Unrecognizable

IRT subway construction, for the original line, in 1901:

Half the street is open for the cut-and-cover tunnel construction. We’ve got a wood handrail as a pedestrian barricade on the left, and another as a vehicular barricade on the right. There are a bunch of service pipes and conduits exposed by the digging and supported by timber. All fairly standard for photos of the IRT work.

In a scenario that many people are all too familiar with, the same portion of the street had been dug up the year before for sewer work:

Here’s the interesting question: where is this? The original IRT was entirely in Manhattan, but I find no recognizable landmarks here. The answer is that we’re between 47th and 48th Street, looking north up Broadway. Here’s a roughly equivalent current street view:

The story is actually more complicated than “New Yorkers built a bunch of tall buildings over the course of 120 years.” The business on the left in the old photo is Brewster & Company, which began in the mid-1800s by building high-end carriages, moved to 47th and Broadway in 1874, switched to car bodies, and for a while was building bodies for Rolls Royce of America. That company isn’t particularly important to discussing these pictures, but Broadway in the upper 40s and 50s was New York’s car center for a while, as Times Square (in its pre-Times incarnation as Longacre Square) had been the carriage center. That wasn’t the only semi-industrial use: the Broadway theaters require a good amount of wood, metal, machine, and electric work, so the area had a very different vibe during the day compared to at night. Well into the twentieth century, Times Square and the blocks to the north on Broadway were a combination of modern theaters and office buildings, and old low-rises; as the industrial uses moved to cheaper land, the low-rises were used for other purposes.

Here’s the Brill Building at 49th and Broadway in 1940:

One of the centers of the US music industry and it’s still surrounded by those old low-rises. Here’s 1600 Broadway (the tall building with the Four Rises sign), a block away:

1600 replaced a bunch of the little buildings on the right side of the 1900 and 1901 photos. Only in the 1980s, when people were determined to drive out the “undesirable uses” in Times Square (porn movie theaters, for example) that large-scale redevelopment began and eventually replaced most of the remaining low-rise building with high-rises.