Photographs of New York Interiors at the Turn of the Century [antikvár]

Introduction In 1888 Joseph Byron landed in America. Byron's family had been professional photographers for three generations, originally in Nottingham on the Trent, England, and he was bent upon opening a smdio in New York City. Accompanying him were his wife, Julia Lewin, and his eldest daughter, Maude Mary. The following year the four other children arrived, escorted by their grandmother. The older son, Percy C., then eleven, had been taking pictures for several years, and he and his brother, Louis Philip, and sisters (including Florence Mabel and Georgiana) and their mother all were to work in various departments of the Byron photography plant. The business got off to a modest start in New "i'ork, but by the early 1890s Joseph Byron was receiving commissions to record a wide selection of metropolitan life and its setting, ascending to the highest stramm of society. That the volume accelerated phenomenally is indicated by the numbering on the prints, which during the first years increased annually by a few hundred, but by the beginning of the twentieth century was skyrocketing each year by the thousands. The Byron camera was focused on everything from the Charles Scribner's Sons building to Lower East Side pushcarts, from Central Park to slum playgrounds, from Madison Square Garden to the Battery "el" station, from fashionable Turkish baths to the Coney Island beach, from millionaires' palaces on Fifth Avenue to "Little Italy" tenements of Harlem, from summer roof gardens to winter blizzards, from Broadway theatres to bicycle shows, from fancy balls to the hurdy-gurdy, from a display of new automobiles at the Astor to bob-tailed trolleys, from a lavish Arabesque stairhall to a college student's dormitory, from the Aeolian Music Hall to a Bowery mission, from a busy luncheon scene at Delmonico's to a lull at Childs, from the lounge of a luxury liner at its New York wharf to the arrival of immigrants in steerage, and from the Easter Parade by the old Fifth Avenue reservoir to Sabbath ramblings in Greenwood Cemetery. Joseph Byron photographed the great and near-great, including Elsie de Wolfe, Mrs. Frank Leslie, Lola Montez, Mark Twain, Eastman Johnson, J. Q. A. Ward, Ernest Thompson Seton and Prince Louis of Battenberg. His roster of theatrical portraits included the names of David Belasco, Joseph M. Weber, John Drew, Mme. Rejane, Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Alice Nielsen, Lillian Russell and Sarah Bernhardt. The divine Sarah was so pleased with the photographer and his work that she called him "Lord" Byron. Among his wealthy clients were Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Mrs. William B. Astor, William Collins Whitney, Chauncey Mitchell Depew, Mrs. Theodore Augus-