He couldn’t have had better timing.

At a time when nearly one-in-five people were unemployed, Delano appealed to the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program that, in an ongoing effort to put people to work, sponsored public art throughout the country. Eventually, over 5,000 artists created 225,000 works of art for the program.

Hundreds of those works came from Delano. His charge from the Farm Security Administration was, like Robert Frank a decade later, to capture the American culture and people. He did.

In 1941, at the Vermont State Fair in the town of Rutland, he took the photo below.* (If you click it, you can see a larger version.)

It’s a remarkable picture – one that captures a moment and a culture in a way we don’t often see. Against the backdrop of the green Vermont hills and in front of a small town is a freak show, garish yet elegant; in front of that, an empty ride. Only a few people are visible – it’s the ride and the house at right that command attention.

But what makes the photo so wonderful are the signs – the typography, the illustrations, the commercialism. And the acts. The pain-proof man. The backward boy. And just to the right of the Roll-O-Plane, partly obscured by a light and over a drawing of a man holding his arm over two small figures – ‘Zip’ and ‘Pip’.

Meet Zip and Pip, born Jenny Lee and Elvira Snow. Sisters from Georgia, they suffered from microcephaly, a disorder that causes the circumference of the head to be abnormally small. In the language of the side show, they were “pinheads.” At the time Delano’s photograph was taken, they were 29, on tour from their regular gig at Coney Island. You can see them at about 1:40 in the video clip below, shot the prior year along the boardwalk.

But by 1941, Zip and Pip were already famous. Nine years before, they, along with another microencephalic named Schlitzie, were featured as characters in the now-infamous movie, Freaks. The fictional romance story was, at best, exploitative, featuring about a dozen actual sideshow performers. The film is now in the public domain.

It wasn’t well-received. Beyond the presence of the unsettling cast, the story line, which revolves around a trapeze artist marrying a midget for his money, preceded strict enforcement of Hollywood’s Production Code, when sexual innuendo and violence were considered acceptable. In the full version of the movie’s climax, the “freaks” descend upon the trapeze artist and mutilate her. One audience member blamed the film for causing her miscarriage.

Freaks has had a lasting impact on American culture, or, perhaps more accurately, subculture. It’s likely that if you hadn’t seen the movie before now, Zip and Pip may have looked familiar for another reason: Zippy the Pinhead.

Zippy the Pinhead is a cartoon by Bill Griffith, the eponymous character of which was based on Freaks‘ Schlitzie and another microencephalic, Zip the Pinhead. (Zip, also a featured act at Coney Island, died in 1926.) The cartoon amalgam of these real-life characters anchors a strip that’s not anchored by much else. Celebrating absurdity and non sequitors, it’s often baffling and rarely funny – but regularly amusing.

Which was the goal of the old side shows, too, of course – not to invoke laughs but instead bewildered amusement. The freaks were meant to send a chill down your spine, meant to get the girl you liked to bury her head into your shoulder. In a world without 4chan, they were all frisson, no irony.

As you may know, there still exists a sideshow at Coney Island, but, being in Brooklyn, it’s populated mostly by self-aware hipsters, exchanging their dignity for cachet. What you may not know is that the older, exploitative form of sideshow still exists in New York as well.

I used to live on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Each September, the street becomes useless for residents, transformed into an ersatz Italian carnival, the Feast of San Gennaro, that covers the roadway and sidewalks with food booths, souvenir stands, and a healthy dose of kitsch.

Where we lived was near Canal Street at the entrance to Little Italy, on the second floor of a walk-up brownstone. In the year that we lived there, 2007, the blocks-long Feast of San Gennaro took over the parking lot across the street, transforming it into a side show for the duration of the nine-day festival.

This being New York City in early September, it was hot, meaning we needed to keep our windows open. And, given that we lived on the second floor, it meant that the recorded patter that blared from the loudspeakers atop the wagons contained the two sideshow acts – Little Lina and the Angel Snake Girl – blared directly into our apartment, in overlapping waves of feral enticement. For twelve hours a day, our living room sounded like this:

Finally, on the second-to-last day of San Gennaro, we ventured over, paid our dollar, and saw Little Lina.

