Tag: Las Vegas

DAMMED PLATES

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A souvenir, something that evokes a place or vacation experience, is purchased to remind the traveler of their trip or to be gifted to a friend or family. Such stuff is sold in shops near attractions. Now with the internet you can also order some items online. Souvenirs verify you trekked to Niagara, the Great Natural Bridge, or Vegas. That’s their intent at least.

On the back of some plates are descriptions of the dam. The reverse of the artist rendering in green of an African dam reads, “This Spode plate was made to commemorate the completion of the dam at Kariba Gorge on the Zambesi River, in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. 1960” It is imprinted “Spode England”. On the reverse of the 5 ½” plate of the powerhouse of Garrison Dam, N. D. is printed, “Hand painted ENCO N.Y.C. Made in Japan.” Collectors begin picking up plates with state, city, monuments, natural wonders, and church (and dam) iconography and guides were published. American kilns produced million of these souvenirs beginning in the 1920s. The fad has pretty well died out. (click on image to enlarge)

Ceramic plates with images of attractions or destinations became popular “I’ve been there” artifacts in the late nineteenth century and have persisted in one form or another since. Clay is cheap and can be shaped into many items. Advances in ceramic technology allowed complex patterns to be applied to the surface of a plate. By the 1870s decorations no longer had to be applied by an artisan with a brush but could be stenciled. This improved and lowered the cost of producing decorated wares. Numerous firms in England, Germany, Japan, and America competed to produce souvenir china and pottery.

Around the central view of Mt. LeConte, Great Smoky Mountain National Park are two historic buildings and two dams. One dam is a major government structure; the second is a small power source for an antique grist mill. Great or small dams are landmarks often visited and souvenired. (click on image to enlarge)

Glancing through these two collectors’ guides to souvenir plates we find imagery of natural wonders and built landmarks. Courthouses, tall steepled churches, or post offices were perhaps not tourist draws but prosaic souvenirs were probably the product of a special order by a local civic group. Souvenir plates were not dinnerware. They were for display. A fixture of middle-class households was the china cabinet where a ceramic record of the owner’s travels could be seen. By the 1920s, wire plate hangers became available allowing plates to be hung on the wall like pictures.

In state or regional montages, dams pop up among bridges and historic monuments. Plates solely dedicated to major water resource projects are not unknown. Some may have been manufactured to mark a dam’s dedication or a ceremonial anniversary.

Serious examinations of any given water resource project would be enhanced by the inclusion of a picture of it on a plate. Its esthetic style and the fact that it was once considered worthy of being a decorative object would impart a certain realism to the discussion of its hydrologic and environmental impact.

GALLERY: Dams, canals, locks and reservoirs (lakes) are notable landscape-shaping features. These manmade landmarks seem to be coequal with natural wonders like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon in the judgement of plate manufacturers.  Indeed, the builders of great dams push the idea that their river control projects are as grand as the most spectacular wonders of nature. (click on any image to enlarge)

BUCKLE UP With a DAM Good Belt Buckle

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Like Hoover (Boulder) Dam, all dams and reservoirs, even small ones, can generate images that promote purposes beyond their hydrological justifications. Cultural and symbolic meanings, Dr. Arrigo, author of Imaging Hoover Dam, convincingly asserts, can be perceived in advertising, souvenirs, and a variety of artifacts that celebrate the mystique of that particular river-blockage.

We further his thesis with a group of decorated hunks of metal used to support a fellow’s jeans. Most of the iconography of these belt buckles isn’t about flood control or hydropower but perpetuates Americans’ belief in the restorative power of outdoor recreation—increasingly a selling point for dam building. Some reservoirs (lakes) are in fact popular. These unnecessarily decorated useful accoutrements, like much of the other stuff in this post, are not specifically mentioned in his book. Our explanations may not be lifted from his writing either, but we run with his ideas that dam trivia can have hidden meaning.

Hoover Dam is just such an icon. It is often used to embellish products like this Montana Silversmiths Men’s Nevada State Heritage Attitude belt buckle. This firm produces buckles for all fifty states decorated with their best-known symbols. A reference to Hoover Dam and Las Vegas appears in this one with a cowboy and hunter flanking the state seal. Many buckles have been produced featuring Hoover Dam’s iconic flank alone

Though not specifically mentioned in Imaging Hoover Dam, these decorative belt buckles embody his thesis that structures built for economic reasons have cultural significance. Thousands of smaller dams built by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, although not as commanding as Hoover, are promoted for the outdoor recreation their backed-up waters provide.

