Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There had been earlier efforts to photograph the conditions of the poor but none so stark or so widely seen. Riis' unflinching pictures of tenement life mark a turning point between the Victorian idea that poverty was an evil to be condemned and the reformer's conviction that it was a condition to be remedied. Riis, like Mathew Brady, had a team of photographers (and like Brady, took credit for their work). Shooting in gloomy alleys and sunless rooming houses, he and his colleagues became pioneers of flash-lit photography -- a delicate undertaking in those days when the newly invented...
...quiet neighborhood, not because of its tranquillity but because of its gaps -- vacant lots where houses were razed and replaced by fields of pink clover, Queen Anne's lace and beer-bottle shards. Here and there are anachronistic gestures to elegance -- carved laurels in a window casement, a Victorian turret, delicate porch columns -- that lend the scene the haunted air of a horror-movie set. At times the Inlet seems just a bad joke. Standing over one bunker-style housing & project is a billboard touting one of developer Donald Trump's two casinos: TRUMP CASTLE. WHERE BETTER IS NOT ENOUGH...
...million investment program for building heavily subsidized housing for the middle class. But neither the casinos nor many of the Inlet's inhabitants have much faith in the effort. "You can't mix caviar with tuna," says Dorothy McCann from the rocker on the porch of her oceanfront Victorian home. McCann, 71, has reason to sound ornery: the agency bought her out last month as part of its raze-and-rebuild plan, despite the headline-making campaign she waged to stay put. "My husband Frank wants me to move out and go to a place where we'll have some...
Atlantic City always dreamed of attracting an upscale clientele, and casinos / now respect this myth with frescoes and wax figures of slim-waisted maidens under dainty parasols, promenading on the Boardwalk. But historians insist that even in its glory days, Atlantic City was simply a Victorian Disneyland. A 1909 edition of a highbrow Baedeker tourist guide carried this assessment: "Atlantic City is an eighth wonder of the world. It is overwhelming in its crudeness -- barbaric, hideous and magnificent. There is something colossal about its vulgarity...
...first time around, Sweeney Todd, the gruesome tale of a deranged barber who slits customers' throats and a pragmatic landlady who bakes the victims into meat pies, was a Victorian penny dreadful by way of Brecht. Everything imitated him: Hugh Wheeler's book, Stephen Sondheim's score, Harold Prince's staging and even the set, which resembled an iron foundry; it hissed and clanged of the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. Audiences in 1979 flinched at the spewing blood and spoken bile: it seemed there had never been so cynical a musical...