Another Berenice Abbott photo from 1935. Based on the angle, she was on the roof or a window near the top of the Chanin Building. If you want to understand the built environment of New York at that time, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better picture than this to explain it.
The centerpiece of the photo is Raymond Hood’s Daily News Building. I’m a huge fan of Hood’s work, so impartiality is out the window here, but he had an incredible run of about 14 years, from the Tribune competition in Chicago through Rockefeller Center, where he defined one possibility for skyscrapers. His designs in that period owe an obvious debt to Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings as well as Sullivan’s statement that a skyscraper “must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.” Daily News is only 36 stories tall, but it feels taller.
Directly in front of Daily News is an H-plan public school, one of the hundreds of schools designed by C. B. J. Snyder between the 1890s and 1920s. The tall building to the right is one of the Tudor City towers, designed, despite its potential East River views, to face west so that tenants would have minimal exposure to the cattle yards (not visible in the shot) and a coal-burning Con Ed power plant (with the four smokestacks) nearby. The lower right corner of the photo is dominated by rowhouses and tenements on 41st and 40th Streets, some with washing hung to dry in the rear yards. The Second Avenue elevated completely blocks the view of that street, although more tenements on the far side of it are visible.
My favorite little detail is the diagonal line cutting through the interior of the block bounded by Second and First Avenues, and 41st and 40th Streets. It’s most clearly visible at the rear of the 15-story Hatfield Hotel, to the right of Daily News and in front of Tudor City, but it affects the shape of a number of lots on that block. It’s the remnant of someone’s property from before the street grid was laid out in 1811, and probably dates to the early or mid 1700s, when a lot of Manhattan north of the then-developed portion of the city was bought up by people who figured the land would be valuable some day. Eventually those pieces of land were divided by the grid streets, broken up, and sold as lots, but a lot of the old boundaries never entirely went away.
In short, we have an eighteenth-century lot line, 1880s tenements, a 1901 power plant, and a 1930 skyscraper, along with various houses, a school, slaughterhouses, an elevated railroad, and laundry on the line.
“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” ― William Gibson
