Radburn, Summer 1949
Photography by Gretchen Van Tassel
In 1949, two decades after Radburn’s founding, its co-planner sought to document the community’s transformation. Clarence Stein wrote that existing photographs were outdated and failed to show the “present beauties of Radburn” – particularly its now-mature landscaping. So he hired Gretchen Van Tassel, a young photographer with a striking background: During World War II, she had worked for the War Relocation Authority, the federal agency responsible for Japanese-American internment camps. Although Van Tassel took some photographs of the camps, her primary focus was resettlement – documenting the lives of Japanese-Americans who had been released from the camps to move to the East.
The images of Radburn that emerged from Van Tassel’s assignment, featured in Stein’s book Toward New Towns for America, are both idyllic and melancholy. In some frames, people seem to ignore each other; always, they ignore the camera. In many, silence hangs heavy and the pictures speak for themselves. They show how Radburn had changed from the raw-boned settlement of 1929.
However, these images are not drawn from original prints; most are reproductions from Stein’s book that we digitally enhanced for clarity. The only high-quality original image—the scene of a man working on his car—resides in Stein’s papers at Cornell University. The fate of the other originals remains unknown.
A lot of these pictures look like they could have been taken when I was a child there in the early 1960's. Such an incredibly idyllic place to grow up! I miss it.