Yet another view of lower Broadway, this time from 1908. It’s low resolution and artificially colored, so it’s really more of an illustration than a photo, but good enough for a postcard.
This picture bothers me and it took me a while to realize why. The issue exists for a lot of the old photos, particularly the postcards: it makes New York look too good.
Look at the buildings: not a single stain or imperfection. Broadway’s pavement is smooth and unlittered…in an era when horses were still being used for transportation (see the left side of the street, adjacent to City Hall Park for a few). Lower Broadway is astonishingly uncrowded – mostly likely because the photo was taken on a weekend day, but there’s no disclaimer suggesting this condition isn’t typical.
In short, the photo represents an idealized vision of the city. This was common in photos, and in movies, for quite some time. I’ve posted a lot of Berenice Abbott’s photos, which are incredible works of art, but in which she bucked this trend by trying to represent real conditions. Movies mostly showed idealized New York until the 1960s, when they switched to dystopian New York for a while.
You must be logged in to post a comment.