The Singer Building

Perhaps it's my age.  Perhaps it's my mother making clothes for the family on her sewing machine.  For whatever reason, say Singer and I think of the sewing machine company.

The Singer Building in New York City was designed by architect Ernest Flagg.  It was completed in 1908 and for two years at, 47 stories and 612 feet high, was the tallest building in the world.  The Singer Building has another interesting distinction.  In 1967 it became the tallest building to be torn down.  It seems it's extraordinarily difficult to raze really tall building, which might explain why there are so many old, ugly skyscrapers in cities all over the planet.  (Perhaps, they'll be our version of the great pyramids.)  Before the destruction of the  twin towers of The World Trade Center, the Singer Building remained  the tallest building razed and is still the tallest to be razed voluntarily.

Printed on the back, "SINGER BUILDING and part of the financial district, New York City.  Singer Building located on the corner of Broadway and Liberty Streets is 47 stories high rising to a total height of 612 feet.  In it are 5,000 tenants who are carried to their offices by 16 Otis traction elevators.  The foundations consist of 36 caissons sunk to bedrock 92 feet below the surface.  Built by the Singer Mfg. Co."  This card was published by The Manhattan Post Card Company and credits Irving Underhill as the photographer.  Irving Underhill was a prominent commercial photographer in New York City specializing in urban and marine landscapes.  He was born in 1872 and died in 1960.  Underhill provided photographs for postcards and book and magazine illustrations.

My Heart Calls You

Written on the back, "Mein herz ruft nach dir."  A quick trip to Google translate gave me my heart calls you.  It sure looks like a theatrical photo so a quick trip to IMDB gave me Mein Herz Ruft Nach Dir, My Heart Calls You, 1934, starring Jan Kiepura as Mario Delmonte, and Marta Eggerth as Clara.  And what do you know, this happy couple are Jan and Marta themselves.  Really happy since they met on the movie, and married in real life.  They stayed married until Jan's death in 1966.

Anyway, both Jan and Marta were pretty famous in the world of opera, and starred in a number of pre-war German musicals.  Jan Kiepura, a tenor, was born in 1902, in a small town in  Poland, back when Poland was still part of the Russian Empire.  Marta Eggerth, a lyric soprano, was born in 1912, in Budapest, back when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

After their marriage, Jan and Marta called Vienna home, but after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, they fled, first to Paris, and then the United States.  Back to IMDB, and I found a 1942 credit for Marta in For Me and My Gal, starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, directed by Busby Berkeley.  IBDB, the Broadway theater version of IMDB, listed three war time credits for Jan and Marta together.  They played supporting roles in two separate productions of The Merry Widow, and lead roles in Polonaise.  Marta also had a credit, without Jan, in Higher and Higher.  They also became American citizens and bought a home in Rye, New York.

After the war, they often returned to Europe to perform in operas, operettas, and concerts, though their pre-war film career was lost to them.  As already noted, Jan Kiepura died in 1966.  He was buried in Warsaw, Poland.  Marta lived to 2013, aged 101.  I went to YouTube and found some of their work, including a concert by Marta, aged 82, singing songs by Robert Stolz, composer of light operas and music for cabaret.   At that point, I realized I could spend the whole day researching Austrian operettas and Berlin cabaret.  I have eclectic musical tastes, have actually been to a grand total of two operas and have several  Kurt Weill/Ute Lemper CDs, (In German, I can't understand a word.) so it might have been a day well spent, but I've other things to do, so don't be lazy, do your own computer surfing.

The Distinguished Actress

broadway.cas.sc.edu

Several posts ago I mentioned that I had bought an envelope of theatrical photographs.  Well, they arrived yesterday, and this is the first post from that collection.

This cabinet card is, to put it mildly, damaged.  The bottom margin that would have identified the photographic studio, and quite possibly, the actress is gone, and I'm not willing to spend days searching images of nineteenth century theatrical photography looking for a match.  While it would be a time consuming exercise, it wouldn't necessarily be a pointless search. It was a fairly common practice during the cabinet card era for famous performers to drop by the local photo studio and have pictures taken.  As I've noted in some of my previous posts, photographers would provide free pictures in exchange for the right to sell those same pictures to the general public. 

Now, I'd like to recommend one of my favorite online photographic resources.  broadway.cas.sc.edu  (You can click just below the title.) It's a great site documenting theatrical photographs from the Broadway stage.  The collection is housed at the very un-Broadway University of South Carolina.

June Roselle

A couple of days ago,  I went on eBay and bought an envelope of theatrical photographs.  Those haven't arrived yet, but it did remind me that I already had a few theatricals sitting on my desk that hadn't yet been added to the blog. 

Written on the back of the top image, and the only one with any information, "June Roselle, daughter of composer L. Crist Carson."  In my search for information, I started with Carson and found absolutely nothing.  I tired the usual sources, IMDB, the internet move data base, IBDB, the internet Broadway data base, and of course, the plain old general Google search.  Then I decided to try the same approach with his daughter.  After all, show business has a lot of multi generational artists.  There wasn't much there, either, but something. 

June Roselle understudied Florence Henderson, on Broadway, in the title role of Fanny.  Fanny ran from 1954 to 1956, book by Joshua Logan and S.N. Behrman  music and lyrics by Harold Rome.  She was listed as having been a replacement for a handful of performances, so she did act on Broadway.  And then, that's it.  Nothing, nada.  No other Broadway  credits, nothing on IMDB, so no movie or television career.  It's as if she just disappeared. 

So, did she decide that show business wasn't for her?  Did she get married and go the family route?  Perhaps she died.