From 1904, a postcard[1] sent from New York to St. Louis. Starting with the back side:
I can’t make out that name at all, although whoever he[2] was, he appears to have been an “esquire”. Secretary of the Swedish…something…at the World’s Fair[3] in St. Louis. The Swedish Pavilion from the fair has survived, for some reason in Kansas.
The front of the card is both more familiar, for the picture, and far more difficult to understand, as it’s in Swedish.
The picture is a glamor shot of lower Broadway, looking north from just south of Trinity Church. It’s a great view of the American Surety Building, showing off how it was one of the earliest skyscrapers in New York to have been designed as a free-standing tower, visible on all sides. As for the text…the combination of cursive from someone whose handwriting is unfamiliar to me and a language that I do not know a single word of makes deciphering this impossible. I tried a bunch of guesses in an online translator and I kept getting auto-complete generic pap: “It would have been great to see you.” Who knows? One thing I’m sure of: after New York and the date, “Broder” is brother. So I guess the card was sent by the brother of the Secretary to the Swedish something.
- The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Trinity Church & American Surety Building” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1904. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/20460f30-c55f-012f-25f1-58d385a7bc34↩︎
- Definitely a man. Keep reading.↩︎
- Technically, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.↩︎
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