| Men in great long coats, of fur or thick wool, hurry past the end of a small depot toward the rear of a waiting train, where a small crowd has begun to gather. It is a scene that must have repeated itself over and over again in the great age of the railroads, repeated itself so often that it seems too typical to be as recalcitrantly real, as undeniably particular, as it no doubt is. The locomotive seems to have just pulled in, and something is happening right around the corner now, but the crowd has been growing so fast that it is closing like a fist over whatever it is, and the eye searches over the image but can't find the answer. It must be something important, or arousing, or urgent. Some of the people are moving so fast that they seem about to blur with their motion. They are in a hurry, but it is not clear what they are doing or what precisely has called them here, and it probably never will be. We know less about it than the young girl who stands on the end of the platform, in her fine little coat, looking vaguely in our direction, away from the crowd and whatever compels it. |
| With all the activity here, a modern viewer may miss one of the other hidden messages in this photo of the Illinois Central depot at Archer, Iowa, early in the twentieth century. If we let our eye wander away from the crowd, and the train, and even the little girl, and instead send it up the end wall of the unassuming depot, we will find first a ladder cutting lengthwise along the depot's wall and then, still higher up, a pair of second-story windows modestly draped with white curtains. We can bring our eye back down to the ladder later. For now, let us look at those curtains that hang so quietly behind the shut windows, pulled tight at the center as if to put a stop to the curious eye. |
| Curtains, of course, belong in windows, so at first everything seems as it should be, and it is only on reflection that we begin to sense how out of place these small domestic accoutrements are in a public space of such obvious activity. In fact, though, this is not just a public space. And that is exactly what the curtains are saying, exactly why they were put across the windows in the first place. The curtains inscribe a vertical boundary between the platform and the tracks and the freight room and interior depot space that occupy the first floor of the building, where so many of Archer's townspeople and visitors would ebb and flow to the tide of the Illinois Central, and the apartment on the second floor reached, |
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IOWA CITY