CAPTURING QUEENS: PERCY LOOMIS SPERR AND FREDERICK J. WEBER – Exhibit Opening

On View February 13, 2021 – February 12, 2022

Our in-person official opening is Sept 23rd at 6:30 pm! Please come join us!

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Come see the images of Queens past, and join QHS and co-curator Jason Antos as he talks about the photograph of Percy Loomis Sperr and Fredrick J Weber.

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Get Tickets Here–

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Thank you everyone for joining us on our virtual exhibition opening of CAPTURING QUEENS: PERCY LOOMIS SPERR AND FREDERICK J. WEBER.

This exhibition was co-curatored in collaboration between Queens Historical Society and it’s board President, and Queens historian, Jason Antos.

This exhibition highlights the work of two prominent photographers of Queens, Percy Loomis Sperr (1890- 1964) and Frederic J. Weber (1881-1967).

Percy Loomis Sperr, born in 1890, was known as the “Official Photographer for the City of New York.” In the early 1920s, Loomis moved to New York where he resided in Staten Island for the next forty years until his death in 1964. 

Starting in 1923, Loomis came under contract with the New York Public Library who hired him to photograph the five boroughs of New York City.

This was instrumental in chronicling the changing architectural landscape of the city and has become such a great resource for contemporary historians.

From the early 1920s until early the 1940s, Sperr’s on the street photography produced more than 40,000 photographs of the five boroughs of New York with the main focus on his home borough Staten Island. 

The exhibition displays a group of photographs specifically depicting Queens’ colonial homesteads and Victorian mansions, farm and marsh landscape, and urban settings, many of which sadly do not exist anymore. 

His work has become a living record of what Queens County looked like before it was transformed into how we know and experience it today. 

The images are startling and breathtaking.Though there is a documentary perspective and intention, the photographs can also be analyzed through their atmospheric, and expressive qualities as well as their emphasis on pictorial composition and sensitivity towards light and shadow. This will be the first time that they will be presented through an artistic lens with the hope of bringing Sperr into consideration within the field of fine art.

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I’d like to give a brief description and context to the photographs in this exhibition by highlighting topics of Street Views & Daily Life, Transportation, People, and Old Homesteads and Businesses:

STREET VIEWS & DAILY LIFE

The lens of Sperr and Weber captured Queens in different periods of transition. 

Weber photographed amazing scenes of humanity in the late 1800s and early 1900s; persons and trolleys going through the daily grind and beautiful portraits of civil servants including local police and fire departments. 

Sperr’s street scenes depict a borough in the transition from rural to suburban in a time which saw the greatest development of infrastructure during the mid-1920s through the late 1930s. Some of Sperr’s images capture grand estates and old byways in their final days before being removed from the landscape forever. However, these images will never be forgotten through the great resource we have of these photographs. 

The images depict amazing views of local streets before their widening in the late 1930s. Many of the homes and businesses were torn down in order for these enhancements to be implemented. In many cases, areas that are today densely populated suburbs were nothing more than dirt lots, grassy plains, and swampy terrain, yet with a somber simple bucolic beauty of their own. There are sights of businesses and real estate billboards especially for Halleran’s real estate agency with its familiar, “So This Is Flushing!’ slogan. 

Weber’s images of daily life are beautifully orchestrated ranging from dramatic to glossy portraits of buildings, people and action. 

Sperr’s photographs are incredibly unique since they offer a kind of ‘you are there’ style of photography with images taken at eye level giving the viewer a glimpse of what one would encounter as they walked along the road taking in the sights. 

 

 

TRANSPORTATION

For most of its history, Queens has always been a major hub for transportation. The movement of people from place to place has played a major factor in its development. 

Beginning in the early 1850s, the first stagecoaches appeared. Funded by local business owners, these horse-drawn vehicles connected the rural villages and even brought Queens closer to Manhattan and Brooklyn. By the late 1860s, the Long Island Rail Road brought people from midtown Manhattan to the far reaches of Queens and further east to Long Island. The Queens County Railway Co. began crisscrossing the neighborhoods of Queens in the 1870s and lastly, the Interboro Rapid Transit dual system brought the masses from the city to developing suburbs during the era of World War I. 

Weber’s specialty was the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) which employed him as a photographer for their legal department. Trolleys traveling along Jamaica Avenue, the headquarters of Weber’s studios, were also a favorite of his. Sperr also took images of the LIRR and trolleys as well but the lenses of his camera fell upon the newest modes of transportation of the day as well; the automobile and aviation. The car makes numerous appearances in his images of Flushing as the former farming village exploded into a huge suburban center in the late 1930s early 1940s.

Aviation was also a favorite topic. As Sperr walked along the thoroughfares of Queens he came upon the beginnings of North Beach Airport (the future LaGuardia Airport) and even little-known oddities such as Holmes Airport that featured the hangar of the GoodYear blimp which called the rural outskirts of Jackson Heights home in the 1930s.

