This Feels Like Cheating

From the Wurts Brothers, a photo titled “Brooklyn – 100 Henry Street – Clark Street” that is pretty clearly a skyline view of lower Manhattan:

I mean, I’ve talked about so many of the building we can see in this photo so many times…the two tallest in the middle are 40 Wall Street and 70 Pine Street; the tall one to the left is 25 Exchange Place, and the Woolworth Building is off on the far right. So what does any of this have to do the intersection of Henry and Clark Streets in Brooklyn Heights?

By 1930 or so, when that photo was taken, the entire block bounded by Henry Street, Clark Street, Hicks Street, and Pineapple Street was the Hotel St. George. The building was constructed in pieces, starting in the mid-1800s at one end of the block, and culminating in 1929 with a 30-story art-deco tower on the Hicks Street side.

Here’s a photo postcard from about that time, with the tower on the left and one of the larger, more modern wings on the right facing Henry Street, gleaming white and with a big electric sign on the roof:

The smaller, older buildings in front of the tower are parts of the hotel on the Clark Street side. This postcard, probably drawn from a photo but so oversimplified that it makes me long for the honesty of air-brushing and Photoshop, shows the relationship of the Henry Street building, the Hicks Street tower, and the older Clark Street buildings:

The hotel itself is an interesting story – maybe one for another day – but that pretty picture above was taken from its roof. We don’t see any of 100 Henry Street, which is at the other end of the block; we see two small pieces of 111 Hicks Street: the handrail on the bottom left, and the weird terra cotta ornament in the foreground bottom with some kind of sign or trellis or whatever that thing is growing out of its top.