From A Distance

From the Wurts Brothers, “General View – Manhattan – Aerial view – Park Avenue – Broadway – looking south”:

The street running diagonally from the lower left towards the center is Park Avenue South; Broadway starts at the lower right corner and runs diagonally the other way. The oval of Union Square is visible just to the right of center; the towers of the financial district are off in the distance along with the harbor and the Statue of Liberty.

There’s no date given, but I’m wondering if this was cold weather. Even in an era when people burned a lot of coal, those are exceptionally large plumes coming from the foreground boiler flues. Or maybe the smog really was that bad and my imagination simply isn’t up to the task. This picture immediately brings to mind one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s from The Disappearing City:

FLW was, in addition to being an architect, a polemicist who was not above exaggeration and misdirection to make his point. His photo of New York is obviously real and similar in form to the Wurts photo above. His point that this proves that cities of the time were unfit for “free life” is not so obvious: would a photo of his cherished Broadacre City taken from the same elevation show us individuals? Would a photo of nature?

I must approve of aerial and skyline photos, as I’ve put so many in this blog, but that doesn’t mean that I think they are good ways to provide portraits of people or of buildings. That’s what closer views are for.