 

PEOPLE

There are many photographs showing street scenes and structures in Queens. They number in the thousands. However, there are very few images which spotlight the people. Images of people are a rare gem indeed as one culls through the archives of historic Queens. 

Sperr and Weber filled this void with poignant photographs of the people of the borough, Weber’s approach showed people in portrait views and staged group shots where Sperr was more journalistic and in the moment.

Regardless of their different approaches, Sperr and Weber captured people of all social classes. 

Thanks to Weber, we have a record of civil servants, members of the middle class and panoramic images of organizations celebrating at dinners for their respective clubs taken with a banquet camera. Weber’s people are dressed in beautiful attire of the period where the people depicted by his counterpart are a bit rougher. This provides a great dichotomy of various social classes and environments in different microcosms. 

Sperr preserves for us, the people of the working class. A German farmer posing at his well on his property along Utopia Parkway and 73rd Avenue; families enjoying a picnic at pleasure grounds at North Beach and the Grand Central Parkway; and, in a rare image, the children of ‘Black Dublin’ a forgotten neighborhood situated on old Amity Street (today’s Roosevelt Avenue) between Main Street and College Point Boulevard then known as Lawrence Street. This area was heavily populated by Black and Irish residents hence its name and acted as a large portion of the congregation of the AME Macedonia Church.

 

OLD HOMESTEADS AND BUSINESSES

When Sperr and Weber deployed their talents on the streets of Queens, they photographed many old homesteads and businesses. Their approaches were very different indeed. 

Weber brought to life the look of commerce at work including large office buildings along the Jamaica Avenue corridor and newly constructed edifices like banks and firehouses as Queens experienced its first wave of modern development after the opening of the Queensborough Bridge in 1909. 

Weber also captured the fading elegance of colonial-era establishments including the Pettit Tavern and Hotel, a local watering hole of the Jamaica community, and a hangout for British soldiers during the War of Independence. 

Sperr’s journey throughout the borough took on a different approach. His images show us the ancient homesteads of northern Queens. Lonely unpaved dirt and rock-covered roads winding their way to homes made of stone or wood with each one no higher than two floors. 

Most of the homes and businesses photographed by Weber show a borough in the state of renewal where Sperr’s show photographic evidence of how parts of Queens, even into the late 1920s, remained in a medieval state.

The homesteaders, the remaining family members of Queens County’s founding families who lived upon this firmament for three hundred years, lived in these houses with pride as Sperr’s images reveal. Proud of their family heritage and for the fact that they were the keepers of the family flame whose legacy in the borough was on the eve of its grand exit soon to be replaced by airports, parkways, and lastly, their numerous amounts acreage, pristine for centuries, were soon covered over by planned communities.

Before we move on the Jason’s segment, which will provide a more detailed context of select photographs, I’d like to speak about three items on display.

On view we have two Kodak cameras and one advertisement from our collection. An Eastman Kodak Bellows Camera c.1915 and Kodak Six-20 Brownie Junior Box Film Camera, c. 1930s.

 

EASTMAN KODAK CAMERAS

Like many professional photographers, Frederick Weber used a bellows camera. A bellows is the accordion-like, pleated expandable part of a camera, usually a large or medium format camera, to allow the lens to be moved with respect to the focal plane for better focus. Bellows are also used on enlargers.

The folding camera exists because of its efficiency in taking cameras into the outside world and the requirement to keep them as small as practical. The bellows themselves were often made of a lightweight close weave material treated to make it light proof. This was only on the cheapest models and during the 1920s and 30s. Others such as bellows made of leather have great longevity and can last over several hundred years, like these on display. 

We have a rare well preserved Magazine Advertisement, from 1953 of the Eastman Kodak cameras, revolutionary to the advancements of photography.

The Kodak Brownie was a long-running popular series which were simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. Since these cameras, first introduced in 1900, were so inexpensive, middle class citizens enjoyed using them as well as the professionals. 

When the invention first came out, it only cost $1. The Brownie enabled hundreds of ordinary people to create snapshots of everyday life for the first time without using a professional photographer. The construction was a simple cardboard box, often coated with leather, with a meniscus lens (meaning convex-concave) that took about 2 ¼ inch square pictures on 117 roll film. Another reason for its popularity was how the camera functioned. 

Within the box was a roll of film which enabled photographers to capture images faster than to replace glass plates which was more time-consuming. Once the roll was finished, all the photographer had to do was send it back to the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY where the employees would develop the pictures and send them back to the consumer. Referencing this easy process, Eastman’s slogan was “you press the button, we do the rest.” 

I’d  like to end my segment with an inspiring quote that speaks volumes to the value of photography, by the contemporary photographer, Sally Man, in her 1995 book Photography Speaks Volume 2: “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”

Eastman Kodak Bellows Camera c.1915