St. Louis Jewel Box

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The Jewel Box is a 1930s vintage greenhouse in St. Louis’ Forest Park. There was a major renovation in 2002 so the building is in excellent condition. The plants are primarily around the edges of the interior leaving space for weddings and other events. Our visit was on a Monday morning – the only other people we saw were people outside working on the water lily pond and the flowerbeds around it.

From the outside, the Jewel Box has the glass walls stairstep up to a flat roof. The framing of the glass panels has a blue patina. There are trees and grassy areas on the sides of the building…the water lily pond in the front.

Inside there were glass panels that divided the entrance area from the larger open area.

The fiddleheads of tree ferns always get my attention. The interior space was appealing – full of light…lush plants around the edges.

Getting to the Jewel Box required a short walk. There is no parking area close so we parked on Macklind Dr. and followed the sidewalk past a naturalized pond,

A nearby magnolia blooming profusely,

And plantings, including a columbine, in a shady mulched area.

Then we came to the lily pond in front of the Jewel Box. It was an opportunity to photograph them in the morning sun.

We took a different route back to the car after seeing the Jewel Box: past the Colonial Daughter Fountain

Then over to the Korean War Memorial that includes a sundial. We puzzled over the flag on the far left…realized later in the day that it was the St. Louis flag!

The short visit was well worth it – for the architecture, water lilies, learning about a part of Forest Park!

Sooty – An Aristocratic Cat

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Internet Archive has quite a few of the Junior Press Books published by Albert Whitman & Company (Chicago) in the 1930s. Sooty – An Aristocratic Cat by Ambrosina Hurcum (1935) is one such example. Kittens and their antics must have been as popular in the 1930s as they are today. Like the other books…the story and illustrations are dated but they are interesting to browse keeping in mind when they were published. I wondered how realistic the illustrator captured clothes for children during that time. Did socks not have elastic in the 1930s? The illustrations look that way.

It was a stressful time in America with the Great Depression and so many people transitioning from the countryside into the cities for work. My parents were born in the early 1930s….a bit too young to read when this book first came out. I wondered how many children had access to books like this. My mother’s family moved from a rural area to a small town after she started school. Did the school have a library of books like this? It seems unlikely. My father grew up in the country and went to a small school of other farm children; it seems even less likely that he would have had books like this.

I’ve become a fan of absorbing history via books written in an earlier time. The authors were writing about their present and for a current audience (in this case in the 1930s and for children) without the hindsight employed in histories written about the same period today. The older books offer a way to step back and observe the author’s perspective…how it is the same or different than would be observed today in a similar situation.

Arts and Decoration from 1920s and 1930s

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Over the past couple of months – I browsed through 29 volumes of the Arts and Decoration Magazine from the 1920s and 1930s. There are a few color images – dominated by covers and ads. I enjoyed thinking about the history and mood of the times reflected in these periodicals.

In the 1920s – Some company names we still see today show up – Davey Tree Surgeons, Listerine, Armstrong Floors, Heinz, Lincoln, Cadillac; some ads for companies that no longer exist too: Quaker Lace Company, Oil-o-matic Heat, Insulite, Johns-Manville Asbestos Shingles. The depictions of women were changing just as the clothes they were wearing: less constrained. The magazine reflected the quickening pace and almost euphoric mood of the decade. 1923 (vol 18-19), 1923 (vol 19-20), 1924 (vol 20-21), 1924 (vol 21-22), 1925 (vol 22-23), 1925 (vol 23-24), 1926 (vol 24-25), 1926 (vol 25-26), 1927 (vol 26-27), 1927 (vol 27-28), 1928 (vol 28-29), 1928 (vol 29-30), 1929 (vol 30-31), 1929 (vol 31-32)

And then came the crash in the 1930s. The volumes from the 1930s contain less color – except for the covers. Most advertisers were weathering the Great Depression but not paying for color ads – except for Kenwood Blankets and a steamship company. The magazine was depicting the perspective of the wealthy but even they were not as flamboyant and exuberant as in the earlier decade. This was the decade when my parents were born. They were far from scenes depicted in the magazine…living in the middle of the US in rural areas where they had plenty of food their parents grew on their farms. 1930(vol 32-33), 1930(vol 33-34), 1931(vol 34-35), 1931(vol 35-36), 1932(vol 36-37), 1932(vol 37-38), 1933(vol 38-39), 1933(vol 39-40), 1934(vol 40-41), 1934(vol 41-42), 1935(vol 42-43), 1935(vol 43-44), 1936(vol 44-45), 1936(vol 45-46), 1937(vol 44-47)

Browsing magazines is a perspective of the important things of the day – carefully selected by editors to present to their subscribers. It reflects a narrow perspective – probably: wealthy, white, skewed to the east and west coasts. It would be interesting to know the demographics of the subscribers but maybe even the publishes didn’t know that!