A Weird Angle That Does Not Help

From around 1910, the Valentine & Sons Publishing Company gives us “Battery Park” as a postcard:

It took me a moment to understand what we’re seeing here. The brown building with the strange spire is One Broadway before its extensive 1919 facade makeover. The big white building to its right is the side of the US Customs House, and the low brown building between them (and with a tower sticking up over the Customs House) is the Produce Exchange. The only way to get those buildings lined up like that is to look east from the west side of the southern tip of Manhattan, which would mean from near where Pier A is at the far northwest corner of Battery Park. And that’s the park, between us and those buildings, and Pier A on the left, past the boat with the white cabin.

From this angle – obviously a photo taken from the deck of a boat – you have no sense of the park’s depth east-west (towards and away from us), you don’t see Castle Clinton, the most prominent structure in the park, and you miss the vista through the park to the harbor. We’re looking exactly the wrong way for the last.

My hypothesis – which will never be put to the test and therefore must be correct – is that the photographer though this was an interesting angle and the “Battery Park” idea was retconned onto it.