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…