Most of the 1950s Angelo Rizzuto photos I’ve been discussing recently can be quickly located even if their descriptions don’t say were they were taken. The 1957 picture above threw me. We’re looking towards midtown – the Empire State Building makes that obvious – but from what angle? It took a while to identify the buildings, largely because most of the near ones are mostly generic rowhouses, tenements, and small commercial structures.
The first tip-off was the big street with the planted medians. There aren’t a lot of those in New York and very few in Manhattan. (I wasn’t actually certain this was Manhattan at first.) The second clue was, off in the distance to the left, the building with a GENERAL MOTORS sign on the roof. That’s 3 Columbus Circle, built in 1927 by GM, which would put us on the Upper West Side and make the big street Broadway. Once you’ve got that, it all starts to fall into place. You can see that the skewed intersections from Broadway’s diagonal line. The building on the left foreground – not the one that Rizzuto was standing on, but rather the one with the rounded corner – is the Hotel Ormonde at 70th Street and Broadway.
You can see the mount for the flagpole on the Ormonde’s northwest corner survived after the pole itself was removed.
This view is so foreign for two reasons. First, urban renewal was about to sweep away much of the mid-ground – basically everything behind the mid-rise apartment left of center – and replace it with Lincoln Center and Fordham University’s Manhattan campus. Second, high-rises would be built along the avenues – Broadway running to the left, Amsterdam Avenue on the right, and Columbus Avenue barely visible crossing Broadway four blocks to the south. The high-rise construction started shortly after 1960 and has continued to the present. If you look at the Upper West Side in yesterday’s photo, you can see that the big buildings were mostly concentrated along Central Park West.
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