A Kodak Family

At one point, I asked my father to help me name how many people in our family worked at Kodak and tell me what they did. This is an incomplete list and does not include countless distant relatives -- or the families of pretty much my whole high school and many in college -- but I thought I'd share it at this point.

It's a window into a time when (for better and for worse) a town was an industry and an industry a town and folks worked 30+ years at and for only one company. The closest I've experience I have had to this is here in Boston meeting folks who worked at Polaroid. Consider this an open post to share any company, industry, or trade that has persisted in your family. I'd be curious to know!

Let's see.. Wow!!!!

Dad: all over (claim to fame: he named T-Max)
Mom: Secretary
Brother: Fork lift operator in high school
Uncle: Master mechanic
Uncle: 126 Film loader
Aunt: Secretary
Uncle: Plastic molding operator
Cousin: Personnel
Cousin: Emulsion making
Grandfather: Roll film paper coating
Great Grandfather: Tin smith
Great Uncle: Paper mill
Great Aunt: Secretary
Great Uncle: Art department
Great Uncle: Distribution
Great Uncle: ?
Great Uncle: ?
Great Aunt: ?
Great Uncle: ?

Somewhat good news from Rochester...finally

Somehow I missed this piece in the May 2nd issue of the New York Times, "At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again" by Claudia H. Deutch, until Shane pointed me to it.

That's Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who created the first digital camera, above. Here is an excerpt from the NTY, with a link to the whole article below. My father, who has met him a couple of times, reports he is a very nice and humble fellow.

ROCHESTER — Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management’s dismay at his feat.

Allan Camp, a technician at Kodak’s inkjet development center in Rochester, works on the development of print heads for printers.

“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ ”

Since then, of course, Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it.

Read more here.

Check out this AP story about the digital camera turning 30 in 2005, sort of...it would be 16 years until Kodak released its first digital camera in 2001.

Here is an image and hyperlink-based digital camera timeline. By the way, this is only the 1970s, so be sure to click around.

ABOVE PHOTO: James Rajotte for The New York Times

Off to Rachacha - 15 miles on the Erie Canal...

Bruce and I are off to Rochester, NY for my parent's 40th wedding anniversary and my father's 70th birthday. On Sunday, my parents have rented a boat on the Erie Canal for a couple of hours (departing from Spencerport). Ought to be fun! We'll see lots of friends and family.

I'll try to post while I am there, but in the meantime, here are some great maps and postcards of the Erie Canal. According to wikipedia, construction lasted from 1817-1825 and the original canal was 363 miles long (today the whole system is 524 miles).

The above image is a 1906 postcard from Vintage Views (which has great vintage postcards and timelines too) of the Upper Genesee falls in downtown Rochester. Bruce has always remarked that we don't see enough images of Rochester's wonderful waterfalls. They are really gorgeous!

Below is a map from ShipsBlog, a site about exploring the NY State canal system by boat. Click for a larger view.

Midtown meets Polaroid

After a long blog absence and a much needed holiday break, I continue my musings on Midtown Plaza (see the last post for a little history of America's first indoor urban mall). We actually went to Midtown the first night I was back in Rochester for the holidays. Parking underground and then riding the escalators up into the mall brought back a flood of memories (including trips to the stationery store Scrantom's for art supplies). My father and I wandered around for a while taking oodles of photographs. There were actually a fair amount of people there, likely paying their last respects to a Christmas tradition. You can read several Rochestarians' memories as printed in the local newspaper on Christmas eve here.

More on my trip home later (and more and better posts in the New Year!), but in the meantime I present one of my fave Polaroids above. It shows a (barely) live tree oddly lit by crazy bright hanging pendant lights. You can actually see it in its glory days in the left of the below picture. (The overall lighting of the mall, however, was incredibly dim and orange, which made picture taking quite difficult.) If you'd like to see more digital snaps I took at the mall and running commentary, please visit my flickr page.

P.S. I realize that taking Polaroids diverges from my Kodak roots, but somehow the nostaglic feel and format of Polaroid seemed appropriate for Midtown. And it's nice to support them and film too!

Where is Brian Ulrich when you need him?