The signs leading to her, enticing us with her exoticism, informed us that she was from Haiti, that she was so many inches tall, weighed so many pounds. We turned a quick corner, and there she was – not exotic, not interesting, just a tiny person sitting on a pillow, grinning broadly and grasping for any money we might care to offer. It was shockingly banal. We smiled, greeted her awkwardly, and left. During the time the trailer was across the street from us, we never saw anyone leave at the end of the day – the trailer was also her home.

Which brings me back to the photo that started all of this. Jack Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov near Kiev, found work in 1941 taking pictures of America for the American government. In doing so, he captured an incredibly American scene – a small fair in a small town at the brink of a tumultuous time.

And somewhere behind the scenes, down from Coney Island, were two women whose deformations gave them careers, of a sort. Made them entertainers, movie stars.

In Delano’s photo they’re unseen. The only people we see, torsos blocked by the orange and red signs that advertise the freaks, are the backs and legs of the folks from Rutland who, crossing the railroad tracks to get to the fair, paid their dimes looking to be amused.

* The Flickr Commons recently added a number of color photos from the era, including a number more Delano took at the same fair. I came across the photo above in this blog post about the collection.

Follow Philip Bump on Twitter here.

Case in point: the New York Times archive. Doing a search for the address of Mediaite’s home office on Broadway turns up, disconcertingly, several turn-of-the-century fires* (one in 1879 and one in 1904 with a “peculiar quality of smoke”) and Broadway “ablaze” (with bunting, for the Centennial of the Constitution). But no photos.

(That is in part because photos in newspapers weren’t common until the early 20th century. When introduced, they were a game-changer. To this day, the logo for the Daily News shows an old-fashioned camera, still bragging about their photography.)

As I’ve discussed before, exploring history online through photography and video is one of the ancillary beneficiaries of increased network speeds. In a city with the overlap of technological ubiquity and deep history – such as New York – such exploration is still just our snowshoeing across the top of the iceberg.

That’s obvious as new images gain attention. The influential Kottke.org recently linked to a University of Indiana archive of color photos of New York from the 1940s and 1960s. The conversation centered on a common question for old photos – where, exactly, was this taken?

The key to answering such questions (beyond a proposal I’ll make at the end of this post) is the buildings. Like fingerprints, a neighborhood’s architecture reveals its identity – whether it’s the Chrysler Building or a tenement-style row house. For New York, the site NYC Architecture acts as the FBI database, an index of nearly every building of note. (For the sake of inspiring furious back-and-forth in the comments, I’m going to use “Manhattan” and “New York” pretty much interchangeably here. And there’s nothing you can do about it.) If you’ve always wondered about that interesting building at Beaver and Pearl, for example – it was the New York Cocoa Exchange. (For the sake of this article, I’m also going to pretend people care about buildings in the Financial District.) If it pops up in the background of a photo, now you know.

Maybe the building you’re looking for isn’t in that database. Maybe it’s just an old brick walk-up. Well, if it has any remnants of an old advertisement painted on it, you might still be in luck. Forgotten NY has an interesting collection of still-visible advertising on buildings around the city.

All of this takes a lot of work, of course, and doesn’t leverage the power of the distributed web. Enter a project called, uncreatively, Pictures of New York City. Built by Ontology2, the system culls images from public sources and sorts them by location, providing a robust way to coalesce images. (Yes, Google Maps already does this to some extent via Picasa, but the emphasis here is on the photos.) The success of this model, though, requires the owner of the photo to know what they’re looking at – or a camera that can accurately geolocate the image.

Which brings me back to the New York Times. Last month, they profiled the life of a building on the Bowery, with photos from 1940 until today. The piece is a wonderful look at the colorful history of the place, and the building – murder, theft, accidental deaths.

Amazingly, the photos that accompany the article come from the City’s Municipal Archives. I find it impossible to believe that over their 160-year history, with all of the things that have happened on the Bowery and at that address, they haven’t got a single picture of it. I think they probably do. Unlike the articles, though, it’s hard to know without putting in some time, going through some process like the above to figure out what each of the photos is, and where it was taken.

