From the Wurts Brothers, in 1947, “General View – Manhattan – Grand Army Plaza”. The photo shows exactly what the title says but leaves an odd question in its wake.
The famous Grand Army Plaza1 in New York is the one at the northern corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It’s huge and has a correspondingly huge triumphal arch. The plaza in Manhattan is at the southeast corner of Central Park and extends from 58th Street and Fifth Avenue to 60th Street and the East Drive of the park, so it’s cut in half by 59th Street. We’re looking south in the photo from the north half of the plaza, so that’s 59th Street running left-right in the mid-ground, and Fifth Avenue on the left.
The Plaza Hotel2 is on the right, the mid-rise Bergdorf Goodman store is directly ahead with the top of the Crown Building peeking over its roof3, and the Squibb Building is on the left. In the south half of the plaza, you can see the Pulitzer fountain. But you know what’s missing from this view? Anything to do with the Grand Army. If you follow that path in the right foreground a few feet further back, just back of where the photographer was standing, you find that Grand Army reference:
That’s the goddess Victory4 guiding William Tecumseh Sherman. It is, as statues go, unsubtle, particularly since that the bronze is gilded.
Given the Wurts tendency to photograph buildings, maybe they were more interested in the surroundings of the square than the square itself. But it feels a little perverse to photograph this location, name the photo after the name of the square, and position yourself so that the most memorable thing there is behind you.
- Named for the Union army in the Civil War. ↩︎
- Hey, I wonder where that name came from? ↩︎
- And a sliver of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center can be seen to the right of Crown, eight blocks further south and only visible because the 1950s-60s skyscraper boom hadn’t yet blocked it. ↩︎
- Or Nike, if you prefer. ↩︎
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