MULBERRY AND PRINCE STREETS
OCTOBER 25, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 31

MULBERRY AND PRINCE STREETS
OCTOBER 25, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 32

Abbott stood in the heart of Little Italy to take this photograph of a federal house at 47 Prince Street. Across the street is Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, the city's first cathedral before the opening in 1879 of the grand Fifth Avenue edifice. With the exodus of many Italians to the suburbs, the neighborhood is now an eclectic mix of Italians, recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America, and Soho sophisticates.

When Abbott photographed 47 Prince Street, it was boarded up and available "for sale or lease [on] easy terms," and by 1937, the building had been torn down. Today, the site of the old house and its Mulberry Street neighbor serve as a parking lot; the Mulberry Street row house at the photograph's right edge and the taller tenement buildings are intact.

Abbott exposed two negatives of this site and, surprisingly, chose for the project the one that included a shadowy figure walking in front of the camera during exposure. She also printed a version with the background masked out, isolating the early nineteenth-century buildings from their 1890s neighbors. This unique instance of manipulation is contrary to Abbott's photographic practice and historical purpose.

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