Bonny Dam in eastern Colorado still stands but its reservoir was drained following a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that forced Nebraska and Colorado to release river water as mandated by the Republican River Compact. The dam exists but in 2011, after years of appeals, the lake behind it was drained to the chagrin of local fishermen. This buckle graphically illustrates the affection locals had for its recreational opportunity in an arid and monotonous High Plains landscape.

 

Belt buckles with anti-dam iconography are exceptional. This “Free the Snake River” buckle expresses the goal of an active movement to remove four Corps’ dams on the lower Snake River. They were built to allow barges to move more freely and to generate a minuscule amount of hydroelectricity. They block the spawning runs of several species of salmon, including Chinook. Once these fish were a vital economic resource.

In the next to last paragraph of his book, Arrigo muses over the ironic fact ephemeral images of dams may continue to freely “speak” to future generations “long after the dam is gone.” Bonny Dam has been left but its function is “gone.” In his account of dam-removals the author doesn’t dismiss the usefulness of some dams. Images of dams do not always verify their stated purpose. Builder propaganda and product advertising have no obligation to be truthful.

A solution to blocking spawning runs has been to stock reservoirs above dams with hatchery-raised fish. That program created a popular sport fishery in Lake Sakakawea but at a cost—hatchery raised fish have poor reproductive fitness. If they mix with the more genetically diverse wild population, the offspring will do poorly. More than 300 scientific studies verified that hatchery-raised trout are poorly adapted to natural environments.

Dr. Arrigo cautions readers that dam memorabilia can misrepresent reality. This belt buckle celebrating the hatchery solution to the blockage of spawning runs is an example.

This species of salmonids is big but not as gigantic as the monster on this sculptured belt buckle commemorating the popularity of stocking Chinook in the biggest North Dakota impoundment.

Not far from Tuttle Creek Lake (Reservoir) is the doing-OK town of Leonardville, Kansas, population 429. Early on a railroad came through and today it’s connected by highways. Leonardville, unlike ten other nearby small towns, supported the construction of a Corps of Engineers dam. Those other burgs would be flooded, or nearly submerged, by the Tuttle Creek flood control project. Despite strong opposition from the three thousand who would be displaced, the earthen dam was built, and the reservoir began filling in 1962.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Tuttle Creek plate shows valued recreational opportunities the impoundment once offered to residents. They were benefits,recreational opportunities the impoundment once offered to residents. They were benefits, but they came at a high price.

A Kansas farmer mowed an anti-Tuttle-Creek Dam message into his field.

Water-powered mills were frontier necessities. Families gathered to convert their grain to flour and the small ponds behind the low dams were places the kids played. These low-tech mills were fondly remembered and idealized in popular culture. Artists painted them and sheet music like “Down by the Old Mill Stream” memorialized them. In a limited-edition belt buckle, Chapman, Kansas recalled an “Old Mill Dam” inactive since1903.

 

The preceding plate-style buckles evolved from Army belts of the mid-1800s. As is evident, this type of buckle affords a large space for decoration. Embellished with Western motifs, they were sported by movie cowboys and awarded to winners of rodeo events. These heavily sculpted ornaments were once exclusively male attire, having had a military origin. Construction, like building dams, was exclusively masculine.

 

DAMS AS SOUVENIR MOTIF

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Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Idol was published eleven years ago but the book only came to our attention recently. Author Anthony Arrigo of course deals primarily with that gigantic plug on the Colorado River that generates electricity and diverts much of the Colorado’s flow to thirsty southern California. Our collection of dam memorabilia contains material imaging Hoover as well as dams across America, even some around the world. We have not only acquired artifacts that comport to Dr. Arrigo’s linkages to American cultural currents, but we have some whose meaning is cryptic.

Cast in pot metal, the ashtray that issues smoke from the openings in the head appears to be a knock-off of a ceramic four-eyed man (drunk?) made by Ensco. Conceivably it was offered long ago to tourists as a souvenir.

The very survival of the then-small Bureau of Reclamation hinged on the successful completion of Hoover Dam. Fortunately for them, the BOR was a publicity-savvy bureaucracy. They flooded the media with interesting images taken by their staff photographers accompanied by glowing press releases praising this symbol of American technological expertise.

