In 1921, photographer Berenice Abbott headed to Paris from New York City, leaving a city that was linked by sinewy streets with quaint brownstones, cluttered retail strips and the occasional mid-sized Victorian office building on Wall Street.

When she returned in 1929, she found an immense transformation: Gone was a place largely defined by human-scale architecture. Instead, the modern skyscraper proclaimed the city as the nexus of global capitalism.

Abbott was so astonished that she shelved her thriving career in Europe to ``put everything she had into a project that started only a few months before the stock market crash,'' says Bonnie Yochelson, an expert on New York photography. ``She intended just to visit, see her mother in Ohio and move back. She never returned.''

The advent of the impersonal citadels of capitalism is the main subject of Berenice Abbott's Changing New York: A Triumph of Public Art, showing through Oct. 4 at the New York State Museum in Albany. Forty black-and-white prints from 1929 to 1940 examine how towering steel, glass and concrete engulfed the last vestiges of the 19th century's stately homes, tree-lined alleys and horse-drawn carriages.

In the image Manhattan I, Abbott found the evident contrasts. From Pier 11, her frame encompasses a long row of 19th century dockside warehouses dominated by 19 skyscrapers, 15 of them built between 1927 and 1932.

Changes in Manhattan also included the construction of luxury homes along Park Avenue and the Upper West Side, but Abbott chose to shoot disappearing working-class neighborhoods close to Greenwich Village where she lived. Her vivid prints show open-air markets, jammed ferries, bustling old docks with sail-powered ships and small storefronts draped with food.

After struggling financially for the duration of the project, she released 305 prints in 1940, recording the architecture of a dying New York. But her photos are about humans, not buildings. Her shots almost always look upward in an expansive way and are personalized by the sense of longing for what was being lost.

Abbott's technical mastery -- she was the darkroom assistant to Man Ray in Paris -- merges the nooks, crannies and crevices of the urban environment with light and shadow, employing a vocabulary mixed with the rigidity of modernism and the curvy, ornate lines of the past.

In Cliff and Ferry Streets, a lonely horse and carriage sit on a cobblestone road in the midst of a dense commercial strip as muscular towers shoot skyward, their facades absorbing the available light. The Manhattan Bridge swallows a small business in Oyster House, South Street, Pike Slip like a prehistoric reptile emerging from the river's depths.

Most of the pictures in the exhibit are of lower Manhattan, but a few focus on mid town and the then-new Grand Central Station. Those taken in Brooklyn, Staten Island and New Jersey all look back on Manhattan. Most of the time, Abbott lugged around a 60-pound, 8-by-10-inch viewfinder camera with a tripod, which didn't allow for much spontaneity.

Later, with government backing, she obtained a hand-held camera, which gave her more freedom to improvise. Atop 1 Wall St. in Wall Street Showing the East River, Abbott bent over a railing to frame the bustling street life far below.

Only occasionally do people inhabit her pictures, as in Shelter and the Waterfront, Coenties Slip, an uncharacteristic photo-journalistic essay of the soft underbelly of Depression-era New York.

Abbott funded the project out of her pocket for its first five years, struggling to make ends meet by also doing commercial work. Early on, she would shoot only on Wednesdays, but by 1935, she was able to focus full time with funding from the Federal Arts Project, which also provided a car and the smaller camera.

When government money was cut back in 1937 and vanished in 1939, the persevering Abbott tapped her meager resources to complete the project's final year.

As the sponsoring agency, the Museum of the City of New York obtained the bulk of her images, while the State Museum received a handful after a 1938 exhibit in Albany. Although Abbott didn't characterize herself as a preservationist, her legacy is connected to the preservationist movement of the 1960s and '70s.

``Later on,'' Yochelson says, ``a group of negatives of the old Penn Station discarded by Abbott were rediscovered by preservationists as an example of what beauty was destroyed.''

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@