First, looking east on 14th Street from First Avenue, last week. The endless repetitive buildings on the left are Stuyvesant Town, a 1940s middle-class housing development that replaced the Gashouse District with a whole bunch of mid-rise red-brick apartment houses. The ornate building on the right is the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and way off in the distance we have the 1926 East River Generating Station. Nearly all of New York’s old power plants are on the rivers, to simplify supplying them with coal. Now that none of them burn coal, that’s just where they are.
Second, a 1937 photo from the Five Boroughs Project, one of the many W.P.A. projects involving art and history in the city. The church looks the same, as does the power plant; the wall of modern apartment houses isn’t there, but instead we have a wall of tenements.
There’s a certain continuity to Manhattan, even with all the changes. A lot of times, if you squint a little bit, you can make the past and the present look very much alike.
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