Photograph courtesy of Turner Publishing Company
The two tableaux prompt wonderment. In the first, barely post-pubescent girls pose before the barred brick façade of the downtown foundry where they work nine or more hours daily in 1910; in the second, from 1876, pupils and teachers convene around and, unthinkably, atop a three-story Second Empire school on the near North Side.
Adele Heagney and Jean Gosebrink cite those images as personal favorites from their book, Historic Photos of St. Louis, which Nashville's Turner Publishing Company released late last year.
"We wanted to show things that weren't kind of clichés, things that weren't shown in every other book or publication about St. Louis," reflects Gosebrink in her document-laden office in Special Collections at the downtown St. Louis Public Library.
"What we hope is that people … use this as a jumping-off point for finding out more about the history of the city," says Heagney— like her collaborator, a mainstay at the library's Olive Street HQ. (Heagney has served the SLPL 15 years; Gosebrink, 22.)
In that hope, Historic Photos of St. Louis should succeed admirably. The handsome 10-inch-square hardcover tops 200 pages and boasts 191 black-and-white interior images, all of them at least full-pagers. The photos range from 1852 to the late 1960s and present a panorama of our past: Union Station packed with rail passengers in 1895. Revelers thronging Washington Avenue in a blizzard of streamers and confetti on Armistice Day in 1918. The steel mosquito of a jet fighter outside McDonnell Aircraft Corporation around 1960.
In creating the book, Heagney and Gosebrink first focused their expertise on preliminary images that Turner compiled from Special Collections, the state archives and the Library of Congress—and complications ensued. "We realized that some photographs were not St. Louis, that some were quite repetitive and that we had some better ones," Gosebrink says. They revised the contents accordingly. (And sometimes amusingly. With a laugh Gosebrink confesses, "We made sure that we had a few pictures of the library.")
The book went from assembly to press in less than three months, Heagney estimates; despite that mind-boggling time frame, the pair found the experience enjoyable, like piecing together a jumbo jigsaw puzzle.
Given their background in general and the book in particular, the two remain sanguine about the relationship among the past, the present and the future here. Tomorrow may not, in fact, be trampling yesterday or even today. "The downtown that they tore down in the 1930s was at least the third version," Heagney states by way of example. Gosebrink agrees: "I think when you look at the pictures, you see how much renewal has been constantly in the history of St. Louis."
"The city changes and it rebuilds," Heagney concludes, "but it's still kind of the same place."
Historic Photos of St. Louis can be purchased at area booksellers, through "the usual suspects" online and from the publisher at turnerpublishing.com.
