JEFFERSON MARKET COURT
OCTOBER 21, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 20

JEFFERSON MARKET COURT AND 447-461 SIXTH AVENUE
Southwest corner, Sixth Avenue and West 10th Street
NOVEMBER 10, 1938. ABBOTT FILE L-32

Greenwich Avenue and West 19th Street, 1931 (CGLI)

The fanciful clocktower of the Jefferson Market Court, the tallest of Greenwich Village's nineteenth-century buildings, was a local landmark to which Abbott returned several times. The triangular site created by the intersections of West 10th Street, Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue, had held an open market and wooden fire tower since 1833. In 1877, Calvert Vaux and Frederick C. Withers designed the Ruskinian Gothic courthouse and jail with a clocktower, which still served as a fire lookout.

In 1931, the nineteenth-century jail was torn down for an 11-story women's house of detention. During construction, Abbott gained access to an upper floor of a building at Greenwich Avenue and West 10th Street to photograph the Jefferson Market Court, dwarfed by the unadorned shaft of the new prison. In 1936, she photographed the front of the courthouse from the corner of West 9th Street and Sixth Avenue. This version (Abbott File 20) reveals the full exuberance of the Vaux-Withers design, bisected by the Sixth Avenue El, which was built not long after the courthouse. At right, Abbott included the West Side Savings Bank's picturesque clock, a foreground "comment" on the clocktower in the distance. At left is the new women's prison.

In November 1938, Abbott rephotographed Jefferson Market, this time looking south on Sixth Avenue (Abbott File L-32). Standing in the street with a hand-held camera, she showed the tower rising above nineteenth-century storefronts.

The row of commercial buildings on Sixth Avenue, which still stands, survived the women's prison, which was torn down in 1974; the prison site is now a community-run garden. Vacated by the courts in 1945, the Jefferson Market Court was saved from demolition in 1967 and renovated as a branch of the New York Public Library.

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