[The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan]

Berenice Abbott

1936 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Manhattan’s elevated (El) train lines fascinated Abbott when she first photographed the city in 1929. Seven years later, she used her large-format camera to capture this shadowed vista beneath the El in Chinatown. "I was right in the middle of the street on a little island," she recalled. "This was one of the occasions when it was downright dangerous to document New York, with traffic whizzing by on both sides, but it was very important to get in exactly the right position to make the photograph work."

Artist

Berenice Abbott

Date

1936

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971