The Project Continued

I spent some time a couple of years ago looking at the photos of  Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” project. Abbott was, of course, a spectacularly skilled photographer, and she made art out of photographing ordinary street scenes. That said, one of the recurring themes of that project was juxtaposing the past and (1930s) present in a single frame.

Almost thirty years later, May 5, 1961, here’s Max Hubacher with “Manhattan, NY, 2nd Avenue”:

We’re looking north up the avenue, probably from a street in the mid-30s. Most of the buildings on Second are Old-Law or pre-Old-Law tenements. Three of them in the middle of the block on the left have had their facades “modernized:” the cornices removed, parapets added, and ornamentation removed. The one of the left had some steel strips added to the fire-escape balconies to create decorative horizontal stripes.

In the background we have the 42nd Street skyscrapers: Chanin just barely visible on the left, Chrysler behind Socony-Mobil, a glass-walled building under construction that honestly I’m not interested in enough to look up, Daily News and its pinstripes, and then another black monolith. The Second Avenue elevated had been discontinued here in the early 1940s and demolished shortly after; World War II delayed the redevelopment of Second Avenue before it got going full steam in the 60s.

So the skyscrapers in the background range from 35 years old to brand new, while the tenements in the foreground are 70 to 100 years old. The stylish white car looks ancient to us as does the stroller in front of it. And that thing on the far right, behind the street lamp, is a telephone booth. Note that the street itself is paved with cobblestones, not asphalt, which is an artifact of the el structure making repaving difficult, but not yet addressed some twenty years after the el was demolished. As I quoted once before: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.