CONSTRUCTION OLD AND NEW
38 Greenwich Street from 37 Washington Street
AUGUST 12, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 166

On the fringe of the financial district--between Greenwich and Washington Streets and from the Battery to Cortlandt Street--were several blocks of tenements built shortly after the Civil War. Residents of the neighborhood were Czech, Polish, and Greek, and most found employment in nearby office buildings as superintendents, doormen, and cleaning women. The tenants at 38 Greenwich Street paid $13 to $18 per month for a three- or four-room apartment, with a lavatory in the hall and without steam heat. Just outside their second-story windows ran Manhattan's first elevated train, the Ninth Avenue line (visible in the lower right of Abbott's photograph).

Behind the "old" construction was the "new": three office buildings built in the 1920s, with main entrances on Broadway. When Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after a decade in Paris, buildings like these had transformed the city. Because the lot on Washington Street where Abbott stood had been cleared, the back of the Greenwich Street tenement, hung with laundry, was unobstructed. A variant image shows the site without laundry, indicating that Abbott visited more than once.

The tenements were demolished in 1946 for the construction of the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, opened in 1950; the three office towers on Broadway still stand.

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