viz.

Image Credit: E.O. Goldbeck

Over the next couple of weeks viz. will be putting up a series of posts celebrating the etched glass façade of the Harry Ransom Center, and I thought I’d get things rolling with a discussion of a baseball picture I’ve always noticed on the southeast corner of the building. The hand-written caption on the bottom of the photograph’s etching reads “The New York Yankees as seen in San Antonio, Texas – March 31^st, 1922.” San Antonio’s never had a Major League Baseball team, so it’s always struck me as a little bit odd that the Yanks might venture that far south. That said, Babe Ruth stands in the center of the picture, and on first glance it seems entirely probable that the team is on some sort of exhibition tour. Anyways, I thought I’d take a moment and research the photograph before speculating on the reasons for its placement on the outside of the Ransom Center.

1922 Yankees Team Photo. Image Credit: Wikipedia

The only player that most will recognize in the photo is Babe Ruth. The only other Hall of Famers in the photograph are third baseman Frank Baker and pitcher Waite Hoyt (players most are likely unfamiliar with). First baseman Wally Pipp, who would go on to average .329 with 90 RBIs in 1922, is notable for the fact that Lou Gehrig would later take his spot at first. On June 2, 1925, Pipp reportedly complained of a headache during a game with the visiting Washington Senators, and Manager Miller Huggins put in a then unknown Lou Gehrig as a replacement, commencing the latter’s 2,130 consecutive games played streak. The photograph was clearly taken before or after a preseason game, as Ruth was not in a Yankees uniform for the first six weeks of the 1922 season. The previous fall, following the Yankees loss in the 1921 World Series, Ruth commenced a barnstorming tour in an effort to raise a little pocket money. Such tours were strongly prohibited by Major League Baseball at the time, in an effort to prevent players from replaying much-hyped World Series matchups. The 1922 regular season commenced on April 12^th, two weeks after the Ransom Center’s photograph was taken.

Image Credit: Hubpages.com, Deanomax

I think one reason the Ransom Center reproduces this image on their glass façade is that the photograph represents an important cultural moment for south-central Texas. Not only does the image depict a historic American baseball team on tour in Texas, but it’s also one of E.O. Goldbeck’s famous panoramic photographs. Goldbeck was a San Antonio native. He had an obsessive interest in photography and persistently developed new methods for taking panoramic photographs. He’d often take grand pictures of cityscapes, going to all the trouble just for the love of visual representation (he made many photographs without expectation of profit). During the world wars he famously photographed thousands of troops at a time in his panoramic frame (see above). Considered in this light, it is important that the Ransom Center exhibit a representation of this photograph on their exterior.

The etched windows are the product of a collaboration between the Austin environmental graphics firm fd2s and San Antonio’s renowned architecture firm, Lake/Flato. The collaboration’s indebtedness to south-central Texas’ cultural heritage should not come as too much of a surprise. As I discussed in a previous post about the work of Lake/Flato, the firm is committed to celebrating the vibrant cultural past of south-central Texas in thoughtfully original ways.