PINE
STREET, U.S. TREASURY IN FOREGROUND
Between Nassau and Broadway
MARCH 26, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 85
On the same day she photographed cavernous Cedar Street, Abbott found another subject on Pine Street, one block south and one block west. Mottled light fell across the Greek-revival facade of the U.S. Sub-Treasury (1842), forming a striking contrast with the rising shaft of the 1933 addition to the Bankers Trust Company. The photograph depicts the back of the Sub-Treasury building, which occupies the site of George Washington's 1789 presidential inauguration and was commonly portrayed from its Wall Street front, where J. Q. A. Ward's famous statue of Washington (1883) stands. Concerned less with its historical associations, Abbott appreciated the architectural form of the Sub-Treasury (built by Ithiel Town and A. J. Davis as a Custom House) and seized upon the light which its low height brought to Pine Street. Working on a sunny day, Abbott did not mind that the foreground buildings (back of the Bank of Manhattan, left, and Chase National Bank, right) fell into deep shadow. The impending darkness and the uncorrected perspective, which made the buildings seemed to be on the verge of collapse, served her expressive purposes. The light on Broadway at the end of the Pine Street "tunnel" revealed the Gothic revival Martyr's Monument in the Trinity Church courtyard, providing another historical contrast. This view is completely unchanged today.