This City Is an Overcrowded, Illogical, Inhospitable Marvel – The New York Times

This City Is an Overcrowded, Illogical, Inhospitable Marvel

Berenice Abbott captured the egomania and wanton development of New York’s streetscapes almost a century ago. The city is still at it.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/berenice-abbott-portraits-of-modernity-new-york.html

A generation before Kouwenhoven, Berenice Abbott captured this heathen beauty in a portfolio of photographs she called “Changing New York,” which was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 1937. Her city is not a nesting ground for the people who lived there but a rivalry of individual egos craning to fill the horizon with their concrete and glass. If people live there, it is only because the buildings have not yet had time to crowd them out.