Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Worcester’ Category

I love roaming around through the amazing collection of public domain books on the Internet Archive, but there’s no good way to search just the illustrations within the books. I have been copying some of the images and posting them to Flickr, linking back to the Internet Archive book record both as a credit and for more information.

Right now I am working with James Arthur Ambler’s Worcester Illustrated from 1875, which has lots of pictures of commercial buildings, factories and more. The size and quality of my images vary as I experiment with using different versions of the Internet Archive files and different ways to make copies. I’m also fooling around with the files a bit, straightening and cropping them, doing minor color correction and adding borders. I’m not very good at this, but I’m not going to worry about it. I feel like I am making these images more findable and more shareable, and that even at their worst they are way better than noting.

I am putting these in a Flickr set called Worcester History Images along with some of my scanned old Worcester postcards. When I have time, I’d like to get these into a real database, put them on a Google map, do some then-and-now photographs, etc. But right now, I just want to get these out there so they can be search and found, so someone might find a picture of the factory where his great grandfather worked, or the school his great-great-grandmother attended.

The Worcester Lunch Car Company
By Richard J. S. Gutman

This slim volume from Arcadia’s Images of America series is a collection of old photographs, advertisements, articles, menus, matchbooks and other documents and memorabilia about The Worcester Lunch Car Company and some of the 651 diners they made during 55 years in business. Gutman, who is the author of American Diner Then and Now, interviewed some of the key personnel from the diner manufacturer before they died, and had access to the company archives preserved at the Worcester Historical Society, as well as his own collection of photographs from decades of road trips and research.
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Yesterday I finally took some pictures of the Miss Worcester Diner, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I have vivid memories of visiting my grandparents in Worcester when I was a young child. We lived in the Boston suburbs, and the gritty urban landscape of South Worcester slightly fascinated me. The Miss Worcester Diner, with an old factory behind, and the rusty railroad overpass across the way, seemed to me to be the very symbol of the city.
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