Dorothy Liebes | 5. Pram Robes Pay The Bills

With shorter hair, and an uncharacteristically serious look, it's hard to locate Liebes on her college yearbook page. She is in the second row, fifth from the left. Liebes expected to graduate from Berkeley as a painter, but her teacher, Ann Swainson, noticed “a curious quality” in her work: its resemblance to textiles. Swainson suggested Liebes try weaving and recommended she attend a summer  intensive at Hull-House in Chicago. Liebes could only afford two of the institute’s six weeks, but they had a significant impact on her work. 

Hull House

She received her Bachelor’s degree and turned her focus to New York. She wrote, “I looked forward to entering the University [Columbia] there. It would be the next step in the education of a would-be weaver and designer.”

Liebes rented a fifth floor walkup at 40 Washington Square South for $25 a month, rooming with two California friends, Margaret Tinney and Emily Nixon. She commuted uptown to Columbia Teachers College on the bus, sitting “on the upper deck . . . gawk[ing] like the greenest country bumpkin at the tall buildings and the stately private homes along the way.” 

She had her loom shipped from California and picking it up from the Brooklyn docks gave Liebes her first look at the Manhattan skyline. Emerging from the subway, she and Tinney approached a “short, square, utterly Irish” teamster in a horse-drawn dray, to ask him to transport the loom in its unwieldy crate to their apartment. “Ah, that’s the Village,” he said. “Now, miss, beggin’ yer pardon, no-o-obody, not even the poor souls who have to live there, can find their way around the village.” 

The Brooklyn Bridge

Thus the young women found themselves crossing the Brooklyn Bridge atop the dray

providing directions to the teamster. Strong-backed suitors coming to take the young women to dinner took over from the older Irishman, who refused to carry the weighty crate up five flights of stairs. 

That year, Liebes wove late into the night, selling pram robes to Saks Fifth Avenue and other fine retailers along Fifth and Madison Avenues. She was saving for a trip to Europe after school let out in May.