VISTA FROM WEST STREET
MARCH 23, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 288

WEST STREET, ROW III
115-118 West Street, between Dey and Cortland Streets
MARCH 23, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 289

West Street between Fulton and Liberty Streets, discarded image

Returning after nearly two years, Abbott continued her exploration of West Street's old commercial buildings in 1938. This time, she moved south, where the view across West Street was unobstructed by the new extension (from Canal to Duane Streets) of the elevated West Side Express Highway.

Vista from West Street and West Street, Row III offer two radically different interpretations of the same buildings. In Vista, Abbott stood at an oblique angle to the block and used a long lens to compress space, sandwiching the row of nineteenth-century structures between the line of parked cars in the middle of West Street and the financial district's office buildings. In West Street, Row III, she stood closer and used a wide-angle lens, eliminating the skyscrapers from the composition. If not for the cars parked at the curb, West Street, Row III presents a nearly authentic nineteenth-century streetscape. The dormered buildings in the photograph were built around 1840, several decades before most on West Street.

Abbott discarded a view of the same block taken from the bulkhead shed on Pier 14 at the foot of Fulton Street. Unlike the close-ups, this panoramic view reveals more clearly the spatial relationship between the piers, West Street, and the skyline. At left is the southern end of Washington Market, the commercial hub of the produce trade, which Abbott chose not to feature in her photographs of the neighborhood.

These and adjacent blocks were demolished in the 1970s for the construction of the World Trade Center complex. On the site of West Street, Row III, the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel was built in 1981.

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