AVENUE D AND EAST 10TH STREET
MARCH 23, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 219

Avenue D and East 10th Street, variant image

On the day that she photographed the historic St. Mark's Church at East 10th Street and Second Avenue, Abbott also photographed this modest bank, five blocks east. Although the Italianate bank in the photograph was built in 1884, a bank occupied the site as early as 1826. During the nineteenth century, this dockside neighborhood had been a bustling commercial center, serving the waterfront shipping industry and the merchants who lived near Tompkins Square. Run down by the 1930s, it was home to Italians and East European immigrants.

The brilliant sunlight that Abbott favored meticulously reveals the elegant detailing and the shabby disrepair of these old commercial structures. As in many instances, Abbott exposed several negatives of the same composition, with different figures inhabiting the urban landscape. The selected image reveals a moment of gossip between housewives. In a variant, a workman strikes a nonchalant pose, smoking a cigarette.

When Abbott took this photograph, the area was fast changing. In 1938, the first stretch of the East River Drive from Grand to 14th Streets was completed. In 1939, the piers were torn down to make way for the East River Park. In 1949, the New York City Housing Authority's Jacob Riis Houses replaced the tenements and industrial buildings, including the one pictured in the right foreground, which had stood between the drive and Avenue D. The bank building remained in use as a bank, however, until 1961, when the Tompkins Square Housing Project rose on the site.

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