GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE I
Riverside Drive and 179th Street
JANUARY 17, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 65

GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE II
Riverside Drive and 179th Street
NOVEMBER 16, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 265

George Washington Bridge in Construction, 1930 (CGLI)

In 1923 New York and New Jersey agreed to form the Port of New York Authority to construct bridges and tunnels for vehicular traffic between the two states. The openings of the Holland Tunnel in 1927, the George Washington Bridge in 1931, and the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937 completed this initial mission. Of the three structures, the George Washington Bridge became one of the city's signature monuments. When completed, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, almost twice as long as its nineteenth-century counterpart, the Brooklyn Bridge. Although originally intended to be sheathed in stone, the bridge's unadorned steel towers gave it a modernist appearance.

In 1930, Abbott photographed the construction of Rockefeller Center and the George Washington Bridge, both symbols of twentieth-century New York. The bridge photographs, which appeared in the May 1930 numbers of Architectural Forum and Architectural Record, were her first photographs of New York published in the U.S.

During the Federal Art Project, she returned to the bridge twice. In January 1936, she stood in Fort Washington Park at the anchorage of the east tower and pointed her camera up, capturing the geometric beauty of the bridge's steelwork. The same day she photographed Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and a nineteenth-century house on Riverside Drive, Abbott revisited the bridge yet again. She photographed it from Riverside Drive, looking through the trees of Riverside Park. Earlier in 1937, Abbott had photographed the Queensboro and Hell Gate Bridges similarly, contrasting these man-made structures with natural forms. She may have returned to the George Washington Bridge with this idea in mind.

From 1936 to 1938, the Henry Hudson Parkway was under construction. Today, Abbott's first photograph of the bridge could easily be rephotographed; the second would require standing on an exit road from the Parkway to the Drive.

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