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COLUMBUS CIRCLE Columbus Circle,
variant image From the ninth floor of the General Motors Building on West 58th Street, Abbott photographed Columbus Circle through the back of a Schenley Rye neon sign mounted on the seven-story New York Journal Building. The Circle's statue of Columbus, built in 1892 to commemorate the quadricentennial of his ocean voyage, occupies the center of the photograph, but it is dwarfed by an even more popular landmark, the Coca-Cola sign standing atop the American Circle Building (1915). The sign contained a half-mile of tubing, 3,000 incandescent lamps, and five miles of wire compressed into an area of 80 x 50 feet. Abbott's inclusion of the back of the Schenley sign--seen as a fragment and read backwards--bisect the composition. The left half presents a traditional bird's-eye view of one of New York's major intersections, while the right half imposes the confusing experience of the modern city onto an otherwise conventional portrayal. The dominance of the liquor sign and the Coca-Cola sign over the Columbus statue emphasizes modern advertising's subversion of traditional civic imagery. In a variant image, Abbott adopted a horizontal format and superimposed the Schenley sign over the entire cityscape, totally obscuring the panorama. In 1964, Huntington Hartford's iconoclastic Museum of Modern Art replaced the New York Journal Building, which had carried the Schenley sign. In 1966, the 44-story Gulf and Western Tower replaced the American Circle Building, bringing down the much-loved Coca-Cola sign. Return to the Middle West Side |
