PHOTO SHOP
Works of art deck halls in Alice Austen House
ONE OF STATEN Island’s most prized historical possessions — the Alice Austen House — takes a special bow during Women’s History Month, with its pioneering tenant hailed as “a woman way ahead of her time.”
The house on the edge of The Narrows, with its sprawling view of the Verrazano Bridge, is both a museum and city landmark honoring the legacy of Austen, who was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1866 and became an early feminist and celebrated photographer.
“Alice was a woman way ahead of her time,” said Bonnie Bolstein, one of several volunteers who work at the house. “Since her death, she’s had more impact than she ever did while she was living.”
Austen, who grew up in the house and later lived on the Rosebank property with her life partner, Gertrude Tate, took more than 7,000 pictures since her uncle first handed her a German-made glass-plate view camera at the age of 10 — fueling a lasting love affair that captured scenes of the American Victorian Era through the early 20th century.
“She fell in love with photography,” said Bolstein, 75, of New Dorp, Staten Island, smiling as she sat in what was once Austen’s bedroom.
“She made a life of it — and thank goodness, because all of this history has been (documented through) her photographs.”
Inherited family wealth gave Austen the opportunity to hone her craft, Bolstein said. As a teen, she took photos of her family and high society friends boating and playing tennis — “the larky years,” as Austen called them.
Yet by her early 20s, the young photographer’s attention turned to the gritty urban streets of lower Manhattan, a world far from the one of her childhood.
“She would get on a bicycle in a corset and bustle with 50 pounds of camera gear and ride the ferry into the city to take pictures of vendors, paperboys, people who weren’t like her,” said Bolstein.
“And when we say take a picture, it isn’t something you just point and click,” said Bolstein’s husband, Jerry, 77, also a volunteer at the house. “You set up a tripod, you mount your camera, you find someone and ask them to stand still.”
The house has undergone a number of renovations and restorations since Alice Austen was forced to give up the property when the well of family wealth ran dry.
“When the stock market crashed in 1929, that was it, that was the end of the funds that supported her,” Jerry Bolstein said.
“They tried to get an income from opening a tea room here — and it didn’t work,” Bonnie Bolstein added, noting that the bank acquired the house in 1844. “It never occurred to her that her photos had any value.”
Before her death in 1952, Austen registered 150 of her images with the Library of Congress. Her work was also displayed in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition and later reproduced in Camera Mosaics and Harper’s Weekly.
One of her photos, taken in 1891 and dubbed “The Darned Club,” depicts two pairs of women, including Austen, with their hands on each other’s hips — a “risqué selfie” of the time period that suggested her sexual orientation, Jerry Bolstein said.
In June 2017, the house was designated as a National Site of LGBTQ History to commemorate her life with Tate.
“Alice would have been 152 years old this year,” Bonnie Bolstein said.
“She set an example for the ladies of today… to do your own thing, to not be conventional, (to) live life the way you want to live it.”