I just learned that Midtown Plaza -- the very first downtown indoor mall in the US, dedicated in 1962 -- in fair Rochester, NY will be demolished within the next year or so. This past weekend, I hung out with Brian Ulrich in Boston. I went to his talk at Montserrat and showed him our AD AGENCY show that his work is also in (both of which tackle ideas of consumerism, see some pics here). We had a great time and he's back safely in Chicago after a rough travel day, but I ask you: Is this a coincidence?

Brian, someone, anyone, will you go to Rochester and document this? Heck, with shades of Flint, MI in Roger and Me, and now with its large Kodak brownfields, where is Michael Moore? I will be paying a visit when I go home for Christmas and taking my own humble snapshots. The mall has seen a decline in the last decade, but it still holds such a soft place in my heart.

To explain Midtown more: As a child, this was a magical place. During the holidays, they set up a Magic Mountain (much like as in A Christmas Story) and a monorail (which, as you can read here, is quite rare), decorated displays, and threw up a HUGE tree. This was THE place to see Santa.

The centerpiece the rest of the year was the Clock of Nations (the picture above is a rare one with people from Rocwiki), which is a large clock that opened on the half hour to reveal moving dolls from different countries. The department store across the street hosted the Scholastic Art Competition on the top floor. I participated in this in middle and high school. I remember going to a fancy indoor cafe and it used to have one of our favorite grocery stores, Wegmans. In his early engineering days, my father was even involved in its construction. For many years, it actually seemed to work. Consumerism also seemed a little less brash and crass and community just a tad more important - but maybe this is just my nostaglia (not to mention being too young to notice). Now, the marionettes no longer move and the displays are gone. The large department stores have long since vacated and many stores are closed or just plain random. Few people go there. This year, my friend decorated 2 windows near the Liberty Pole and attended the last Midtown Christmas celebration. Many came for its last hurrah.

Next, some history: Here is a flickr group started the same day as the demolition announcement, some great memories on a mall blog, and wikipedia's history. You MUST watch this fascinating socio-economic take on Midtown embedded below. The segment is from a 1963 Jam Handy industrial film short, "Rochester: A City of Quality," interestingly sponsored by RG&E, the Rochester Gas and Electric company.

The New York governor announced this October that Midtown will be destroyed, making way for the new PAETEC (a telecommunication company) headquarters with 1,000 employees. This company, I might add is already based in the Rochester area, and I assume already has a building. You can read more from the newspaper.

The demolition ALONE will cost over $50 million and the state will help to subsidize the new construction. I know jobs are good, but it is only adding 500 jobs, maybe. The enterprizing folks who do live downtown have no where to buy groceries and not much do to after 5pm. How is this good for the city? There is so much potential. Has every use and option really been exhausted for Midtown?

I say, Bah Humbug!

(For those interested, after watching the below video, "Rochester: A City of Quality," you can watch a parody of it: "Rochester: A City of Poverty"

Kodak building implosion update

David Valvo sent me some new pics of Kodak buildings 65 and 69 after their implosion (check out the last post for more information) on October 6th. For those who know Rochester, they are (were) near the corner of Ridge Road and Lake Avenue. Above is a close up of building 65, where all yellow mailers were processed that folks used to send to Kodak. Even a week later, David noted, several people still gathered to pay their respects if you will.

Building 69 (called Photographic Technology), photo by David Valvo

Building 65 (color print and processing), photo by David Valvo

Sadness and Woe: Kodak demolishes buildings

Several weeks ago, Kodak demolished Building 50 (one of the buildings where black and white paper was made) in Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. It seems that there are no plans to build on or sell the land; several others were imploded this past summer and a couple more are slotted to be imploded soon. You can read more and watch slideshows and videos of Buildings 9 and 23 at this Democrat and Chronicle online feature. Buildings 65 and 69 came down this past Saturday.

Kodaker Dave Valvo, whose remarkable pictures are below, explains what happened in each of the buildings, the images, and the effect it had on former employees:

{about Building 50 in the first photo}
To the left of bld 50 was where paper roll storage Bld 16 used to be. Behind Bld 50 in his picture is where Bld 9 used to be, Paper Finishing, Bld 10 where I started at KP [Kodak Park] and Bld 36. Looks like a war zone up close. I photographed this about 3 hours after the destruction. Many old Paper Manufacturing alumni were coming by and we talked. Everyone had a glum face as they saw where they spent much of their lives... gone...

