By Tom Dodd

Regular Rag readers were astonished to see the upper stories of the Masonic Block in full, florid color in the February issue, but there it was: Frenchie’s Verdigris, Yellow Bird Yellow, Clover Computer Green, and Hair Station Henna. Screaming, bright and shiny, from the cornice to the street. Color had arrived in Depot Town.

When the Depot Town Association started publishing The Rag in 1976, old photos from the Ypsilanti Historical Archives showed the neighborhood in half-tone, sepia tone, and Dagurreotype technology. The HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Academy_of_Sciences”French Academy of Sciences announced the daguerreotype process on January 9, 1839. This invention marked the invention of photography, a year after the first train had already arrived in Ypsilanti and riders were wishing they had cameras installed in their cell phones, but that took a bit longer. Still, locals took pictures of just about everything that fell into their line of sight then and today we can clearly see there was no color yet. Anywhere. Everything was just black and white––with occasional undertones of gray.

Camp Photo, in the upper floors above today’s Sidetrack Bar and Grill, was the nation’s foremost school photographer and their product hung above the lockers of most of America’s high schools. No color here; just black and white mug shots of somber students in big oak frames.

Even on the outlying farms, color did not exist. Some would argue that sunsets were just as colorful even before the days of pollution, but farmers worked “from dawn ‘til dusk” and were always tired and ready for bed by the time the sunset came around to end their long work day. If there was any color then, no one seemed to have noticed or made any mention of it.

In 1856, Louis Prang [1] started messing around with color lithography but, aside from some homemade Christmas cards and making kids paint his Prang Color Wheel [2] in their junior high art classes, not much of that technology ever made it as far as this side of Ypsilanti. [3]

[1] Louis Prang
[2] Pre-Prang Black & White wheel
[3] Prang’s Color wheel

Depot Town was black and white, movies were black and white, television was black and white; even Life magazine was black and white. Color, for all practical purposes, did not find its way to this neighborhood until iSPY magazine brought its hues, values, and intensities to the district with their tabloid-style slicker-magazine reportage of things of interest to their 18-35-year-old demographic of readers who needed constant titillation to keep their attention. Depot Town, from its beginnings in 1838 to the January/February issue of The Depot Town Rag, still catered to its 50-to-Highland Cemetery demographic with mundane and colorless photos.

With last month’s issue, The Rag took a bold step to merge with iSPY (“Ypsi” spelled backwards––it took some of us nearly a year to figure that out!) with lurid photos of flesh-tones, sky-blues, pretty-in-pinks, and everything-has-to-be-greens. Earlier Goth readers already familiar with the aforementioned tabs were accustomed to color tv, liptick, and eyeliner.

Our editors will endeavor to report colorful stories––even those which might have been described as “off-color.” Things were so much easier in the Before Color days without “red” and “blue” politics.

Do not be surprised to see contemporary readers wearing sunglasses indoors––and they’re not looking at 3-D movies. That probably won’t be around for at least another hundred years or so, say the experts.

[4] Birdseye Photo caption:
Depot Town, from the period before color, drawn on the back of a hymnal from the tower of the Presbyterian church.