New York in the Thirties (New York City) (2024)

A pictorial history of Manhattan

This is an interesting book that documents the history of Manhattan through black and white pictures. Most pictures printed in this book are between 1935 and 1938. It is by no means an exhaustive work but it should be of interest for casual readers interested in the history of New York City. The financial district, New York harbor, East River, the Lower East Side and Fifth Avenue is prominently illustrated. Most notable parts of the city missing in this book are the Time Square and Central Park. However there are several photographs that are worth looking at, which includes; a 1938 aerial picture looking-down on Broadway from Wall Street to Battery Park; a 1938 aerial photograph of the Wall Street; the 1937 picture of Brooklyn Bridge with pier 21; a 1936 picture of Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company’s Lines at Second and the Third Avenue; a 1937 picture of Hester Street chicken market; the 1936 picture of Washington Square looking North (this is my favorite photograph in this book); a 1935 photograph of 32 Street and Third Avenue showing a street newspaper vendor; there are more than one hundred magazines on display in this photograph and the covers of many of magazine shows movie stars of the day that include; Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Claudette Colbert.

"Buddy, I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer...I go anywhere," replied Berenice Abbott to a male supervisor when he cautioned her that "nice girls" don't go to the Bowery. After reading Dwight Garner's New York Times review (April 9, 2018) of Julia Van Haaften's bio, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, I got New York in the Thirties out of the library so I could marvel at Abbott's dramatic vision of the city, uptown to the Bowery, street level to the sky. Abbott was quite the character, taking small parts in her friend Eugene' O'Neill's plays, immortalized by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, getting kicked off the floor for "obscenity" dancing with Man Ray. What a life; what a photographer!

The 1930s were a time of great upheaval in New York City. With the Great Depression and looming war as a backdrop, the city's very shape was changing: skyscrapers rose as the old tenements and elevated railways began to come down. The remnants of 19th century Manhattan were being covered over, swept away, or drowned out. On Wall Street, the towers of modern capitalism crushed and darkened the narrow streets of the original city. In the immigrant neighborhoods, the old and new worlds had fused into a unique hybrid, poor and dingy perhaps, yet holding on with a certain defiant pride. Photographer Berenice Abbott saw this sweeping transformation and spent a decade documenting it with an 8x10 Century Universal camera, first as an independent effort, later under the Federal Art Project in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York.

This book (originally titled Changing New York), was issued in 1939, near the end of the project. It collects 97 of Abbott's photographs, mostly architectural or environmental, roughly organized by geography. Abbott's intent was purely documentary, not artistic. Yet there is great artistry in her work. Few of the photos give any sense of the city's crowds and noise; instead, the stony silence of buildings in nearly empty streets predominate. We see soaring spires of concrete and steel, geometrically perfect but largely soulless, juxtaposed with the dirty jumble of crumbling tenements, drooping laundry lines, and struggling shops in the Lower East Side. Modernist glass shoves up against the neat, quiet brownstones of Midtown. And once-wealthy addresses become monuments to fading beauty, their ornate railings and stonework mocking the cold, squared-off steel frameworks that hold up the "New" New York. When we do see people, they tend to come in two varieties: the poor and working-class, in ragged caps and shapeless shoes, often looking straight into the camera; and distant streams of undifferentiated humanity, flowing across streets in neat lines, just another part of the great grid which surrounds them.

The large-format Dover reprint captures the images well enough (as a former employee of the publisher, I know well how much care they took in balancing top quality with rock-bottom costs). The pictures are full of detail and contrast, rewarding close inspection. The original captions (by Elizabeth McCausland) are retained intact, giving a sense not only of what the images show, but the incredible speed of the city's transformation: several of Abbott's subjects had already disappeared by the time Changing New York was published. Personally, I would have preferred more of Abbott's excellently framed street/people scenes and fewer of the architectural shots, to get a better sense of daily life within the city. But that's not really what the project was about. It was about documenting an urban environment poised at a tipping point between old and new, the organic and the industrial, the human scale and the gargantuan. In that, Abbott's work was a brilliant triumph.

This book was a treasure trove of visual delight. I have never lived in New York before but the history of that city is so rich. In every photo in this book there is a story to tell but what is amazing is to see the different way of living. It's so hard to imagine the lifestyle that people had back then because when you think about all the things we take for granted no one can imagine living in a time like that. There was no A/C, poor sanitation system, communication was only through mail and pay phones, you could only get your news at a news stand or paperboy.

During my time reading this book I also went onto google maps and looked up each place to see what it looks like now. Everything has changed but I did enjoy the photos that showed some of the buildings still there, including the famous bridges. The history that has revolved around those bridges is quite immense when you think about all the buildings, people, stories, and places that have changed over the years. In one photo there was a pier that housed boats for cargo and tugs boats but not that whole area is a park with no sign of it ever being a pier at one point, except down the shore line there is now a full cargo loading dock but not where the photo was taken.

When you connect the photos of today with the photos of yesterday it makes you wonder all the people who walked those streets before you and what their lives were like. You also have to remember that their lives were not nearly as complicated as ours today where we are bombarded with tons of information from all points of the globe all the time. The only way you could find out what was happening in the world was to go to a movie theater and watch the same news real once a week or listen to the radio or buy to read the paper (which was a thriving industry at the time, unlike today).

The other great part about what these photographs revealed was how much prices for food and gas have changed. It's amazing to think that 30 cents at one point could buy you an entire meal and that 11 cents a gallon was a lot. If you wanted to rent a push cart it costed you 25 cents a day and if you wanted to sell pots and pans on the road as a paddler it costed $10 dollars for a license, which was a lot back then.

When you look at all the photo apps we have today and how kids are able to take better photos than this lady ever could, it takes away the importance of what makes a photo worth learning about now. There are hundreds of photos now all over the world for every place on earth now that photos like the ones Berenice took more than 80 years. The photos of today won't mean anything anymore except that people will be able to see time lapse photography for any place years from now in the future with even more sophisticated apps. The photos will be useful to show how times and places have changed but it will be an expected part of live instead of something to treasure like the ones Berenice captured.