There are two ways, though, that the Times (or any paper) can build an incredible (and incredibly useful) database of geotagged photos.

The first is to transition to geolocative cameras or, if they aren’t doing so already, to add the location to the metadata of each photo as it is taken.

The second is to take advantage of the metadata that already surrounds these photos – the articles. Every article the paper has ever run has been in service to the story adjacent. It’s possible that there could be an automated system to pull the location from the accompanying article; it’s probable that to have a human do it would be trivial.**

Unlocking the archive of the Times would build the groundwork for the grand vision: a publicly accessible map littered with photos of every conceivable origin, each displayed according to where it was taken. Cities demolished in war would spring back to life. A corner we know intimately would stretch back over decades to show its birth and youth. Every new photo dug from an attic or discovered at a yard sale would fit like a puzzle piece into the portrait of our world, with increasing ease.

It’s a complex world, in which centuries of history went unrecorded. That era has ended. Every photo – even one taken at a birthday in a private kitchen, even one taken in Dallas, Texas, on November 19, 1963 – is a component of our collective past. Institutions like the Times have a tacit obligation to contribute their history to our collective understanding of our past. Everything we can do to support those efforts – we must. Everything we can do to expand on and explore these structures – we should.

* Which, I assume, has nothing to do with the upcoming office move.

** Ultimately, of course, humans will invent some software tool that will do all of this work for us. Researchers have already built systems that can recognize objects within video – deconstructing an old photo doesn’t seem too far down the path.

A few weeks ago, the Times’ J. David Goodman looked at Monserrate’s 2008 campaign website, which was still allowing comments. (The comments he was receiving were not particularly flattering.) In the piece, Goodman asked an interesting question:

How many orphaned campaign sites litter the Internet?

That, of course, was a challenge. I’ve made a few campaign websites in my day, and it’s true. When you wake up (late) on the Wednesday morning after the election, taking down the site for an unsuccessful candidate is not the first priority. But finding these sites is tough – who remembers the domain name for some House candidate from 2005?

Instead, I thought I’d explore the always-wonderful Internet Archive to revisit those domains that I could remember (and, frankly, that would be generally interesting). And so, I present: Old Campaign Websites, in reverse chronological order.

2008
The 2008 campaign for President was not only the most recent, but one you likely still remember. The sites themselves were considered news, after all, during one of the most-watched campaigns in American history. But, as a Democrat, I didn’t spend a lot of time exploring the sites of Republicans who lost in the primary. So:

Nearly no one of any party saw Rudy Giuliani’s campaign site. The sulky photo is apt.

Mike Huckabee’s site, with its Easter message, seems to be in keeping with his campaign themes. The link to his Myspace page does not.

An old Photoshop hand like myself can give you a tip about the Romney site: the photo of Mitt and his wife may have been superimposed on the flag in the background.

And then there’s Ron Paul. The highlight of this one? His announcement bout an appearance on “Glen Beck” (see: Upcoming events). Remember when it was Paul who commanded the legions of fanatic supporters?

The Republicans in the audience may not be aware that there was a pretty scrappy contest for the Democratic nod in 2008.

So you may not have seen Hillary Clinton’s site, for example. (She came in second.) It’s impossible to believe that a candidate with such strong support of Elton John wouldn’t prevail in November.

The other guy in the hunt was John Edwards. On his withdrawal from the campaign, he vanished from sight. We can only assume that he and his wife (pictured!) lived happily ever after.

2006
Speaking of sex scandals, did you know that David Paterson was never elected as Governor?

I’d be curious to see what the “Friends of Eliot and David” counter would read these days.

2004
Speaking of sex scandals, a much-younger John Edwards was also the Vice Presidential candidate in 2004. This site reminds me of numerous scathing comparisons between Bush and Kerry’s logos – the former’s being far bolder than the latters.

The same holds true for their websites. Bush’s 2004 site was much stronger and confident than Kerry’s. Note the famous “Wolves” ad promoted at lower left.

That strength also led itself to parody, however. The owners of Bush2004.com made hay with some of the prominent themes of the President’s campaign.

