“Babe” Ruth and Hastings mayor Thomas F. Reynolds Your next issue of the Hastings Historian contains many fascinating articles — articles about how Hastings got its name and about Hastings’ first ambulance, plus a wonderful reminiscence on gym class in the early 1960s. It also contains a plea from Frank […]
If you are a frequent visitor to this blog, you probably have some sense of how many unidentified photographs we have in our collection. In order to identify a photograph, we have to find the right person with the right knowledge, but sometimes that knowledge is not of names and […]
Here is a great photograph of the Riverview Manor Hose Company No. 3 filling up at the Gulf station on Main Street. We have a 1947 photograph showing the Gulf station in just this location on Main Street, in the spot that is now the Boulanger Plaza parking lot, before […]
As soon as we had finished writing the previous week’s post on Jean-Antoine Houdon’s bust of Robert Fulton in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we realized that that eminent French sculptor is actually represented in Hastings, in our own collection. In our small but select library, in a glass case, […]
In 1981 Elizabeth Filkins Gessler, long-time French teacher at the Hastings High School, donated to the Historical Society an album containing dozens of wonderful photographs. The album is dated “1935-1954”, and the photographs show the activities of the French Club, a club which “Madame Gessler” sponsored. The most spectacular pictures […]
Due to technical difficulties, today’s blog post will take a break from extolling the glories of our own collection, and point you instead to one of the many fabulous items to be seen in other New York collections. Painted plaster bust of Robert Fulton by Jean-Antoine Houdon, ca. 1803. The […]
We have all sorts of objects in the archive, and all sorts of mysteries. Here is an advertisement for Champion spark plugs from our documents collection. It appeared on page 15 of the Saturday Evening Post for January 18, 1958. The caption below the photograph reads: “Police cars have to […]
Mary William Ethelbert Appleton “Billie” Burke, best known as the good witch Glinda in the 1939 film version of “The Wizard of Oz,” began her film and stage career in 1907. She was 24 years old and already a star when she bought the Kirkham estate on Broadway in […]
Among the 50-or-so original photographs in our collection by documentary photographer and Hastings resident Lewis W. Hine are these two pictures of a young man in a suit. Who is he? Why did Hine take his photograph? Did he win a prize? Was he captain of the football team? Does […]