One of their first official photographers was Cliff Segerblom hired in 1938. He had never used a camera before but had training as an artist. The Bureau hooked him up for instruction with Margaret Bourke-White and Ansel Adams—both had done contract work for them. Although Segerblom only worked for the BOR for several years he fulfilled their need to control the public opinion of the giant, expensive project.

As for the miniature doll house plastic toilet with a picture of Lake of the Ozarks’ Bagnell Dam, we could easily transfer this from our dam collection to our kitsch collection. Souvenirs are often obscene or scatological, failed humor assaults on good taste. They sometimes say nothing at all about their subject

He posed his wife-to-be, Jean Wines, placidly peering down at the dam to counter his earlier images of construction whose brutality may have given the impression that the dam was a dangerous place to visit. This tranquil view was reproduced in a 1941 Arizona Highways magazine and more recently on the cover of Imaging Hoover Dam.

There are some very different, but similar compositions. A sightseeing day trip to the dam and reservoir is a tradition for Las Vegas visitors. When tourism developed, the BOR lost control of the imagery that they had enjoyed during construction when photographers needed a pass to even see the dam. German art photographer and specialist in erotica, Helmut Newton, doubtlessly cared little what the BOR would have made of his view of Hoover Dam. We have not found out if this were an assignment from Vogue, Vanity Fair, or even Playboy. Las Vegas was a go-to resource for curvaceous females who would disrobe on request. We speculate he may have brought a showgirl in a thong to add pictorial interest to the scene of this great engineering accomplishment.

Contrasting Segerblom’s demure Mormon fiancée with a Vegas showgirl is a rather dramatic illustration of Arrigo’s thesis that Hoover Dam doesn’t have a single picture—its image is a mix of often very different views.

“General view,” photo by Cliff Segerblom.

Hoover Dam Overlook, photo by Helmut Newton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE PAYTON DAM COLLECTION

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Catalog for a photographic exhibition created for the University of Missouri Extension

We had two young sons to raise after Leland lost his employment creating photographic exhibits for the University of Missouri Extension. He was let go because of pressure from Stuart Symington. Missouri’s senior U. S. senator was angered because he sicked the Environmental Defense Fund on the Army Corps of Engineers’ Harry S. Truman Dam and Reservoir project that would block the Osage River. The lawsuit didn’t stop the impoundment, but it did force the Corps to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. In detail the documents revealed the project’s adverse effects and poor cost-benefit ratio.

Leland’s traveling photographic shows on Missouri’s natural environment were pleasing to both regionalists and environmentalists.Supported financially by the Kansas City Association of Foundations his work came to the attention of Nancy Hanks, head of the National Endowment for the Arts. She backed his creation of a large exhibit on the state in observation of the Bicentennial. Ms. Hanks was offended when Sen. Symington sent an aide asking her to withdraw support for Leland’s project due to his “stop Truman Dam” efforts. University of Missouri Extension officials were cowed, however, by the Senator’s pressure. When he refused to withdraw as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, he was sacked.

Neither Leland nor wife and mother Crystal had marketable job skills, so they became itinerant, underfinanced antique pickers. As a kid, Leland had collected coins and Indian relics so along with looking for undervalued old stuff they started several collections of stuff that was interesting but cheap. One of these collections was of memorabilia relating to dams motivated by the effect they had had on his life.

The late John Margolies inspired us to collect souvenirs and memorabilia relating to book projects.

While exhibiting at a New York City antiques show, they met John Margolies, the preeminent and well-published roadside photographer. John thought their accumulation of kitschy 1950s lamps was interesting, so he introduced them to Walton Rawls, an acquiring editor at Abbeville Press. In 1989, Turned On: Decorative Lamps of the Fifties was published. It was a modest success.

Weary of traveling to the coasts to buy and sell Art Deco and folk and outsider art to selective customers, the Paytons settled in Leland’s Ozarks homeland. From Springfield, Missouri, they did several more pop culture books then segued to self-publishing projects on regional subjects. To illustrate these projects, their accumulation of Ozarks memorabilia would be mixed with their contemporary location photographs. Several titles centered on the celebrated spring-fed streams of the rugged uplift. Recently Missouri State University Libraries-Ozark Studies Institute acquired their 5,000+ piece Ozark collection.

Hopefully their dam collection can similarly find an institutional home where it can be made available to scholars of water resource development. The stunning graphics of much of this stuff lends itself to exhibition as well. In this post we illustrate some of our material showing the variety of ways dams are perceived. Some we match up with quotes from Imaging Hoover Dam by Dr. Anthony F. Arrigo. All the illustrations in this post are from the Paytons’ dam collection.

