Pretty Lights

From the Wurts Brothers, circa 1932, “General View – Manhattan – Aerial view – Night view from Empire State Building – looking northwest”:

Just to orient things a bit, the black stripe running form the middle of the left side of the view a little bit diagonally above horizontal to the right is the Hudson River. It was a reasonably clear night: you can see the “necklace lights” on the cables of the George Washington Bridge towards the right, where the river meets the horizon, and that’s over eight miles away.

The huge glare of lights is Times Square, with the wedding-cake-with-clocks-and-a-globe Paramount Building at the left end of the light show. Note how fast the lighting drops off as you head west (left) into Hell’s Kitchen: even the street lights there seem subdued. Sixth Avenue, to the right is lit up well, even though there was at that time not a whole lot exciting on that street.

The well-lit diagonal is Broadway, curving from almost parallel to the avenues at Times Square to much more diagonal and then back again above 72nd Street. The area with the evenly-spaced somewhat-meandering lights is Central Park, with Broadway just touching the corner of the park at Columbus Circle.

With Rockefeller Center not yet built and most of the very tall buildings of that era east of the Empire State, there’s nothing even remotely as tall in this view as the observation deck the photographer was standing on. Today, the Empire State is the eighth tallest in Manhattan, and three of the taller buildings would be visible from this angle, along with hundreds of shorter but still tall buildings.