Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

The arrival of cable-powered cars in 1890 marked an improvement in speed, comfort, and service over earlier systems of intracity transport, and necessitated the replacement of outdated equipment with new cable-driven apparatus. This scene records the construction at Union Square of that new cable system for the Broadway Surface Railroad -one of twenty-four firms operating railways in New York at the time.

Irish immigrants and their American-born sons held a broad spectrum of jobs associated with the city's nineteenth-century street railway business. By the 1880s, Sicilian-born laborers had also entered local construction trades, and the two groups' collective contributions to urban transit receive recognition in this tableau.¹

As a packed commuter car recedes into the distance of Union Square, the workers modernizing the railbed tend to the business at hand, some pausing to confront the artist commemorating their toil. Depicted supervising his employees (at far left) is the formally attired, derby-hatted contractor John D. Crimmins (1844 -1917). The son of Thomas Crimmins, an émigré from County Limerick, Ireland, he was born in New York City and became a partner in the family-run Crimmins Construction Company, one of the city's largest and most profitable contracting firms, noted for its ubiquity in municipal and state public-works projects.²

Hughson Hawley, an Englishman who immigrated to New York in 1879, arrived with experience as a painter of theatrical scenery and initially applied his talents to work for the Madison Square Theatre. By 1880 his primary professional focus had shifted to the expanding field of architectural rendering. So convincing were the details, coloration, and pictorial perspective of Hawley's building illustrations that leading commercial architects were soon competing for his expertise. Eventually, his prodigious output would tally close to eleven thousand drawings, with Hawley's genius often overshadowing the names of the architects whose structures he had delineated.³

Laying the Tracks at Broadway and 14th Streets demonstrates two of the elements of training that Hawley had mastered as a scene painter and illustrator, which would combine to inform his large-scale architectural drawings: keen graphic control enhanced by a sensitivity to tonal values and compositional balance, and the ability to animate the urban backdrop of his main subject with realistic details and action. This richly developed gouache was adapted as an engraving for Harper's Weekly (September 26, 1891).

Notes:

1 Hawley's crew appears to be a mixed force of Irish and Italian track layers, the latter suggested by the prominence of the thick black mustaches sported by several figures who face forward, as if peering out of the picture at the viewer.

2 The Crimmins Construction Company recruited a predominantly Irish workforce to expedite such major publicly financed construction contracts as the High Bridge and Croton Aqueduct, and the building of countless New York City streets, sewers, gas mains, and street railway lines. Affluent businessmen of Irish heritage like John D. Crimmins were alternately praised for employing so many Irish workers and criticized for paying many of them poorly. For more on the Irish presence in nineteenth-century New York City, see Gaelic Gotham: A History of the Irish in New York (curatorial script for the 1996 exhibition of the same title at the Museum of the City of New York) and Ronald H. Baylor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), sections titled "The Great Migration: 1844 -1877" and "The Turn of the Century: 1877 -1914."

3 Hawley's influential career as a renderer, little documented in the standard literature on American architecture, has been researched and summarized by Janet Parks in "Hughson Hawley," in New York on the Rise: Architectural Renderings by Hughson Hawley, 1880 -1912, exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1998).