PIKE AND HENRY STREETS
Pike between Henry and Madison Streets
MARCH 6, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 73

Three months after Henry Street, Abbott returned to the neighborhood and composed a similar view of tenements, this time framing the Manhattan Bridge. In both instances, Abbott used a long lens to create the illusion that the great structures in the background were closer than they appeared to the eye. The effect here, however, is different from that of Henry Street. Where the Municipal and Woolworth Buildings loom over the Henry Street houses, the tenements on Pike Street seem to dwarf the gigantic bridge, declaring poverty a greater force than public works. The strong shadows that fill the foreground and lead the eye down a central axis toward a light-filled view of the bridge and the Brooklyn warehouses strengthen this impression.

When the giant Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges were built shortly after the turn of the century, tenement construction swelled to house the vast numbers of European immigrants reaching New York. Pike and Henry Streets stood squarely within the Jewish district, with a synagogue every few blocks and the office of the world renowned Jewish Daily Forward one block east.

Today the view down Pike Street still reveals the Manhattan Bridge, but the dramatic contrast of tenement and bridge is gone. Pike Street has been widened 85 feet, and the tenements to the west (on the right) have been replaced by a one-story utility repair building. The row of buildings to the east gave way to the Rutgers Houses, a 1964 low-income housing project whose bland brick facades are set back from the street.

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