberty herself. A few come from the Art Deco boom of Miami Beach—the Shelborne and Raleigh hotels, their geometric signage preserved on cardstock from an era when the palms were hand-tinted after printing.

Each image is cropped, layered, and reassembled—not to reprint the original postcard, but to carry what it captured into a different language. The Statue of Liberty becomes a collage of edges and harbor light. Grand Central's façade becomes a pattern of arches and stone. The geometric re-composition is deliberate. A postcard in a drawer is a record; a postcard on silk is an argument for a continued life.

We are less interested in making a souvenir than in making a small, portable case: that a printed image from 1910 is still worth looking at, still worth carrying. A scarf is one way to carry it.

—Paul Morris

Read next: A short history of the printed silk scarf.