Where It Comes From

I’ve written about the Whitehall Building and its extension enough that there’s not much to say about it for this new (to me) picture:

The buildings were a little isolated from the main downtown skyscraper cluster by being so far southwest, but it’s a five-minute walk to Broadway, so that location is not exactly the end of the earth. In the lower right corner are the tracks shared by the Ninth and Sixth Avenue elevateds, heading to the South Ferry station behind the photographer and to uptown ahead. And between the tracks and Whitehall are several blocks of very old houses converted for commercial use – then Little Syria, and later to be called Radio Row.

What strikes me, looking at Irving Underhill’s 1911 photo, is that you can see the origins of Gotham City’s visual style even in the bright sunlight: the tall buildings full of projecting masonry ornament, the chaos of the low buildings, and the el running by.