In an album of photos from 1917, put together by Alice Leeuwenhoek, are crowd photos that somehow involve WWI.
The following is a sample of what the album looks like when you open it up. Most of the photos are of Alice and her family, like these first ones.
The war photos were taken in Kalamazoo. You can see the Humphrey Company building in a couple of them. According to the 1905 and 1926 Kalamazoo City Directories, Humphrey Company, a gas company, was located at 501-515 N. Rose Street, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Like a lot of businesses at that time period, it was located on the “north side,” which became an almost exclusively African-American area by the time I was a kid.
Downtown Kalamazoo is not that big, and only a few streets over is the main street, West Michigan Avenue.
So tell me: what do you think is going on in these photos? I think it’s exciting to see the density of the crowd. There are soldiers leaning out of the windows. Are they being seen off to war by the people of Kalamazoo?
The details of hats and the white/black contrast of female/male attire is fascinating.
Notice in the above photo two people standing on an elevated surface. The man on our left has his arm around the other person’s shoulders. I imagine they are saying goodbye to a loved one.
These are photos with the Humphrey Company in the background.
As to the photographer of these photos, I suspect they were taken by Joseph DeKorn, Alice’s uncle, because she is the subject of so many of her photos. Also, Joseph was the family photographer of the time period. The question is, if Alice was not a photographer herself, why did she own so many albums?
I don’t know the answer to that question.
The Family Kalamazoo 