The last days of winter on the streets of 1920s Manhattan — remnants of snow and slush mixed with coal soot and car exhaust — were quickly forgotten with the advent of spring. The New Yorker (March 26, 1927) turned its attention to more pleasant diversions including the annual Madison Square Garden flower show…
…and to the people it attracted, rendered in illustrations for “The Talk of the Town” by Alice Harvey…
Backyard gardens and window boxes also welcomed spring, as did a two-part feature that offered helpful advice to amateur urban gardeners. An excerpt:
No doubt the writer saw something akin to what we can see in Frances Benjamin Johnston’s rare color photographs of backyard gardens in the early 1920s Manhattan (all photos courtesy Library of Congress):
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Let’s look at a couple of advertisements from March 26 issue…why fight the crowds on the commuter train? — you could live a life of ease and convenience in the new Tudor City…
…and perhaps you could afford a car almost as prestigious as a Cadillac…introducing the new LaSalle, manufactured by Cadillac but priced lower to “satisfy that other great market”…
For industrial design buffs, the 1927 LaSalle in many ways marked the beginning of modern American automotive styling. The LaSalle line, designed by Harley Earl, would be eliminated in 1940, but Earl’s career as the man in charge of design at General Motors would last into the late 1950s.
Earl was a pioneer in auto design, one of the first to use modeling clay to develop forms for cars. He also established an “Art and Color Section at GM,” a radical notion at a time when American automobile manufacturers paid little attention to the appearance of automobile bodies, which were merely engineered for functionality and cost.
Earl also pioneered the idea of planned obsolescence in cars (which he termed “Dynamic Obsolescence”) in which annual model changes were used to induce sales. It was Earl who convinced GM to build a sports car–the Corvette–and it was Earl who also oversaw the introduction of the tail fin — culminating in the 1959 Cadillac — the year he retired from GM.
In the course of just 32 years, Earl’s designs went from this…
…to this…
Next Time: Dinosaurs of Upper West Side…
A New Yorker State of Mind 