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LAMPORT EXPORT COMPANY This impressive example of lower Broadway's many cast-iron commercial buildings was designed in 1872 by the prestigious architect Jonathan B. Snook (1815-1901) for Joseph E. Laubat, a French merchant. Now in the heart of the Soho Cast-iron Historic District, the building is still leased, as it was in Abbott's day, to textile wholesalers. Although cast-iron architecture was less widely appreciated in the 1930s than it is today, Abbott viewed the building with a modernist eye, sensitive to the graceful rhythm of its modular structure. This building's distinctive feature is the enormous expanse of its delicately proportioned colonnade, five stories high and three lots wide. Abbott ingeniously captured this expanse by photographing with a wide-angle lens from a fire escape across Broadway. The facade fills the frame from cornice to sidewalk; its 150-foot width just barely escapes the frame at the left edge. The superimposition of the fire escape grid upon the columns complicates the work's spatial structure, demonstrating Abbott's ability to transform city architecture into abstract composition. Return to Greenwich Village |