IRVING TRUST COMPANY
BUILDING, ONE WALL STREET
February 15, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 281
JOHN WATTS STATUE
FROM TRINITY CHURCH COURTYARD
Broadway and Wall Street
MARCH 1, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 284
Irving Trust Company,
full negative
Across from the venerable Trinity Church (1846) at the foot of Wall Street stands the 50-story limestone Art Deco mountain of the Irving Trust Company. Abbott was keenly interested in both One Wall Street, which she had photographed under construction in 1930, and in Trinity Church, about which she planned an entire book. Although no photographs of the church are in the project, there are two of One Wall Street taken from the church courtyard. In Plate 22, the office tower rising to its full height fills most of the frame and dwarfs its older neighbors. Dissatisfied with this wall of stone, Abbott tried two remedies. Standing behind a churchyard tree, she created a natural screen through which to view the man-made facade. In the final print, she cropped the treeless version, eliminating most of the building's bulk and focusing instead on the canyon of Wall Street. With most of the Irving Trust Company eliminated, the dark shadow of a Trinity Church buttress (upper left) draws attention.
Irving Trust Company,
variant image (CGLI)
In Abbott File 284, Abbott stood behind the bronze sculpture of John Watts (1749-1836), a New York patriot in the Revolutionary War. Like the Abraham DePeyster statue in Bowling Green, this George Bissell sculpture was commissioned by John Watts DePeyster, Watts's grandson. By photographing the back of the sculpture against a modern skyscraper, Abbott broke the historical connection between Trinity Church and one of its distinguished parishioners. A variant image, which included the sculpture's base and centered the figure within the frame, captured this disjunctive effect less effectively.
John Watts Statue,
variant image
The statue, Trinity Church, and the Irving Trust Company (now the Bank of New York Building) still stand. Except for the demolition of 70 Broadway (upper right) for the Irving Trust annex (1965), the older buildings, seen as fragments in Abbott's photographs, remain.