Historic Hood River
Summer Vacation
Notes
You never know what you’ll find in the Museum’s photo collection, and this is a good illustration of that point. We found a very faded, crinkled cellulose nitrate negative mixed in a box of glass plate negatives. I could barely make it out by eye, but the scanner did its magic and revealed this image. Clearly not Hood River, and clearly not this century.
Following a hunch that this might have been a “world’s fair” of some sort, I was able to find similar architecture at the Paris Exposition of 1900. This was one of the less photographed parts of the fair. The photographer was standing right in front of the Eiffel Tower, looking down the Esplanade des Invalides. We can see it in all its glory in this image courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
I knew very little of the Paris Exposition before this image prompted some research. I’ll share two facts.
- 1) These spectacular structures were all built just for the Fair, and are long gone.
- 2) This is the same Paris Exposition at which Campbell’s Soup won the gold medal they still boast about on their label.
It’s hard to imagine someone from Hood River traveling to Paris in 1900. We’re not sure who the traveler was, but he or she left behind some pretty good evidence of an amazing summer vacation.
Which brings us to our Monday Mystery: Was this visitor to the Paris Exposition in 1900 tied in some way to the “Paris Fair” Department Store which opened more than 5000 miles away on Oak Street the following year? Or was an unrelated entrepreneur simply capitalizing on the worldwide press generated by the fair?
l.e.
I have thought about asking you why the store, that appears in so many of the historic photos, was named "Paris Fair".
Connie
How wonderful in this day and age of technology that we can preserve this image from a negative that obviously is in such bad shape. Thanks Google Grant!!
Charlott
Fantastic Photo of a world lost. Like so many world fairs, much was built only be torn down afterwards. Like the Lewis and C lark Exposition in Portland. Grand things were built for the event and then torn down afterwards.
This didn’t necessarily have to have been taken by someone from H. R. Could have been something that came down within a family and eventually ended up here.
Arthur
There is no conclusive proof this photo was taken by a Hood River resident, but we have some circumstantial evidence. We have more than a dozen negatives of Paris and its environs from the same era, mostly glass plates. The glass plates have "clip marks" from the mechanism that held the plate in place during the exposure– and those marks match marks on other negatives taken in Portland and the Hood River Valley. Not conclusive, but suggestive of a very well traveled photographer (or at least camera) whose collection wound up in a box at the Museum.
hss
Certainly the fair was wildly popular with travelers –it attracted 50 million visitors and was a bargain at just 11 cents admission. Don’t know the numbers for the 1900 fair but the 1889 one attracted some 150,000 Americans. Henry Adams (historian and grandson of John Adams) complained during his 1900 visit "All Americans are in Paris, I pass my time hiding from them".
David McCullough’s book on Americans in Paris "The Greater Journey" recounts a nice exchange between Midwesterners:
First Chicagoan: "It don’t compare with the World’s Fair of Chicago"
Second Chicagoan: "Of course not. I knew that before I left Chicago"
BTW, not all the buildings from 1900 exposition were demolished after the fair’s nine month run. The Grand Palais –an enormous wedding cake of a building–continues to be used today as one of Paris’s main exhibition spaces. The Eiffel Tower is a remnant of the 1889 fair which was spared the wrecking ball because of its popularity (and profitability!)