Thomas Cave's Tattoo: Preservation Road

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo"

I've started a blog that discusses what I call the New Great Depression - the idea that the next few years will constitute a Depression era, and not simple recession. I believe that to understand it in that way will enrich it, and encourage everyone in this country to make this era a creative period, a positive time, an act of construction, and not a cause for panic, chaos and fear. This is a chance for renaissance.

If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, film, community, and a discovery of human value, as the first one did, who wouldn't want to be a part of it.

I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, make fun, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone. The dead weight of spoils has been lifted.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"About Thomas Cave"

Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Preservation Road

It's deja vu all over again, as those greater than me have said. The WPA housing projects from the first Great American Depression are now being threatened with destruction, or razed, just as the New Great American Depression is getting underway - with housing projects. Read Tracie Rozhon's New York Times article, "New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer." As Ms. Rozhon, a former colleague, quotes Robert A. Caro as saying, "It’s ironic to be tearing them down just when America is going through tough times again." Caro wrote about the W.P.A. in “The Power Broker,” his book about the builder Robert Moses. “We should be preserving them and honoring them. They serve as monuments to the fact that it is possible to combine infrastructure with beauty.”

What goes around comes around, etc. There are dozens of sturdy sayings for situations like this.

Should we be preserving this stuff? Your call - call in please. Or, should we be concentrating on the beautiful, contemporary flower of the New Great Depression, and what it could / will produce? Are preservationists marching down the right road? Or do we need a next generation of preservationists who are prepared to preserve us - and not the buildings coming down around us. Priorities please: and your comments.

Is this a New Great Depression? It's certainly beginning to smell that way, even if the press won't come out and call it that. What would you call this?

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

1 comments:

hotjesus said...: I say a blanket yes to old anything, like that old dog Stump winning the Westminster and vintage trucks and rotting tree stumps in the woods.; February 12, 2009 7:28 PM

Thomas Cave's Tattoo