NEW YORK NEW YORK – Those of you who have followed these pages for some time know that we’re usually in Connecticut on weekends. Well not on this particular day. I drove back down to New York early this morning to attend a reunion at Columbia. A thoroughly enjoyable day. I spent a couple of hours in a tour of St. John the Divine, the massive, unfinished Episcopal cathedral here in Morningside Heights near the Columbia campus. Construction started in the late 19th Century on a Romanesque plan; around 1910 or so a new high gothic plan was developed so the structure is partly gothic and partly Romanesque. Pretty odd. Traditional building techniques were used – the construction is all masonry – there is no structural steel. This means that construction has been slow and expensive. Work stopped for after Pearl Harbor and was not restarted until the 1970. Work stopped again early in this Century when the Church decided that the money was better spent on its mission that this massive pile of stone.
St. John the DevineSt. John the DevineSt. John the DevineSt. John the Devine
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Today I did homework for my rephotographing New York class. First I took the subway to 154th Street to find a house at 857 Riverside Drive (which oddly doesn’t face the Hudson River up here) that Berenice Abbott photographed in 1937. A poor jpg of Abbott’s original is the second photo below. The original is rather casually put together. The light is far from optional, accenting a bush on the far right and the house is obscured in shadows – it really looks like a snapshot. Number 857 was wedged between two larger apartment buildings -you see the building on the right, and the shadow of the building on the left – the sun was behind her left shoulder. I suspect that she shot number 857 because a wood frame house was unusual in Manhattan even in 1937 – I found no similar house in the area walking around for an hour or so.
Remarkably the house is still there. It’s had the gingerbread stripped off and has been badly “modernized”; it’s in the course of a further “renovation”. It’s clearly inhabited: someone has put cat food out in the foreground on the right. Abbott took the photograph literally pressed against the building to the left so she could show the view though the Charleston-style gallery on the left side of the house through to the river – a view that is now obscured by a building and a mature tree. So here you go: 857 Riverside Drive:
Riverside Drive rephotographedBerenice Abbott original
A second project for the day. James Van Der Zee was a photographic chronicler (among other things} of the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous image, and perhaps the most famous image from the Harlem Renaissance, is the second image below: a marvelously-turned-out couple in raccoon coats posed in front of a massive Cadillac on a street that is thought to be west 127th street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. There are various guesses at the exact location. One of them places the image at 247 West 127th Street, the site of the current PS 154 – the third image below. I’m not certain that I believe – I can just make our the first digit of the address on one of the buildings and it looks like it starts with a “1”. There is a row of a half dozen brown stones a few feet down the block; I managed to shoot a couple in their SUV in front of it.
West 128th Street after VanderzeeJames Vanderzee originalThe exact spot
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A lot of pictures today. If you scroll down to May 17, 2013 you will see that Francesca, our daughter, graduated from law school one year ago. Well today, 368 days later, she was sworn into the New York bar. So the bar cram course, the bar exam, waiting for the results, gathering up details about her background, submitting a bunch of stuff to the character and fitness committee and getting a date to be sworn in take a year more or less. Congratulations Francesca.
After lunch I had the first session in a class at the ICP – we’ll be rephotographing iconic New York images. This is familiar territory for me starting with Mark Klett’s rephotographic survey and Douglas Levere’s rephotography of Berenice Abbott’s 1939 book, Changing New York. Abbott’s photographs are meticulously documented – many of her most famous works were done while she was employed by the Museum of the City of New York to document the City. After an hour of getting to know each other at the ICP and a half hour discussion of where to start we went down to the Flatiron Building to re-shoot Berenice Abbott’s famous 1938 image. This worked well for me because I own a print of this image – it’s in our front hall in New York.
I didn’t realize that we would be shooting so I was packing only my walk-around camera, my Leica Monochrom and a 1959 Dual-Range 50mm Summicron lens (the perfect kit to photograph Francesca earlier in the day). I needed a much wider lens for the Flatiron shot so I ended up stitching four frames. After fussing around a bit we figured out where Abbott was shooting from – it’s a traffic island now as I’m certain it was then. I’ve included a poor jpeg of Abbott’s original for comparison.
Anyway, Francesca outside of the First Department Courthouse.
Francesca outside the court
Francesca and her “Don’t mess with me, I’m a lawyer” expression.
Don’t mess with me, I’m a lawyer
My rephotographic effort of the Flatiron Building:
WASHINGTON DC – I’m here in DC at some client meetings. They start around 8:00 AM but that let’s me get up and catch the morning magic hour with such monuments and flowering stuff (there’s a lot of it) as are within walking range of our hotel. These are all with my Leica M and an 18mm Super Elmar M lens – my go to wide these days. That’s the same contrail in the first two images.
WASHINGTON DC – Still here. Meeting. But slipping out in the early morning to catch the AM magic hour and some magnolias. The cherry blossoms are also out but they are concentrated on the Tidal Basin, which is uncomfortably far from my hotel given my tight schedule. So I settle for magnolias. These are with my Leica M and 18mm Super Elmar lens. This is a nice travel kit, by the way. The Leica is a camel in terms of battery capacity. I’ve been shooting a week on a single charge.
MagnoliasCivil war memorialAmerican Bar Association
NEW YORK NEW YORK – this post is dated March 14 but as is typically the case I’m actually writing this about a week later (it takes me that long to edit, upload and write a post). My web hosting service, Bluehost, had had some major service issues this week and last week (including a couple of periods of total shutdowns). They now appear to have things under control. I apologize for any bad experience that you may have had in terms of page loading times and so on.
I went out today with my Leica S and a 35mm lens. This is four frames stitched, with a lot of overlap. This is the Municipal Asphalt Plant, an architectural icon that now serves as an indoor swimming pool. As you can see it is being renovated.
