Past & present

Tom Neumeyer has been photographing Cape Girardeau since he was a student at Southeast Missouri State University at the beginning of the 1970s. Both as a former newspaper photographer and in his current profession as a commercial photographer, Neumeyer has documented the old and the new in the city.

Forty of his photographs will be paired with historical photos, drawings and postcards of the city in the photo-documentary "Cape Girardeau: Then and Now" opening Sunday at the River Campus Art Gallery in Cape Girardeau. A reception from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday will include remarks by Neumeyer and Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at the university. The exhibit, a collaboration between Neumeyer and Nickell, will be on display through Jan. 11.

A conversation over coffee between Neumeyer and Nickell generated the project. Neumeyer likens it to a family photo album or a biography of the thousands of people who have lived in the community. He also envisions the exhibit as a bridge between the past and present, one that revisits the legacy that has been preserved and the legacy that has been lost.

The Common Pleas Courthouse, preserved when citizens protested a federal government plan to raze the 19th century building, is one of the pairings. Others show landmark buildings that no longer exist alongside their replacements. A parking lot replaced the once-magnificent Ellis-Wathen-Ranney house on North Main Street.

One goal of the exhibit is to help raise awareness about the need for historic preservation in the community, Neumeyer writes in the exhibit epilogue. "The city does not belong to us. It belongs now to our children and grandchildren. We need to nurture, preserve and take care of it while we have temporary tenure."

COVER: Photographer and historian Tom Neumeyer posed with his camera. (AARON EISENHAUER ~ aeisenhauer@semissourian.com)

One pairing shows children playing on swings in Capaha Park long ago and now. A current photo of the building that houses the Cup 'N' Cork wine shop and restaurant at the southeast corner of Main and Themis streets can be seen alongside a vintage image of the same building in 1858. At that time, Charles Schievelbein operated a saloon there. Schievelbein is the ancestor of the Shivelbine family who have been in the music business in the city for many decades.

Most of the older images come from the archives of the Center for Regional History and the Special Collections & Archives of Southeast Missouri State University. Many of those images were taken by longtime Cape Girardeau commercial photographers George and Chester Kassel and Paul Leuders. Some came from the Missouri Secretary of State, who oversees the state archives.

Neumeyer's collection of more than 100 vintage cameras includes the one he took his first photographs with in 1967, when cameras had no light meters. He worked for the Southeast Missourian and the Bulletin-Journal newspapers before beginning the commercial photography business he operates now.

The Center for Regional History will publish the book based on the exhibit in the spring.