Bob

Postcards

Photos and Poems

Besides Coffeedrome.com, I maintain another web site, Rumbledrome.com, which is devoted to the history of championship auto racing in America in the 20th Century. To find material for Rumbledrome (photos, old programs, tickets, etc.), I regularly visit eBay and search, using the search term "speedway." It often happens that pictures or postcards are available featuring the Speedway, in New York City. This Speedway has nothing to do with auto racing. Instead, it was a stretch of road running along the west edge of the Harlem River from 155th Street to 208th Street where trotting horses exercised and raced at the turn of the last century. Today the Speedway is part of the Harlem River Drive and the scene in the postcards below is a familiar one to me. I see it driving home almost every night.

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Read the 1899 article.

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Map from Scientific American, February 6, 1897, showing the location of the Harlem River Speedway, then under construction.

Read the article.

Card printed in Germany, about 1905.

Mailed Feb. 25, 1905

Undated photograph.

Mailed from New York to Petaluma, Calif., Aug. 4, 1914

Not dated, not mailed.

Printed in Germany. Date uncertain.

Printed in 1905. Not mailed.

Mailed in 1906 from Brooklyn to Brooklyn.

Postcard printed after 1908. Not mailed.

Postmarked in Lakeville, Ohio, December 31, 1910.

Mailed from Hoboken, N.J., to Norton, N.J., Feb. 19, 1906.

Postcard printed in 1903. Not mailed.

Mailed from New York to Mount Union, Pa., May 26, 1905

Mailed from New York to Elgin, Ill., Jan. 27, 1914

Mailed from New York to Cooksburg, N.Y., March 26, 1906

Undated. Never mailed.

Mailed April 11, 1905, from Hoboken, N.J., to Le Havre, France

Mailed from Albany, N.Y., to Ipswich, Mass., June 24, 1904

Mailed from Albany, N.Y., to Ipswich, Mass., June 24, 1904

Printed after 1908. Not mailed.

Date uncertain (but those are cars on the Speedway, not horses).

March 28, 2004