Alice had a voracious appetite for images and dedicated herself to recording everything on film. She took photographs of family and friends as they enjoyed the pastimes of the era – picnics, card games, costume balls, ice skating parties, and thrilling new sports like auto racing, bicycle riding and – Alice’s favorite – lawn tennis.
Clear Comfort looked out over The Narrows of New York Harbor, and from that vantage point, too, there was endless entertainment. Alice watched, and captured, images of the Great White Fleet and the Lusitania sailing by. And to the north, she watched as the Statue of Liberty was erected.
Alice also traveled widely – throughout the United States and to Europe, always hauling along her camera equipment and taking photographs wherever she went.
But beyond capturing scenes of life from her own circle, she also took grittier portraits of the working class – scenes of bootblacks and blacksmiths, organ grinders and oyster shuckers, egg vendors and newsboys and new immigrants.
When Alice was 33 years old, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her devoted partner for the next half century.
The ladies continued to travel, and Alice also spent considerable time improving the grounds of Clear Comfort and founding the Staten Island Garden Club in 1914. For almost every occasion, she took photographs – images that reveal a personal but expansive view of the conclusion of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th.
While Alice treated this as her life’s devotion, she apparently never considered it a career. Instead, she relied on her inheritance to cover her living costs – but that income dwindled over time, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, Alice and Gertrude found themselves in difficult financial straits.
They tried staging a tearoom on the Clear Comfort lawn, but when that didn’t bring in enough to sustain them, Alice was compelled to sell off the furnishings and art in her home. Then she had to mortgage the property. By 1945, she had lost that, too.
Before she moved out from her beloved family home, she asked a friend from the Staten Island Historical Society to store her glass plate negatives. Everything else was sold, and Alice and Gertrude moved to an apartment.
When they found they couldn’t afford even that, Gertrude’s family took Gertrude back, but made no such offer to her partner of half a century.
E.A. Austen, 1889. Collection of the Alice Austen House.