2003
Residents of California elected a former actor to be their Governor. When he died, the former actor that was then their Governor paid tribute.

(Arnold was elected in 2003, so I’m counting this as that year.)

2001
I’m often surprised how often people forget that September 11, 2001, was a primary election day in New York City’s race for Mayor. The front-runner was Mike Bloomberg, who lost and retired penniless.

(A quick plug: I presented a collection of screen captures I made on 9/11 for last year’s anniversary.)

2000
Probably the most fascinating pages I came across in this retrospective were those from Bush and Gore, shortly after Election Day in 2000. Each page shows messages calling for continued support from voters during the recount process. (It’s fascinating to remember how many of these battles were fought by proxy – here, James Baker versus Bill Daley.)

Bush looks so young; Gore so cramped in the tiny box displaying his photo. There is also a picture of Joe Lieberman on the page. Question for time travelers: will seeing that photo impact how you might vote in the 2000 race?

1996
Most candidates didn’t have websites in 1996, but the White House did. In fact, the White House is one of the few organizations that has a full set of captures from 1996 to 2008. The progression of American politics and technology are both captured over the course of these 12 years.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, it’s hard to remember domains for all of the various candidates who have run over the years. So I made this little tool – if you enter a domain name (including the dot-whatever) and a date, you can pull up the Internet Archive’s closest web capture.


If you find anything interesting, add it in the comments below.

Or maybe we should have a contest for the most derivative, ugliest campaign website in history. Here’s my entry: the site for Hiram Monserrate’s re-installation campaign. Green, yellow and black combined with a mutated Obama logo is bound to be a front-runner.

Even if comments aren’t allowed.

While we’re feeling superior: check out the cover story. For our friends in the media industry, it should be considered inspirational. For if you’re struggling every day to publish magazines and newspapers that, unfortunately, probably won’t be along much longer (or websites that, unfortunately, will) – at least you’re not making $23,200 a year.*

That princely sum was the 1977 annual salary of Eileen Shields, Time‘s New York reporter. On the plus side, it was a 10% jump over her $21,000 1975 salary. In 2010, twenty-one grand is below the Federal poverty level for a family of four.

Ms. Shields wasn’t alone – the Times‘ Judy Klemesrud made only $37,000. Eugene Maleska, that era’s Will Shortz, got $26,000 (earning a place on the magazine’s “Cushiest Jobs in Town” call-out). Peter Fleischmann, Chairman of The New Yorker, only got $76,800. I know people that make more than that! (Demonstrating that 1977′s priorities weren’t completely out of whack with our own, A. O. Sulzberger pulled in a much more robust $285,000 – just over a million dollars in 2010 money.)

Hundreds of salaries are detailed. Sandy, the dog from Annie (which is also reviewed in this issue), earned $200 a week, twice as much as the doorman with whom he shares the cover. Mario Cuomo, then Secretary of State, made $47,800 – bested by “Duane”, a pimp in Midtown who made $54,000. (See, media drones! Some of you are making more than stereotypical late ’70s pimps!)

The list is amazing – so many names you recognize in jobs that you didn’t know they held. (David Dinkins was City Clerk! John Marr was the city’s Chief Epidemiologist!) Here is the list, in full.

New York has done this since, multiple times, most recently (as far as I can tell), in 2005. This newest list is also very much worth a look, if only to see the athletes and now-disgraced titans of industry and who make their 1977 counterparts look like relative hobos. (Lehman’s Dick Fuld made $35,000,000 in 2005; Frank Cary, CEO of IBM, earned $595,000 28 years prior. Raise your hand if you still do business with Lehman Brothers.)

These comparisons aren’t fair, of course. A dollar in 1977 isn’t the same as a dollar today. (In fact, a 1977 dollar is worth about three-and-a-half times a 2010 dollar.) But it’s more fun comparing your salary to Rose Ann Scamardella‘s $60,000 annual earnings than her actual $214,000-in-2010-dollars haul. (“Tony”, who passed out flyers for the Harem massage parlor, gets boosted from $3 an hour to only $10, so feel free to act superior.)

