GENERAL VIEW FROM PENTHOUSE, 56 SEVENTH AVENUE
JULY 14, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 254

Abbott took this photograph from the penthouse balcony of her friend Frederick Kiesler, an Austrian-born architect and designer. Kiesler's building, which stood between West 13th and 14th Streets, was one of the several apartment houses built in the 1920s to accommodate an increasingly middle-class Greenwich Village. The balcony afforded an expansive view of Chelsea, a mixed-use neighborhood to the northwest.

Rising above the row houses, tenements, and old warehouses was the County Trust Company of New York, a 1929 20-story office building at the corner of West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue. Farther northwest was the massive Port Authority Inland Terminal, built in 1932. This structure filled the entire block between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets; it served as headquarters for the Port of New York Authority and as a freight distribution center. Against the rigid geometries of this urban fabric, Abbott skillfully juxtaposed the fanciful curlicue of Kiesler's iron garden chair.

Today the view remains intact. The first floors of the 14th Street row houses have been converted into commercial storefronts, and the tenants of the larger buildings have changed: National Republic Bank occupies the County Trust Company Building, and the Port Authority moved to the World Trade Center, leaving only commercial tenants in the Inland Terminal.

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