A Little R&R

I’m getting together with some friends tonight to have dinner and ogle some turn-of-the-century photos one of them recently acquired. It was an EBay purchases of 40 photographs of Eureka taken around the turn of the century. There is little hope that one of them will be a picture of my house, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

My house isn’t exactly an eyesore. You would think that at some point over the last 100+ years someone would have snapped a photo of it. Preferably a pre-WWII photo. I have poured over every photo archive I can get my hands on and found almost nothing.

I met an old tenant once who said she lived here in the late 60s to the late 70s. She was a little girl then and she said you had a few photos of the place. She was visiting from out of the area with her daughters and I gave them a tour of the place. I gave her my email address and she promised to send me some but I never heard from. She even said they were already scanned and on her computer, so it’s not like she had to jump through hoops to get them to me. I’m kind of pissed because as I was giving the tour I mentioned several times how I was interested in the photos.

I did find one aerial photo on-line a few months back. A local photographer took dozens of aerial photographs of the city back in the 40s and 50s and they were all recently put on-line by the local university. They are large format photos, and the resolution is surprisingly good, but still, it gets grainy when you try and zoom in on a particular house. The photo that this was cropped from covers are area of about 25 square blocks. All the cars are from the late 30s to early 40s.



You can see that the house has it’s brown and tan paint job. It has the 2 story addition with the exterior stair case leading to an upstairs apartment. The apartment/garage building has been built, but the house does not have the asbestos siding yet. The chimneys are still there, and the streets are still dirt.

The other interesting thing about the photo is that it shows that there were still sections of wooden sidewalks in the neighborhood. The Petch House already had it’s concrete sidewalks, and you can see that a new section has just been poured at the property next door (lower right). Across the street, though, the old 1870s house still has it’s wooden sidewalks, as do many other houses in the neighborhood.