So ignore those dollar conversions. Our goal here is to make you feel rich, that you’re worth more than the Director of the FBI ($42,500) or the Chancellor of schools ($53,000) or, at the very least, the Chair of the Arts Department at Paterson State College ($16,993). And here’s another way to feel better. Punch your salary, however meager, into the Global Rich List calculator, and you’ll learn that, pretty much no matter what, you’re in the 95% of wealth in the world. (Don’t ruminate on what that means for the rest of the world. Just feel rich.)

I’ll leave you with one last ego boost. Robert Moses, the architect of much of modern New York City transportation, earned $35,000 in 1977. In 2005, New York‘s survey discovered that Anna Wintour‘s assistant made $40,000. I think we can all agree that when assistants at magazines earn more than public servants, it’s a sign that the universe is shifting into proper alignment.

Just don’t adjust for 2005 dollars.

* Unless, of course, you do. In which case… man. I mean… man.

Yeah, it’s coming to TV in real-time, and James Cameron seems to have an affinity for it.* Great. But the technology has been around forever. As in, since the 1890s. The classic image of people wearing 3D glasses at the movies is from the 1950s, after all – half a century ago.

What people are eager for, I offer, is 4D. 4D viewing is what makes the TiVo popular – you can watch a show in any direction, can (once on your hard drive) jump to any point within it. You can see the outcome before you see the set-up, which saves a lot of time in M. Night Shyamalan movies. (“Oh. They’re actually in modern times. Got it.”)

4D is also how one might describe imaging that offers the ability to overlap time periods; to compare what a thing looks like now with what it looked like then. When you restage a photo from your youth (a popular Flickr pastime), you’re adding the temporal dimension to your image. (Technically, of course, comparing photographs of the same object over time is another form of 3D, eliminating the perception of depth. But I’m already three paragraphs into this conceit. Just go with me.) Doing so allows for a sort of personalized “Spot the Difference” game – less hair here, more gut there.

People like doing this with their hometowns, too. New Yorkers and those visiting our fair shores may be familiar with a book, popular at tourist sites, that applies this concept to the city. Called New York: Then and Now, it presents historic photos of New York side-by-side with recent images. As your eye skips across the book’s gutter, it traverses decades, centuries.

Two years ago, the New York Times offered an online version of the same thing. Its Then/Now series (by reporter David Dunlap) allows site visitors to slide images across one another to see changes over time.

Other examples abound online. For you Left Coasters, the Los Angeles Times this week posted a series of images comparing the view from City Hall today with that of 1951. (Note the last photo, in which the Times’ building itself appears – not much the worse for wear. You can just make out the ‘For Rent’ sign.) (Not really.) Flickr has an entire group dedicated to recreating historic photos, from which some of the pictures on this page are taken.

The concept extends to social commentary. Last year, a Russian photographer overlaid images of modern Leningrad with photos of the same scenes from the siege during World War II. Brutal and gruesome shots of corpses and rubble gently saturate with color around the edges to show modern residents, oblivious to what happened a few feet away, many years prior. An online Holocaust memorial compares drawings of concentration camp life with the now-bucolic surroundings in which they occurred.

In the same way that we’re fascinated by baby pictures of friends and loved ones, it’s irresistible to compare the world we live in with its youth. Google is explicit about allowing similar comparisons in Google Earth. (I explored this theme somewhat tangentially, in another post.) Within Google Earth’s ‘Layers’ menu, choose ‘Gallery’ and ‘Rumsey Historical Maps’ to explore a variety of ancient and historic maps. Here, for example, is what the Mall and “President’s House” looked like in 1861 – before anyone was considering a Lincoln Memorial:

Still visible to the southwest – the swamps of the Potomac. With a click of a checkbox, you can see what now lies where this muck once was. (Probably rhymes with Beeberman.)

Now that I’ve clearly demonstrated to those television manufacturers and media company owners reading this post that there exists real demand for a four dimensional experience, let’s get cracking. (How can this exist, you ask? Not my job. Sony‘s job.) Granted, those in the betting-on-things business might take issue with being able to know the outcome of a game before it’s over, so we shouldn’t expect sports to lead the pack on this. For sports fans, then, this will have to do.

