CORLEARS STREET, NOS. 3-5
Corner of Corlears and Monroe Streets
MARCH 4, 1937. ABBOT FILE 213

Beginning in 1884, this building was used as a car stable for a trolley company, but in Abbott's day, the lower floor stored heavy machinery and the top floor was vacant. Corlears Hook, the name for the bit of land jutting out into the East River that had been in Van Corlears bowerie (farm) in Dutch times, had become a slum. In 1939, the new East River Drive (now the F.D.R. Drive) cut through one block to the east, and in 1956, the site was taken over for Corlear's Hook Houses (now East River Houses/ ILGWU Cooperative Village).

Taken the same day as Stanton Street, Corlears Street also monumentalizes its humble structures. The simplification of form, precise rendering of surface texture, and blank sky recall the raw power of nineteenth-century topographical photography, which Abbott's generation had begun to appreciate. Signs play a small but significant part in the composition. The sign advertising the second floor loft for rent, with its modern graphics and black-and-white diagonal, reinforces Abbott's modernist interpretation of the site, and the one-way sign pointing out of the frame forms a left-edge marker for the composition.

From the three negatives for Corlears Street, Abbott chose to print one in which a street cleaner, perfectly aligned with the edge of the warehouse, seems as still as a statue and lends the scene an otherworldly aura.

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