The first weeks of a new year always bring the urge to look ahead, to ponder what’s around the next corner. It also affords a chance to reflect on how far we’ve come, as individuals and as a community.
We started with photos of Toledo and northwest Ohio from the Detroit Publishing Company, all dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The Detroit Publishing Co. was one of the largest postcard producers in America at the turn of the 19th century, routinely dispatching photographers throughout the region to capture images of Midwestern cities and towns. The company went defunct in 1936, with its negatives and prints eventually making their way to to the Library of Congress.
Vintage photos in hand, we asked Blade staff photographer/videographer Andy Morrison to revisit those same sites, capturing them from the exact same angle a century later.
Everything’s changed, and also very little. Same steam plant. Same Midwestern sky. Same colonnaded art museum.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that a century ago, the first affordable electric appliances were making their way into homes, streetcars were more common than automobiles, and passenger airline travel was in its infancy.
We dress differently today, and instead of traffic cops we have stoplights. But there is the same industriousness about the community, the same sense of going places.
And there is that same essential artery linking past and present, the Maumee River, pulsing along as it has for centuries on end.
First Published January 12, 2020, 12:30 p.m.