Dr. Arrigo acknowledges the power of these diverse representations. He was amazed at how they influenced public opinion but how few scholars recognized this fact:

I was struck by the rhetorical features of these images, as well as their ability to instantaneously arrest my attention and “speak” to me in ways that the text did not or could not. As I began to research the topic in more depth, I found a seemingly endless trove—thousands upon thousands—of images of all sorts published in every conceivable medium. It seemed to me that these images had their own story to tell, and the more images I found, the more diverse the story became, in some cases veering wildly from the received history of the dam that I had casually come to know.

Later in the preface he points out the sneaky way these megabuck endeavors to remake the landscape are advanced:

I trace how its imagery was deployed through advertising, government propaganda, journalism, and other promotional outlets to shape the public’s perception of the project. This discussion ranges from how the dam’s imagery reflects the cultural and ecological imperatives that precipitated its construction, to the influence of religious doctrine and the American agrarian movement in the drive to build the dam, to the visual commodification of the project as a way to sell cars, trucks, vacations, and a variety of other goods and services.

The book laments the neglect of “this endless array of images” by historians.

Although the Hoover Dam project itself has been the subject of hundreds of publications, this mass of related visual material has barely been considered. By foregrounding representations of Hoover Dam that were produced before, during and after its construction, Imaging Hoover Dam shows how this supra-discursive visualizing process was integral to the development of the mythology, indeed the very iconicity, of the dam, and how the use of Hoover Dam imagery shifted over time from ensuring its construction, to its celebration as a sublime engineering wonder, to its utter commoditization as a means of selling everything from whiskey, to cars, to vacations, to space pens.

It was a costly undertaking during the Depression: “Regardless of its potential, luring residents to the harsh, flood-prone, and as-yet-undeveloped Colorado Desert, and persuading a reluctant government deep in the throes of the Great Depression to spend tens of millions of dollars on a giant dam—what some saw as a boondoggle of monumental proportions—would require a massive public relations effort.”

Hoover Dam and Las Vegas are intimately related. This musical snow globe shows Kokopelli (adapted from an ancient Indian petroglyph) cavorting around the base while two Kokopelli dressed as tourists look down into Hoover Dam inside the globe. A cautionary tableau, fabricated into a souvenir. (left) Many souvenirs like the vintage glass ashtray (top right) show both Hoover Dam and Vegas.

Native Americans are the embodiment of primitivism. Surprisingly they appear in conjunction with this icon of modern technology. In Imaging Hoover Dam, the author addresses this strange pairing:

The figure of the Native American is clearly a romantic one, as is suggested by the title of the booklet, but what is also romanticized here is the technological achievement and the materials of modern construction—concrete and steel. The Native American figure is part of the old Wild West romance myth that is so important to the ethos of the American West. But the native also seems to be looking at the dam in wonderment and perhaps resignation. The figure appears to be looking at the dam as one looks at a curiosity. Although the native carries his own technology, an instrument of war and hunting, his bow and arrow are clearly impotent against the modern dam.

(Click on any image below to view in gallery)

Near naked warriors in front of Hoover and other dams are not uncommon, if paradoxical. Arrigo explains: “In these images, the old and new are powerfully contrasted. Native figures in traditional dress—feathers in their hair, and loincloths around their waists—look out onto the ultramodern dam, a symbol of industrial and governmental power, symbolism echoed in the oversized stately building placed at the bottom of the dam. Here we see that the native people are left behind, a romantic legacy of a time long past.”

The conclusion of Imaging Hoover Dam examines the changing public perception of these heroic projects and the future of Hoover and other monumental efforts to control nature:

The dam’s demise may, in fact, come at the behest of the American public if it decides at some future point that Hoover Dam is no longer appropriate in the zeitgeist of a more environmentally concerned society. The frenzy of dam building that the Bureau of Reclamation set into motion in the early 1900s in the United States is over and appeals for movement in the opposite direction have been taking hold.

Fishermen lobby to remove blockages of fish that spawn in headwaters. Reservoirs fill with sediments. Some objectionable dams have been removed. New projects are justified because hydroelectric power is “green.” In the ten years since this book was published, “clean energy” advocates have included hydropower in their suite of proposals. Alas, growing populations need water for irrigation and believe in the promised flood control. At the same time, the movement to remove aging, fish-blocking, sediment-clogged dams has gained momentum. The outcome of these conflicting needs and interests is unknown.