A Monday Washing, New York City

Published in 1900 by the Detroit Photographic Company, A Monday Washing, New York City is much more than just a stunning, nostalgic visual. The scene was typical of what was known as the weekly and city-wide "hard wash day" (usually Monday) in tenement buildings throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Plentiful rows of laundry would be strung on lines high above the street, across the buildings’ facades. Uniting households in the then-common practice of hanging one's clothes out to dry, the lines' carefully fastened flapping fabric resembles Tiebetan prayer flags. Truly, there was faith involved that your clothing (which back then, especially for working-class folks, was precious and worn threadbare) would be safely reeled back in.

If taken as gospel, one might be convinced by the image that everyone in this densely populated neighborhood matched, and only wore pastel blue, stark white or pale pink. Of course, that's not accurate. Photolithography, and more specifically Photochrom, the process by which this image was made, involves hand-painting parts of a black and white photographic negative, then transferring that image onto a lithographic plate using colored gels. This then produced a colored print. The photographer would either rely on imagination or, more often, take detailed notes about the colors they felt were important to represent in a given image when undertaking the detailed process. In the end, like the true colors of the laundry in A Monday Washing, New York City, the real life hues represented in any photolithographic piece will never be known.

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