Sleuthing

This Wurts Brothers photo, “Parks – Bryant Park” is both misleadingly labelled and mysterious. While it’s true that the foreground of the photo, and where the photographer was standing, are Bryant Park, the focus seems to me to be the rear facade of the New York Public Library.

The mystery is the date, listed on the NYPL website as “1887 – 1964 (Approximate).” Since the library was completed in 1911, I think we can safely rule out 1887 to 1911, leaving 1912 to 1964. There are two indicators that it’s later in that period. First, a little vaguely, is that so few men are wearing or carrying hats. The beginning of the end of hats being part of daily wear for men was the Kennedy administration, 1961 to 1963, when people were apparently inspired by the young president’s example of going bare-headed. Second, in an area of endeavor I’m more comfortable discussing, the scaffold on the library is a cleaning crew. Look at how white the stone to the right of the scaffold is compared to the stone below the scaffold and to the left. It takes a while for stone to discolor, even in the coal-burning smog of the first half of the 1900s. The timing of the cleaning may have been random, or it might have been something like “let’s spruce up the building its 50th anniversary.”

So between my limited understanding of men’s fashion and my guessing at motives for facade work, I’d date the photo as 1961 to 1964.