Nearly all of the historic photos I use here are black and white, because that’s what nearly all photos from the period I generally talk about (pre-1930) are. I recently stumbled across a collection of color photos from the Detroit Publishing Company and I really like them. Even when you’re used to black and white – and I grew up watching B&W television and used B&W photography for site work until the mid-1990s – color pictures are generally more relatable. They look like we expect things to look.
The 1900 picture above, labelled “The City Hall, New York City” gives a pretty accurate view of a specific time and place, in my opinion. The little palazzo at the center is City Hall, built in 1811 for a city of about 100,000 people. The slightly larger building behind it (with the octagonal skylight) is the New York County Courthouse, AKA the Tweed Courthouse. It’s worth noting that in 1900, the scandals that brought down the Tweed ring were less than 30 years old, and the courthouse was seen as something of an embarrassment as a result.
Based on the angle, looking northwest past City Hall towards Broadway, I suspect this picture was taken from a window in the World Building. While I was working on The Structure of Skyscrapers, I got to know the adjacent blocks of Park Row and Broadway quite well because there are so many 1880s and 1890s high-rises there. In this view, from the left, we’ve got the Postal Telegraph Cable Company and the Home Life Insurance Company side by side, the very slender National Shoe and Leather Bak just left of City Hall’s cupola, The Broadway Chambers Building right behind the cupola, and the Langdon Building on the right, over Tweed’s skylight. All of these old skyscrapers look smallish and quaint today, but they were cutting-edge 1890s buildings and still new at that time. In other words, this isn’t a photo of oldey-timey New York. Rather, this is a picture of a fast-growing commercial neighborhood, a picture of modernity.