{about Building 65 in second photo - Dave said he will go back to document the rubble}
This is building 65, scheduled for implosion very soon (it was, this past Saturday). It was also known as CP&P or Color Print and Processing. All films sent to Rochester using the old yellow mailers were processed here. It was later part of Research. I worked here at that time for a while. This is a difficult image to capture. Those of you from Rochester will know why. There are buildings on camera side of the street. So this is a stitch of taking images around the sides of the buildings as though they were not there and then putting the result together.

From my Dad: "I did not work there [building 50], but I visited it often when I was coordinating B/W paper...when I started at Kodak in 1962 they had 120,000 employees worldwide with 60,000 in Rochester. ... It takes much fewer employees for digital that it does for film especially if you have others do the manufacturing for you. Remember that George Eastman and his successors wanted a vertically integrated manufacturing plant so that they had DIRECT control over all aspects of the manufacturing process even including gelatin making (Eastman Gelatin in Peabody, Mass, etc.)."

Here are some quotes from a recent AP article on the recent events:

As film fades, Kodak's mammoth manufacturing hub shrinks
By BEN DOBBIN, The Associated Press, ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP)

As mainstream photography turns digital, the mammoth film-manufacturing hub that George Eastman opened here in 1891 is swiftly shrinking. A decade ago, when it stretched across 1,600 acres, Kodak Park was easily the biggest industrial complex in the Northeast. By year-end, when Eastman Kodak Co. wraps up a drastic, four-year digital overhaul, its miles-long perimeter will encompass a mere 700 acres. ... The company used explosives to implode three cavernous buildings this summer and has sold big tracts to developers, most recently a 330-acre plot anchored by a 2.1 million-square-foot warehouse. ... Even as revenues in its traditional businesses tumble, Kodak is still leaning hard on high-margin film to generate the profits needed to see it through the most painful passage in its 126-year history. Kodak Park, now a mix of old-world chemical plants and the most advanced filmmaking technology anywhere, sprouted up on an abandoned fruit farm a few miles north of downtown two years after Eastman launched silver-halide film in 1889. ... Only about 100 buildings will be left this winter, down from 212 in the 1990s. Kodak's work force also is contracting: its global payroll will soon slide to 34,000, half what it was five years ago. In Rochester, there will be fewer than 10,000 employees - versus 60,400 in 1983. ...

You are getting sleepy, "buy Kodak, buy Kodak..."

Photographs by and couresty of Dave Valvo, www.davevalvo.com. Thank you Dave for sharing and taking these important photos!

Off to Rachacha, Land of Photo

My oh my! It's been a long time since I've written. I've been really concentrating on summer, or at least trying. Since my last post, I went to another wedding, explored the Cambridge arts festival, hiked around Mt. Misery (mentioned in Thoreau's writings), moved my car twice for street cleaning, and sat and then got dismissed from jury duty. Needing a little more head clearing, Bruce and I are now off to Rochester to visit friends and family. Interestingly enough, in the last few weeks, I've corresponded or met with 4 photographers that had ties to Rochester. Usually, it's through school, be it RIT or VSW, and at least 2 of them repeated the nickname above, Rachacha. I don't know where this epithet came from; I thought I was the only one who said it, but apparently not!

While in Rochester, we will go to the Keuka Lake winery Dr. Konstantin Frank, have a barbecue with friends, check out the Rochester Criterium (a fast-paced short bike race held downtown), pop in the Eastman House to see the Steichen autochromes, and maybe hit MassMoca on the way back to witness the Christoph Büchel spectacle/debacle. You can read the whole back story on the massive installation here, and read an archive of his demands here. When we were there last time, we could only see the theatre entrance and it was completely closed. Either way, neither no one wins in this situation. I am sure that it will fuel many dissertations for a long time to come.

Addendum: the real autochromes weren't on display, reproductions were. Although I understand why from a conservation perspective, it was slightly disappointing not to see the real things. I think I'll post on the Ansel Adams exhibition soon.

Image: Edward Steichen, (American, 1879–1973). [Charlotte Spaulding Albright with flowers], ca. 1908. Color plate screen (autochrome) process. George Eastman House collections.