SQUIBB BUILDING WITH SHERRY NETHERLAND IN BACKGROUND
142 East 18th St.
NOVEMBER 21, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 44

Squibb building, 1931 (cgli)

Abbott took this photograph from the roof of 718 Fifth Avenue, a six-story commercial building at the southwest corner of 56th Street. Below her, and obstructed by a balustrade, is the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the hub of the city's most fashionable shopping district. Rising above the balustrade are two of the neighborhood's newer buildings--the New York Trust Company (1930) at the northwest corner of Fifth and 57th Street, and the Squibb Building (1931) at Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. North of the Squibb Building is the Sherry Netherland Hotel, built in 1927 at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, opposite the Central Park Plaza. On the west side of Fifth Avenue (left), the mansard roof of the Duveen Building (1911) can be seen, where Joseph Duveen ran his legendary gallery. This building and the high-pitched roof of 724 Fifth Avenue belong to an earlier era when Fifth Avenue was first converted from a quiet residential neighborhood to a bazaar for luxury goods.

In 1931, Abbott photographed the same scene from the same rooftop. For the early version, she stood slightly to the right and farther from the balustrade, featuring the stylish setbacks of the new skyscrapers and the Art Deco facade of the Bonwit Teller Department store (1929). Returning in 1935, Abbott produced a visually arresting, image, with the out-of-focus silhouette of the balustrade forming a screen across the picture plane. On many occasions Abbott included out-of-focus elements in the foreground, a practice that violated the norms of professional urban photography. Today, the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street remains the center of luxury shopping. In 1940, Tiffany & Company remodeled the four-story building at the intersection's southeast corner (seen through the balustrade, lower left). In 1959, Tiffany's competitor Harry Winston remodeled 718 Fifth Avenue, removing the balustrade through which Abbott took her photograph. In 1983, Bonwit Teller was demolished for Trump Tower, a shopper's wonderland and luxury apartment house, and the ground floor of the New York Trust Company became the Warner Brothers Store in 1994.

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