RMW Ramblings

 Artists of W 18th Street Revisited Mary and I had a mid-afternoon dinner last Sunday at Buckley's Tavern in Centerville and were conveniently seated by the fireplace with Dick Layton's ( https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2025/02/artiists-of-w-18th-st-richard-layton.html) tempera painting "Old Centerville in the Days of Doc Chandler."   I photographed it so I can now share it with you.  A few days later artist friend Margo Mavrantonis Johnson ( https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2025/02/artists-of-w-18th-street-margo.html) stopped by. I commemorated her visit by transporting her wandering snowman  to Rockford Tower.  

  Artists of W 18th Street Margo Mavrantonis Johnson Margo Mavrantonis Johnson is a W 18th St artist who is still active, although no longer living on our block.  Margo is retired from her art teaching career but continues to paint professionally.  She paints a variety of subjects, but my favorites are the structures and streetscapes from her frequent European trips, especially to her second home, Greece.  We treasure her Christmas cards which depict a peripatetic snowman who has visited New Castle, Tuscany and Greece, but has yet to experience a meltdown.       Margo has a studio and gallery representation in the Opera House, 304 Delaware  Street in old New Castle, Delaware, and a web site at https://margojohnson.artspan.com/exhibits.html.  There is an extensive gallery of her work there.      

  Artists of W 18th St Richard Layton The Laytons house faced W 19th St but their deep yard, where Dick had created a fairy-tale castle playhouse for their kids, extended to 18th, giving me license to claim Dick as a W 18th St artist. The Laytons were already there when we moved in in 1966.  I had known Dick's wife Debbie in high school. and we quickly became reconnected. Dick attended the Philadelphia College of Art, and studied with Frank Schoonover,  Carolyn Wyeth, and his friend Andrew Wyeth.  I remember Dick being involved with many art projects beyond easel paintings, often sponsored by Wilmington arts patron W. W. "Chick" Laird.  He designed interior panels for the theater that once occupied one floor of Breck's Mill in Henry Clay, and even painted faux windows to cover empty window openings in Walker's Mill across the Brandywine from Breck's. A large project that Dick was commissioned was a set of murals painted for the Dover Room dinning hall in what ...

 Post Offices Past Some once small communities bordering Wilmington once had their own post offices and postal addresses. The Highlands, now a Wilmington neighborhood, was once a separate community with its own post office. Here is an 1886 envelope postmarked from Highlands from Joseph Bancroft & Sons Co. to Pusey & Jones Co. from 1886. Our own Highlands. house was built around 1882. Notice that neither businesses required a street address.   Several years back the Montchanin Post Office left their old train station location in Montchanin and relocated in Breck's Mill along the Brandywine in the old community Henry Clay. Montchanin is a PO Box only station with its own zip code but no delivery area. From 1851 to 1924 Henry Clay had its own Post Office. Here's an envelope postmarked August 27, 1914 from Henry Clay .  Highlands became part of Wilmington early in the 20th century.  Henry Clay remains just outside the Wilmington city limits and is p...

  Bridges of the Brandywine In my posting last month, The Three Bridges ( https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-three-bridges.html),  I mentioned that that project lead me to investigating all of the other bridges over the Brandywine in the Delaware section.  I visited and photographed all of them and researched their historic predecessors in the photo collections at the Delaware Historic Society and the Hagley Museum Library.  I painted watercolor views of each of them, then using scans of the individual paintings created a pictorial map of the Brandywine.  I had 18 x 24 inch prints of  Bridges of the Brandywine produced.   The border of the print is modeled on the truss work of some of these bridges.  The legend is modeled on Delaware historic markers.  For display I built a frame overlaid with truss-like metalwork built from pieces of an old Erector set. I have some copies of this print/poster still available.

  The Delaware Bibliophiles Endpapers   Books and ephemera have been an interest of mine for years, so it is natural that I joined the Delaware Bibliophiles.  I have edited, and for several years earlier, contributed, to the DB's semiannual publication  Endpapers.   Here's the cover of the current issue...   You might want to become a member.  While we have ramped back on face-to-face meetings for a while, we still have Zoom meetings with visits to book related collections, and last summer an outdoor picnic.  Membership is $30 a year .  Members get paper copies of Endpapers and on-line access to current and back issues.  The DBs are part of The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies (FABS) and we get their publications as well.   If you are interested, contact me at RMWramblings@gmail.com and I will get you connected.    

  On the Avenue 2 The Morning After  

On the Avenue  1 The Del Rose has been gone for many years, but here it is in a painting I did of Delaware Ave denizens back when.      

  A Movie and a Coke Another View of the Warner Theater While this watercolor painting was done to feature the Kozy Korner Restaurant c1956, then located at Delaware Ave. and Washington St., but you can see the Warner Theater in the background.  In this painting the Warner is showing High Society with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, one of my old favorites.   The painting was one of three larger watercolors that I did as a commission for Nick Vouras the owner of the Kozy Korner, then on Union St.  He wanted three paintings of my pick of local scenes.  The Kozy Korner and Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox  were obvious choices for two of them.  In a personal touch, I snuck my 1948 Studebaker into the Atlantic service station, now the site of the Brandywine Building, and much earlier, the site of the James Garfield statue now on Concord Ave.

  In the Cool and the Dark Wilmington's Old Warner Theater     The Warner Theater on W 10th St. in Wilmington is long gone, but I remembered it in this painting in acrylic on hardboard, set in circa 1955‑6 .  The building had an odd L-shaped layout, wrapping around the adjacent buildings on the west side of the theater entrance.

  Wilmington's Trackless Trolleys 2. Their History On March 29, 1939 the first trackless trolley line started in Wilmington, the 10 Delaware Ave., which ran out to The Highlands.  This had been the first tracked trolley line earlier.  The system was converted fully, eliminating tracked trolleys, and operated until December 6, 1957, when all lines were converted to smelly diesel buses.  It was a sad moment for me; I loved the trolleys.  DART, the successor to the old private Delaware Coach Company (DCCO) is now converting back to electric propulsion, now sans overhead wiring and trolley poles.   There is a complete history of Delaware's trolleys in this book, now out of print...     Two of our former trackless trolleys are at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, ME...   Our trackless trolley era got less than one page in Cox's book...    

  Wilmington's Trackless Trolleys 1. My Junkyard Finds In the 1940s and 1950s we had trackless trolleys, or trolley buses, in Wilmington.  Powered from twin  overhead electric wires with two trolley pole connections, these rubber tired trolleys could pull over to the curb and swerve around stopped vehicles.  In the 1970s I photographed some junkyard remains of a few of these in south Wilmington.  Here are some of the pictures.     Here's a ceiling light fixture, rather art deco... Here's the driver's dashboard... We'll have some more on our trolleys in another posting.

  Cards of Christmas Past 2010 19th Century Carolers in New Castle Our 2010 card shows the advantage of computer editing and printing to produce a card with more detail and color than our earlier card crafting approaches.  In the fall, at Oak Knoll Books on the top floor of the New Castle Opera House, I noticed the view of the old New Castle Courthouse, and it suggested the theme for this card. I wanted to have a high angle view.  I made this very preliminary sketch... I couldn't fly over the Courthouse, so I took photographs from ground level to work out the building's proportions.  Then I built a maquette, a little model, and photographed it from several viewpoints with a variety of lighting arrangements. I chose this view for the card... ...made a very pale print of the cleaned up photo, carefully preserving the shadows.   Then I constructed the drawing over it... And began adding color in Photoshop...   I drew the carolers, wagon, trees, the other build...