ADVERTISEMENTS
East Houston Street and Second Avenue, northeast corner
FEBRUARY 11, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 205

On the same day she photographed the old-law tenements on East 1st Street, Abbott photographed these billboards, held aloft on a building half a block away. This stretch of Houston Street, where tenements and commercial lofts bordered a crosstown thoroughfare, was a perfect site for billboards, which in 1918 had been outlawed from scenic and residential parts of the city. Instead of standing across a very wide intersection for a panoramic view, Abbott stood close and pointed her camera almost straight up. The collapsed perspective created a modernist composition appropriate to the brash, contemporary subject.

Abbott's billboard was not of the most modern design. According to the promotion department of the General Outdoor Advertising Company, the eight-poster latticed billboard was 10 years old and obsolete. The single-image billboard was considered more effective and had replaced the multi-poster type.

Although billboards are no longer mounted on the Houston Street facade of 14 Second Avenue, the entire wall is covered with a scrim bearing a single advertisement.

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