When I recently came across an article about the abandoned and overgrown Grossinger’s Resort Hotel, I became fixated on the photographs of the pool within the resort’s natatorium. I recognized the space (but barely) from a collection of ephemera, which we digitized for The Catskills Institute several years ago.
Grossinger’s New Indoor Swimming Pool. “Superchrome” postcard. c.196-
The distinctive, once orderly, deck chairs now stand alone in the muck and moss, or have been tossed like bones into the bottom of the graffiti laden pool, joining muddy strings of blue beaded lane markers. The signature tile work is faintly recognizable under the encroaching moss, and the star burst lamp still hangs from the ceiling. I knew how tragically abandoned the formerly thriving resorts in the Catskill Mountains had become, and had seen photographic evidence of just how overgrown and lost these spaces currently are, but the images of the natatorium haunt; the building sits upon the landscape like a perpetually decomposing corpse. In the mid-century (when the indoor pool was constructed) the resort was thriving, as it had been since the 1920s. Grossinger’s gradually declined throughout the 1970s, a decline which hastened when the property was sold in 1986.[1. Abandoned NY: Inside Grossinger’s Crumbling Catskill Resort Hotel.] Many items of interest pertaining to Grossinger’s, including an Auction notice and contents for sale, can be found in Brown’s Digital Repository. Most of the resort’s buildings have now been demolished, but the natatorium still stands as a ghostly relic; its remnants pointing to fragmented memories, an uncanny space filled with abandoned objects of leisure being consumed by nature itself.
Photo by Pablo Maurer. Abandoned NY: Inside Grossinger’s Crumbling Catskill Resort Hotel
As winter in New England quickly becomes the house guest that has greatly outstayed its welcome, I thought it would be interesting to browse through the Brown Digital Repository for images of snow in Providence. I came upon this image with a view up Williams Street of the Nightingale Brown House. Trade in the horse-drawn carriage for some contemporary vehicles, and it’s not too far from the Williams Street we saw on Tuesday.
* Update: Many thanks to Ron Potvin, for correcting the information about this image. We have updated the post as well as our metadata in the BDR to reflect his insights.
Porcelain figures originally commissioned by John Nicholas Brown II (1900–1979) are currently on exhibit at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. library through April 25, 2014. Brown II was a civilian-status Lieutenant Colonel, Special Cultural Advisor for Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) in Europe toward the end of World War II — as well as husband to collector Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown, the founder of the Library’s military art collection (a substantial part of which has been digitized for online viewing). While the 21 porcelains currently on display in the library were not salvaged works per se, they were commissioned by Brown in 1945 while he was a “monuments man” in Europe.
Thanks to a movie opening on February 7, 2014, directed by George Clooney and loosely based on historical accounts, the “monuments men” have been making a resurgence in both popular media and the cultural heritage community: from features in the New York Times (re: monuments women, as well), to educational reference resources showcasing the retrieved artworks (Scholars Resource set featuring 111 salvaged works), to recent commentaries by associated museums (“In the Footsteps of the Monuments Men: Traces from the Archives at the Metropolitan Museum”).
The image shown below, a porcelain commissioned by John Nicholas Brown II in late 1945 while serving with MFAA, was taken by Digital Production Services for the library’s exhibition publicity. Curator Peter Harrington describes the context of its commission:
While John Nicholas Brown was working with the allied forces in Germany in 1945 reporting on stolen art works, he visited the factory at Nymphenburg in Bavaria and ordered 21 porcelain figures for his wife, Anne S. K. Brown. Subsequent additions to this set came from the Dresden porcelain factory. Today these porcelains form a unique segment of the foremost American collection devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering.
