BROOME STREET, NOS. 512-514
Between Thompson Street and West Broadway
OCTOBER 7, 1935. ABBOTT FILE 2

Broom Street, variant image

When these two federal houses just east of the corner of Broome and Thompson Streets were built in the mid-nineteenth century, they bordered St. John's Park, a prestigious residential square far removed from the downtown business district. By the end of the century, when the warehouse behind the houses was built, the park had become a railroad depot. When Abbott photographed them, the houses stood two blocks east of the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, which opened in 1927.

Abbott took two exposures--vertical and horizontal--of this site. She chose the vertical, which included the full height of the warehouse and its water tower. The scene characteristically juxtaposes structures from different eras in the city's history. It also exhibits Abbott's preference for the striking geometries of light and shadow that sent her out most often on clear sunny days.

Broom Street, discarded image

Abbott returned to Broome Street two days later to photograph two similar houses at the other end of the block (discarded image). The outscaled sign bearing the word "Signs," incongrously mounted on an antique facade, and the biomorphic dented fenders in front of an auto repair shop lent a surrealist feeling to the scene. She preferred the earlier photograph however, and discarded this one.

Sometime before 1939, the two federal houses were torn down and replaced by a two-story house and adjoining storefront; today, the storefront is a Laundromat. The Thompson Street "grocer's warehouse"--a handsome loft building located only a block from the central artery of fashionable Soho--still looms over its lowly neighbors but has been renovated as a luxury apartment building with an art gallery on the ground floor. The empty lot at the corner of Broome and Thompson has been fenced in for gallery use.

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