HARDWARE STORE
316-318 Bowery at Bleeker Street
JANUARY 26, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 276

Hardware Store, variant image

Hardware emporiums, catering to tradesmen from all over the city and day laborers who lived nearby, flourished on the Bowery. The extravagant display of merchandise--from hammers and nails to toilet seats and birdcages--was more than good advertising; customers with a shaky command of English could simply point to their desired purchase. The skates, antifreeze, potbelly stoves, and electric heaters indicate the seasonal nature of the display. In summer, garden tools and camping equipment were featured. Loading the trays onto hand trucks, the manager and his helper spent an hour each morning and evening moving the stock outdoors and in again.

Bleecker Hardware was established in 1907 and remained at its Bowery address into the 1970s. The display and plate-glass storefront contradict the somewhat elegant mansarded structure above, which was built in 1868, when the Bowery was the center of New York's theater district. Today a chic restaurant--one of many on the Bowery north of Houston Street--occupies the site. Abbott's 1938 handling of this Bowery storefront differs from her 1935 photographs of the Tri-boro Barber School and the Blossom Restaurant. The earlier images contain figures and recall Atget's Parisian precedents, as well as storefront scenes by American painters such as John Sloan and Edward Hopper. Hardware Store, by contrast, is both simpler--a plate-glass grid sandwiched between sign and sidewalk--and more complex. The profusion of everyday objects presents an inventory of 1930s Americana. In a variant image, Abbott closed in on the hardware display, eliminating the shop sign above and sidewalk below. She rejected this horror vacui for a more stable composition and more contextual information.

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