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    Old New York in Early Photographs
    Old New York in Early Photographs
    Old New York in Early Photographs
    Ebook262 pages1 hour

    Old New York in Early Photographs

    By Mary Black

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    About this ebook

    New York City as it was 1853-1901, through 196 wonderful photographs: great blizzard, Lincoln's funeral procession, great buildings, much more.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJul 24, 2013
    ISBN9780486317434
    Old New York in Early Photographs

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    • 5/5
      Superb record of 19th century New York, well laid out with intelligent captions.

    Book preview

    Old New York in Early Photographs - Mary Black

    OLD NEW YORK

    IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS

    OLD NEW YORK

    IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS

    1853-1901

    196 Prints from the Collection of

    The New-York Historical Society

    Mary Black

    Curator of Painting and Sculpture

    Second Revised Edition

    DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

    NEW YORK

    Copyright © 1973,1976 by The New-York Historical Society.

    All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

    Old New York in Early Photographs, 1853-1901, 196 Prints from the Collection of The New-York Historical Society is a revised edition of the work first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 1973.

    International Standard Book Number: 0-486-22907-6

    Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-90527

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

    INTRODUCTION

    One of the questions the Director of the New-York Historical Society asked me when I joined the staff in July, 1970 was whether I thought I could organize an exhibition that would introduce the general public to the photographs in the Society’s collection. Although neither a New Yorker nor a historian of photography, I had a good idea of the magnitude of such a project. The Society’s photographic archives, formally begun in 1906, now contain more than 50,000 negatives and an even greater number of new and old photographic prints. The idea of presenting a sampling from this vast visual storehouse was an appealing one, and I agreed to take on the project almost as the first order of business in my new job. The resulting exhibition, called Eye on the City, was held at the Society from October, 1970 to March, 1971. The present book is an outgrowth of that exhibition, an assembling of its most significant pictures and descriptions in permanent form.

    The range and theme of the selection emerged as my sifting of the Society’s holdings proceeded, and as the photographs began to outline a picture of the city’s appearance from 1853 on. The French photographer Victor Prevost’s wax paper negatives, made in 1853 and 1854 and apparently the oldest remaining photographic views of the city, formed the starting point in time. (Although both Dr. John Draper and Samuel F. B. Morse have left descriptions of their earlier attempts to capture New York’s appearance in daguerreotype, the visions they recorded have so far eluded recovery.) The close of the nineteenth century seemed like a suitable end date. I selected only views of Manhattan. But within these imposed limits were thousands of impressions of a growing, changing metropolis and of places and events forming a mosaic which began with far and near views of the harbor and Battery and proceeded north to the joining of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers at Spuyten Duyvil.

    Within this geographic progression, certain focal points, like the areas around City Hall Park, Union Square, Madison Square, and Central Park, or such major north-south thoroughfares as Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Riverside Drive, can be viewed as they appeared over a span of several decades in celebration and in mourning. In the period encompassed by the old photographs gala processions marched three times under triumphal arches along Fifth Avenue—honoring Washington in 1889, Columbus in 1892 and Admiral Dewey in 1899—while rumbling, flag-draped wagons twice drew the heavy burdens of presidential coffins—Lincoln’s and Grant’s—from a City Hall draped in black along streets thronged with watching crowds.

    Photo, Joshua H. Beal

    Panoramic View of New York City, 1876

    As the piers for the Brooklyn Bridge rose high in the air, a new and breathtaking view of the city came into being. This sweep of five photographs, from the Battery to Pier 39 and beyond, was taken by Joshua H. Beal from the Brooklyn pier before the cables were placed. For Beal, who had his studio on Beekman Street in Manhattan but who lived in Brooklyn on St. Mark’s Avenue, the completion of the bridge would have personal significance; for the entire world it was one of the greatest engineering feats of the century.

    The pride that nineteenth-century New York residents took in their city is evident in the photographers’ choice of subjects. The noteworthy buildings and settings that appear in many views proclaim a firm belief in the superiority of local enterprise and the ultimate importance of local wealth. But the ghettos of the lower East Side and the squatters’ cabins of Central Park also attracted their share of attention in grim contrast to the prevailing theme of the beautiful city. While many of these areas may have assaulted every sense except sight, the streets appear uniformly clean and unlittered.

    Most of the major concerns of early New York photographers are illustrated in this selection, but each category is admittedly a personal expression of what I found interesting and revealing in a vanished half-century of the city’s history. My own delight in the changes wrought in the Flatiron Building site at the southwest corner of Madison Square is evident, as is my pleasure in the gleaming beauty of the second Madison Square Garden at the northeast corner. I responded to the bustle and business along the city’s water roads as revealed in populous markets, docks, and commercial houses. And, equally, the impression of quiet churches, quiet streets, and quiet wooden store figures, many of them close by the jangle of horse-drawn jitneys and trolleys and festive crowds, prodded my nostalgia for a world I never knew.

    Often the idea that the living, laughing, fooling, posing people represented in these photographs were images of personages long dead was heightened by the effects of the long plate or negative exposure necessary at the time—effects that hint at the ephemeral quality of human life. Throngs, carriages, and streetcars became mere ghosts of real things as the camera’s eye stared on at a central subject. In some of the early time exposures by Prevost, uninhabited city streets with blank-windowed houses and horseless carts and carriages suggest an almost deserted village. (One exception is his record of Ottaviano Gori’s marble-cutting establishment, in which the frozen white neoclassical figures enliven the scene most curiously.) In much of this there is also a romantic timelessness that seems at odds with the raw new city that replaced an old and mellow one. But despite that contrast, traces of the views caught in the camera’s indiscriminate gaze in the last half of the nineteenth century may still be seen today.

    I recommend that the reader take the time to let his eye wander within the margins of these old photographs. With careful observation, the figures standing at open doors and seated in windows, the buildings and passing seasons, take on life once more. Magnified details serve to emphasize the intimately identifying aspects of the nineteenth-century scene: the continuing prevalence of frame houses; the striped and plain awnings that soften the windows of residences, stores, and hotels in an attempt to control New York summer temperatures; windows shuttered inside or out, working to the same end; the lacy effect of cast-iron construction; and the lightening appearance of commercial structures as glass areas were expanded with the

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