This photo has a glossy finish to it, and is not on very heavy paper. It seems like it was possibly cut out of a magazine or book. The coloring is great. And if we could only rotate the photo sideways like in a satellite view, we could read the advertising on the wall on the left, for clues. But the green and black sign looks like it says “Nuts” and underneath that the word on the left looks like “Milk” but really, who knows? The location is a mystery! Perhaps that is Earle W. standing on the far right, and he signed the photo (just joking), but really, it is interesting that there is a name at the bottom. Who was Earle W. and why was this photo significant for him? …Looking at the photo with a magnifying glass, it looks like that might be the number 44 appearing twice on the streetcar, on the left and the right in the bright green area….
With a little more searching (photos of suspension bridges) it became apparent that, of course, this is an old (hand-colored?) photo of the entrance to the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, that spans the Ohio River, between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky. This photo would have been taken from the Kentucky side. I couldn’t resist leaving the above paragraph the way it is, as it was great fun to solve the mystery, and learn more about the bridge. At the time it was constructed, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, and was first crossed by pedestrians on December 1, 1866. A Wikipedia entry states that over 166,000 people crossed the bridge in the first two days it was open to foot traffic. After some finishing touches it was opened officially January 1, 1867. The bridge was at first just known locally as “The Suspension Bridge” then as “The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge” until 1984 when the name was changed to honor it’s designer. John A. Roebling was also the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. Finding out the location and name of this bridge was exciting for another reason: This would have been the very bridge that John Voss crossed to court his future-bride Louisa Moormann (This blog author’s great-grandparents.) John was from Covington and Louisa from Cincinnati, and they married in Cincinnati in 1880.
More mystery solving: After looking again at the advertisement on the left in this photo, having searched under milk companies and dairies in Covington to no avail, it became apparent that the first word really didn’t look like “Nuts” but more like “Hoits.” Some more online searching and then “Eureka!” This was an advertisement for playwright Charles H. Hoyt’s musical comedy “A Milk White Flag.” The flag-shaped design in the advertisement is the clincher. This comedy was either written or first produced in, most sources say 1894, so this photo would have been taken in 1894 or sometime afterward, maybe up until around the turn of the century, judging by the clothes of the people in the photo.
As to the streetcar in the photo, this would have been part of the South Covington and Cincinnati Railway Company, commonly known as the “Green Line” because of the color of the cars. So, it seems that the coloring of the streetcar in this photo was not just done arbitrarily. According to author Tom Dunham from his book Covington, Kentucky, A Historical Guide, the horse-drawn trolleys for the Green Line, gave way to the electric in 1890.
Size: About 5 and 1/2 x 3 and 1/2″
Price: $20.00
Sources and further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Roebling_Suspension_Bridge
http://www.cincinnati-transit.net/suspension.html
http://www.nkyviews.com/kenton/kenton_cov_sb_approaches.htm
The A to Z of American Theatre: Modernism by James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré. 2008. Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Covington, Kentucky. A Historical Guide by Tom Dunham. Published by Author House, Bloomington, Indiana, 2007. Ref. appears on page 65.