Sweet Sixteen

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Sweet sixteen in 1900 was very different from what it is today, there were no reality shows focused around some big party with heinous parents and the monsters of children they’ve created. The photo above should be vaguely familiar to you, if you’ve ever been inside a vintage ice cream shop or seen the “classic” cover of an old novel suddenly being mass-reproduced. Her name was Evelyn Nesbit, she was the first teen star worshipped across the nation, she started as a model then became a dancer, followed by actress and finally ending up as the wife to a psychotic multi-millionaire. She also turned sixteen at the turn of the 20th Century.

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Most of Nesbit’s childhood was mixed up in a high-powered pedophilia ring involving New York’s most notorious movers and shakers. Remember, this was a time when New York was controlled by people with names like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, corruption was everywhere. Poor young girls like Evelyn had no choice but to be at the mercy of these unstable scions. She is most infamous for being invovled in the first big murder trial America saw as it entered a new age of Yellow Journalism. Nesbit’s lunatic husband, Henry K. Thaw, murdered her former lover, the luaded architect, Stanford White. Nesbit was once again a star, but this time for her testimonies on the stand, and in the end she died alone and depressed, used up by the circumstances that surrounded her and thrown away like yesterday’s news. Evelyn was the future of celebrity before anyone knew what that would be. Today, it’s her photos that she posed for between the ages of fourteen to sixteen that people know her by best; photos that were passed around as rapturously as music is shared on the Internet today.

Collection of Jeffrey M. Smith

Emma, 1900

Another girl turning sweet sixteen at the turn of the 20th Century was Emma. A great-great-great-relative of mine who also led a life mostly out of her hands and ended just as tragically as Evelyn’s. She grew up in the pampered and sheltered existence a girl enjoyed during Victorian times and was then pushed into nursing to find a husband, which she did, albeit a much older husband. She produced kids, controversially got divorced and then went mad in the latter part of her life from a severe form of depression.

Collection of Jeffrey M. Smith

Emma, 1901

Like Nesbit, there is a melancholy that permeates all of Emma’s photographs, in their eyes you see an unidentifiable malaise. Almost like they are resigned to the fact that their fate would be unfair and that their choices would be limited. But on these days, in these pictures, they were just sixteen and uncertain about the future that lay ahead. Those eyes are full of mystery and secrets that no one will ever know and that’s the way it should be.