FORTIETH STREET BETWEEN SIXTH AND SEVENTH AVENUES
DECEMBER 5, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 58A

FORTIETH STREET BETWEEN FIFTH AND SIXTH AVENUES
From the Salmon Tower at 11 West 42nd Street
DECEMBER 5, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 57A

Fortieth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, variant image

On the same day she photographed the garment district from the Nelson Tower, Abbott ascended the Salmon Tower on 42nd Street to view midtown from the northeast. Looking across Bryant Park from an upper floor, Abbott captured a spectacular diagonal view of a cross section of midtown buildings. In the center are two 33-story office buildings of the garment trade, both of 1930: the Bricken-Casino at Broadway and 39th Street and its neighbor 1400 Broadway at 40th Street. At 110 West 40th Street (right) is the World Tower Building, a 1915 30-story skyscraper, and at 80 West 40th Street (left) is the 1901 Bryant Park Studios, a 10-story Beaux Arts building intended for artists. Abbott made two exposures of this composition, with varying light effects. In a variant, the five-story nineteenth-century buildings on Sixth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets emerge from the huge shadow cast over the foreground by the Broadway skyscrapers. In Plate 26, which was included in the book Changing New York, the sun highlights the setbacks of the Broadway buildings.

In 1938, Abbott returned to the Salmon Tower to photograph the view south. Looking over the roof of the New York Public Library (left) and Bryant Park, she captured almost the entire facades of the buildings between 8 and 54 West 40th Street. Most notable is Raymond Hood's American Radiator Building of 1924 at no. 40 (right). Looming over these structures is the great shaft of the Empire State Building (1931) at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. In the distance is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, which was the world's tallest building in 1909.

This section of midtown has changed relatively little. All the major buildings in the diagonal vista are extant, although Abbott's composition is now obscured by a 1958 office building at 1065 Sixth Avenue, which replaced the nineteenth-century buildings in the foreground of her photograph. The southern view also remains remarkably unchanged, although the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower is now blocked by a 1984 skyscraper at 452 Fifth Avenue.

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