SEVENTH AVENUE LOOKING NORTH FROM 35TH STREET
DECEMBER 5, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 56

SEVENTH AVENUE LOOKING NORTH FROM 35TH STREET
From the Nelson Tower at 450 Seventh Avenue
DECEMBER 5, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 55

Looking West from the Nelson Tower, discarded image

From the 46-story Nelson Tower at the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, Abbott photographed the new skyscrapers along the central artery of the garment district. In the northward view, the towers encroach upon the Metropolitan Opera, built in 1883 at the southeast corner of West 39th Street (top center). The Mills Hotel at West 36th Street (lower right) was one of a chain of inexpensive hotels that provided an alternative to the fashionable hotels surrounding Pennsylvania Station. In the southward view, the cavernous office towers of the fur district--a garment center subsidiary--are engulfed in shadow; only the deep canopy on the Pennsylvania Hotel across from the train station is easily identified.

Six weeks before she took the two Seventh Avenue views, Abbott had photographed the westward view from the Nelson Tower, an image she ultimately discarded from the project. Showing the setback tops of new buildings along West 35th Street and Eighth Avenue, this image featured the Hotel New Yorker, a popular 42-story hotel built in 1930. In one of her rare photographs taken at dusk, Abbott captured the crowning effect of the New Yorker's huge neon sign.

This stretch of Seventh Avenue, now named Fashion Avenue, remains the heart of the nation's garment industry. The northward view is intact except for a 1969 office tower, which replaced the Metropolitan Opera House when the opera moved to Lincoln Center. The southward view is the same but for the demolition in 1962 of Pennsylvania Station. The area's once-glamorous hotels have lost their luster; the New Yorker was sold to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's World Unification Church in 1976.

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