* I haven’t seen Avatar, because, meh. But how dumb a name is “unobtainium”? I hope the movie at least comes up with some reason for why that’s what they settled for. (See also: Will Hunting.)

Yankee-hating is seeing a resurgence, thanks to the sudden ability of Alex Rodriguez to get hits in October and their building the most homer-friendly ballpark in the majors. The Handbook, that religious document, is now out of print (due, no doubt, to the nefarious machinations of Clan Steinbrenner), so those seeking to bone up on the various historic reasons the Phillies are worth rooting for have to turn to our old friend, the Web.

The beautiful thing about baseball is how astonishingly rich its history is. (Consider this: in its entire history, the NFL has played fewer games than have been played in baseball’s past five years – in the Majors alone.) People have been playing professional baseball for over a century, all the while documenting the games and the players in every new media format available. Much of that documentation is a quick link-click away.

Let’s start at the most jaw-dropping website in professional sports: Baseball-Reference.com. I’ll explain what’s available there with a quick anecdote (as, it seems, is my wont). Shortly after my Dad laid the Handbook on me, we took a trip to Detroit to see my childhood favorites, the Tigers play, and beat, the Yanks. Our family made much of the fact that, while regular players had photos that appeared on the scoreboard when they batted, Rob Richie, newly drafted, had only the Tigers’ logo where his photo should be – implying that Mr. Richie bore more resemblance to Shere Khan than Genghis. In a family of corny jokes, this one became long-running. So, with only this information in hand (Rob Richie’s early appearance, the Tigers winning), I was earlier this year able to scrabble through the pages at Baseball-Reference and find the boxscore for the game itself – August 19, 1989. (Mr. Richie went 1-for-4, with 2 RBI.)

Photo from the New York Public Library on Flickr.

Baseball-Reference has box scores, standings, player data for nearly every game in the history of professional baseball. Want to know what the standings were on the day you were born? No sweat. They’ve got it.

Statistics are one thing. Photos are another. Yesterday, the New York Public Library posted on its blog a series of photos from classic New York and Philadelphia teams (all pulled, notably, from the Flickr Commons). The photos are fantastic – crucial, valuable bits of American history. (I’m particularly taken with this staged photo of someone sliding into second – you can get a sense for how long they held this action-packed pose by noting the blurred man in the background.)

The historical import of such images is reinforced by the Library of Congress’ baseball card collection. Fatima Cigarettes gave us the 1913 Phils and 1913 Yankees. That year, per Baseball-Reference, the Phillies came in 2nd in the NL; the Yanks, pre-Ruth, 7th in the AL. (The Philadelphia A’s, meanwhile, won the AL pennant, and the World Series.) Baseball cards still exist, of course, but target the collector market rather than kids, a transition made clear when, in the mid ’90s, Topps stopped including gum with the cards since the gum left stains. (Little known fact: Topps started as a candy company, using the cards to build gum sales.)

A few decades into the professionalized sport, radio became mainstream. The image is universal: pre-teen boys huddled around a console radio, pounding a fist into a glove, growing agitated over the travails of their favorite team. Sadly, much of this is lost to time, though some of the more memorable calls – like Bobby Thompson’s shot-heard-round-the-world – live on. Major League Baseball (MLB, which tightly controls its own history) has a collection it calls ”Baseball’s Best.”

Then came motion pictures and television. Some of the best footage comes from movie news clips – the first time video of games was presented in the now-familiar highlight-reel format. This video details the last time the Yankees and Phillies met in the World Series: a 1950 Yankees sweep. A dark time. There are any number of similar segments on YouTube – but much of the more modern footage is still only available through the MLB, leaving some fans to resort to other ways of getting their game footage fix.

The Web is dripping with baseball history, including fan sites, like Historic Baseball.com, and professional organizations like SABR, the Society of American Baseball Researchers. It reinforces the web history truism – the more interesting a subject is to a broad range of people, the more complete its history will become.

Of course, the history of the game of baseball continues to be written. Last night, for example, was the first World Series game ever played at the new Yankee Stadium. And like all of the best stories in history, it had a happy ending.