HABS of the Blue Wing Adobe in Sonoma… Again?
Last month we had the pleasure of documenting Sonoma's Blue Wing Inn Adobe. It was officially an addendum to a historic photo documentation from 1934. It's fun to think that the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) program is the only New Deal program still in existence and many of the historic buildigs that were photographed in the infancy of the HABS program still exist.
We're big fans of Then & Now projects so we started off the 20 photographs with two that were re-creations of the only two taken by photographer Roger Sturtevant in 1934. It's like looking in a kid's photo book of "what's different?" What happened to that second chimney? And look at that Wisteria!
Today we have wider angle lenses than in 1934, so the view of the porch is a little wider, but the knot holes on the roof rafters still match up even though the floorboards were replaced.
My negatives and contact prints will be sent to the Heritage Documentation Programs division of the National Park Service soon. Then they will be acquisitioned by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division; with my negatives stored along side Sturtevant's negatives from 1934 (which are in cold-storage at Fort Meade, Maryland). And after the restoration of the Blue Wing Inn is complete, we'll take another set of "After" photos and add a little more to the HABS collections. It's what we love to do.
Stephen Schafer is a HABS Photographer based in Ventura, California. | 805-652-1000 | www.habsphoto.com