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It’s astonishing that Hollywood has yet to make a biopic about Alice Austen, the unruly photographer who was raised in privilege in New York in 1866 and died in poverty in 1952. Picture Austen gleefully defying Victorian female norms and lugging around 50 pounds of equipment on her bicycle to capture life in the rapidly changing city, cruising around Staten Island as its pioneering female car owner, or playing lawn tennis with her partner of over 50 years, Gertrude Tate, and their queer circle of friends.
But beyond the casting conundrum, the centuries-old house in which Austen spent most of her life, on Staten Island’s northern shore, would be one of the movie’s biggest stars. Her family referred to it as Clear Comfort, though sailors approaching the harbor knew it as The First House on the Left. Originally built around 1690 as a small Dutch Colonial farmhouse, it was purchased in 1844 by Austen’s grandfather, businessman John Haggerty Austen, who transformed it into a Victorian Gothic masterpiece. The surrounding 15-acre park offers breathtaking views of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“For the LGBTQ+ community, it is a site of pilgrimage,” says Victoria Munroe, executive director of the Alice Austen House, the sole museum in the US dedicated to a woman photographer. Austen captured over 7,000 photographs – from street scenes to immigrant quarantine stations and rare depictions of intimate relationships between women, some even dressed as men – of which approximately 3,500 have survived.
Although some of her work was published, Austen’s fame grew exponentially just before her death, thanks to the support of historian Oliver Jensen. More than 150 of her photographs are on display at the residence, which Munroe describes as “one of her greatest inspirations.” Austen snapped pictures throughout the house, developing them in a makeshift darkroom created from a closet on the upper floor.
Clear Comfort was a bustling home, inhabited by Austen’s mother, who had been abandoned by her husband, and their daughter in the late 1860s. They lived alongside grandparents, uncles, an aunt, three maids, a pug, a chihuahua, and several cats. However, the family’s fortune vanished in the stock market crash of 1929, and in 1945, they were evicted. They had attempted to make ends meet by operating a teahouse on the front lawn and selling their belongings, but Austen ultimately ended up in a poorhouse, where Tate was only allowed to visit.
In the 1950s, another pioneering lesbian photographer, Berenice Abbott, played a vital role in the preservation of the house, and in recent years, the Alice Austen House has placed a renewed focus on Austen’s complete identity, previously overlooked. The establishment of a Queer Ecologies Garden Project features “nonbinary” and “trans” species, while contemporary photography exhibitions intersect with Austen’s areas of interest. “Having roped-off rooms with staged furniture isn’t something that resonates with everyone,” Munroe remarked.
Some of Austen’s personal belongings have been donated back to the house, such as two 19th-century Chinese vases acquired by her relatives during a trip to Asia, as well as a trove of letters discovered by the subsequent occupants after Austen and Tate’s departure. These artifacts offer glimpses into Austen’s vanished world, where cycling and lawn tennis were newly embraced activities for women, and where individuals sought ways to express their personal identities and live on their own terms.
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