Hobart Then and Now: Two Views of Lake Street

Circa 1912 and 2010.



(Click on images to enlarge)
Top image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

The photographer was standing on the west side of Lake Street, just south of Fifth and looking south toward Sixth. The postcard bearing the top photo was postmarked 1912.

Here we've moved a little south, to the intersection of Lake and Sixth. There is no postmark on this card, but it looks roughly coeval with the first one, or perhaps a little earlier.



Top image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

That contraption the horses are pulling might be a street-sprinkling apparatus. In my reading of early twentieth-century newspapers, I've come across occasional references to sprinkling the streets of Hobart to keep the dust down. This was, of course, before the streets were paved. Someone would enter into a contract with the town to provide sprinkling for a set term; now and then the contract would expire without a replacement in line, and then the Gazette would have to complain of the dust raised by vehicles driving on the unsprinkled streets.