STONE
AND WILLIAMS STREETS
Exchange Place and William Street
MAY 12, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 116
Stone
and William Streets, variant image, lower half of montage
The clustering of skyscrapers on Manhattan's oldest streets created a Brobdingnagian world, which Abbott was determined to capture, despite difficult lighting conditions. For this photograph, she stood at William Street and directed her camera along Exchange Place (not Stone Street), a 25-foot-wide "back yard" to office towers with street addresses on Broadway and Wall, Broad, and William Streets. The three main buildings depicted on project researcher Everett Gratama's map are: (1) Wall and Hanover Building at 63 Wall Street (background); (2) Farmers Trust Company at 22 William Street (right); and (3) National City Bank at 55 Wall Street (left). The pedestrian bridge connects the top floor of the National City Bank with Farmers Trust.
STONE AND WILLIAM
STREETS, FILE MAP
Abbott made two exposures of this site. Pointing the camera along Exchange Place, she did not correct the perspective and allowed the building walls to converge toward the center. In a second composition, she tilted the camera skyward, further exaggerating the convergence and more successfully conveying a worm's eye view of this narrow, tower-flanked alley. In a unique experiment, she also created a montage, combining the street scene of the first image with the skyscraper pinnacles of the second (variant image).
Today, the three principal buildings in this photograph remain, but the bridge has been removed.