I'm at the Imperial Hotel. Where are You?

The architect who steals my covers recently returned from the annual Frank Lloyd Wright conference with this piece of memorabilia.

 

I'm re-posting the card from a previous post that shows the hotel itself, along with the background information.

At the turn of the century, there was an increased demand for rooms for foreign visitors to Japan. In order to meet that demand, a directive was issued to build the Imperial Hotel. Frank Lloyd Wright was hired for the project in 1916. He designed just about every aspect of the hotel, including doorknobs and carpets.

According to the architect who steals my covers, these are some of the significant aspects of the hotel:

1. The job was an important one for Wright because he had no work at the time. He was still recovering from the murder of his mistress Mamah Borthwick-Cheney, who had been hacked to death with a hatchet along with her two children at Wright's house at Taliesin. The murder was committed by one of Wright's servants, who had just served them lunch moments before. After that, the servant also burned down Wright's precious Taliesin house. Frank Lloyd Wright was at his office in Chicago at the time. The scandal of the affair with Borthwick-Cheney and her subsequent murder diminished Wright's appeal to prospective clients.
2.  The Imperial Hotel managed to withstand the great Kanto earthquake in 1923, which destroyed just about every other building in the vicinity.
   
3. The hotel was demolished in 1967 because the property values were so high that a two-story building simply didn't make financial sense. The center part of the building was preserved and reconstructed at the Meiji Mura Museum, an outdoor architectural museum in Inuyama.

Happy Birthday & Many to Foller

These are both pretty birthday postcards, but I love them more for the messages on the back.

Here's the back of the card, written on March 9th, 1916 by Silas Davis.

 The message reads:
I wish you a Happy Birthday & Many to foller.  from Silas Wayburg (?) Davis

The second card was sent to Minnie Crosby in Norwich, new York in 1915.

The message reads:

Dear Auntie:

We are all well but papa he has got a sore leg  

please excouse writting From Clara W.

New Home Sewing Machines

Here are two 1880s trade cards from Watertown and Cortland, New York.
The New Home Sewing Machine company was formed by William Barker and Andrew Clark in 1882. They continued to manufacture sewing machines under that name until the brand was bought by Janome of Tokyo in 1960. If you want to find out more about the history of sewing machines, check out the website for the International Sewing Machine Collectors' Society. You could even attend the 2011 US Convention in Nashville, Oct 14-16, 2011. I posted another trade card recently that showed a similar graphic, with a head bursting through a newspaper. It must have been a trendy graphics technique at the time.