FULTON
STREET DOCK: MANHATTAN SKYLINE
From Pier 17
NOVEMBER 26, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 51
Moored opposite the Fulton Fish Market at Pier 17, the Mary P. Mosquita was a 34-year-old trawling vessel used to fish for mackerel. Behind the boat's masts rose the huge chimney at 130 John Street of the New York Steam Corporation. Producing 1.8 million pounds of steam per hour, the company provided heat to all of downtown's major office buildings. In the distance, the financial district's tallest towers stand out (from left to right): Farmers Trust, 60 Wall Tower, Bank of Manhattan, 116 John Street, and 111 John Street.
By juxtaposing the fishing boat's masts with Wall Street's towers, Abbott contrasted potent symbols of New York's nineteenth- and twentieth-century economies. Five months later, she more dramatically conveyed this theme in a photograph of the cargo ship Theoline, docked at Pier 11. Standing on the ship's deck, Abbott portrayed the skyline through a screen of the ship's masts.
Pier 17 survives as a successful food court and shopping mall developed by the Rouse Company in 1984. Old sailing vessels maintained by the South Street Seaport Museum are docked permanently along the pier. The nineteenth-century buildings opposite the pier on Fulton and South Streets are protected as part of the Seaport Historic District, established in 1977. The transfer of air rights of the landmarked buildings to developers in the 1980s led to the district's encirclement by huge office towers. Still rising above these blocky new structures is the elegant tip of 60 Wall Tower.