TEMPO OF THE CITY II
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
MAY 13, 1938. ABBOTT FILE L-17

TEMPO OF THE CITY I
Fifth Avenue and 44th Street
SEPTEMBER 6, 1938. ABBOTT FILE R-1

The "tempo of the city" was fast, and Abbott used small cameras to capture it. Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was an ideal location, since the avenue was the city's main shopping street, and 42nd Street linked Grand Central Terminal with Times Square. In the Tempo of the City II, Abbott leaned out the window of the Seymour Building at the northeast corner of the intersection; filling the street below was a sea of pedestrians, which numbered 30,000 at rush hour. In Tempo of the City I, she photographed the southwest corner of 44th Street from the top of a Fifth Avenue double-decker bus, undoubtedly stalled in traffic. This version features a 1907 cast-iron sidewalk clock, one of the four remaining (and landmarked) in Manhattan. For Changing New York, Abbott chose Tempo II, forgoing the temporal symbol of the clock.

Today, Fifth Avenue is still jammed with shoppers, tourists, and office workers, and even more crowded with cars, cabs, and buses.The 42nd Street trolley, so prominent in Tempo II, ended its run in 1946.

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