I moved from Brooklyn, NY to Green Island, IA with my mom and siblings in 1972, arriving in time to start second grade. To make it seem exciting, our mom told us about the trains that traveled through town – actually almost in our backyard – and admittedly that did sound cool.
Though passenger service had ceased, the depot still existed with operators that managed traffic and passed messages: barely visible on the left is the pole which held messages to grabb when trains passed, higher for the engineer and lower for the caboose brakeman. I was inside a few times, but don’t remember much other that the inside was also fairly run-down.
My grandfather took this picture on a visit from Connecticut, likely in 1973, probably his first visit to Iowa. Ostensibly it’s a picture of my sister and brother outside the depot; however, the building and its overall decrepitness the focus upon zooming out, my siblings providing a reference point of the building’s size.
My wife pointed out the exterior discoloration on the bottom 2-3 feet, likely water discoloration from the regular spring flooding of the nearby Mississippi River.
I believe my grandfather was proud of this picture, as it hung in multiple homes of my grandparents. We searched for the original negative, and when we couldn’t find it he gave me his copy to scan. The original color around the edges is where the frame protected the print from sunlight.
And now for something slightly different….
I color-adjusted the original scan to create a black-and-white version, which appears almost dystopian England, my brother’s plaid Sears Toughskins notwithstanding.
Image © 1973 Sheldon B Sosna
