Flooded Small-Town Street, Midwest USA, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Flooded Small-Town Street, Midwest USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Flooded Small-Town Street, Midwest USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-E49D59

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Somewhere in small-town America in the 1950s, a residential street has become a shallow lake, and whoever is driving that pale sedan has decided the water is probably not as deep as it looks. This was the standard operating assumption of the postwar American motorist, who trusted Detroit's engineering and his own judgment in roughly equal measure, both of which were occasionally misplaced. The car is already committed, pushing a small bow wave through what was, until recently, a perfectly ordinary tree-lined street, the kind of neighborhood where the houses sit on slight rises and the drainage was designed by someone who had never seen a serious summer storm. Nobody has erected a barricade or a warning sign, because in the 1950s the local response to a flooded road was largely to watch someone else try it first and see how that went. The photographer, almost certainly in a second vehicle, recorded this moment not as a disaster but as an event worth documenting, which tells you everything about how the decade regarded minor civic inconveniences — as something between an adventure and a curiosity, not yet a liability.

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