UNION SQUARE
Fourth Avenue between East 15th and 16th Streets
MARCH 20, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 80

Lincoln Statue at Union Square, 1929

Formed in 1811 at the intersection of the city's two major thoroughfares--Bloomingdale Road (Broadway) and the Bowery (Fourth Avenue)--Union Square was a fashionable residential area before the Civil War. By the 1870s, it had become the center of the theater and hotel district, and, following years of decline, it emerged in the 1920s as a working-class shopping district and a locus of radical political dissent.

Among Abbott's first photographs of New York in 1929 was a series depicting bronze statues of George Washington (1856) and Abraham Lincoln (1868), both by Henry Kirke Brown. Removed from their bases for repair, these national heroes lay on the ground, their dignity compromised. In a rare example of overt political commentary, Abbott showed the prone Lincoln against the offices of the American Communist Party and the radical Yiddish newspaper Freiheit. In Union Square in 1929, politics could hardly be avoided; radical labor demonstrations and violent police reaction were commonplace.

In 1936, standing a block south of the Lincoln statue Abbott again focused on the Square's sculpture, this time on Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi's bronze Lafayette, which France gave to the city in 1876. Abbott depicted Lafayette against the same backdrop of old lofts, which in the intervening years had been consolidated by S. Klein, the Square's famous discount department store. She photographed this scene with two different lenses. With the shorter lens, Lafayette is lost in the middle distance (variant image); with the longer lens, the sculpture fills the foreground, and the spatial intervals collapse between Lafayette, S. Klein's, the Union Square Savings Bank (1924), and the tower of the Consolidated Edison tower (1926), a block away. As at Columbus Circle and Bowling Green, Abbott used public sculpture to contrast nineteenth-century civic ideals with twentieth-century commercial culture.

During the 1970s decline of Union Square, S. Klein closed and remained empty until the late 1980s, when a renovation of the park precipitated a renewal of the surrounding real estate. Today the Lafayette statue remains; the S. Klein annex is occupied by Toys 'R Us; and the saplings in Abbott's photograph are full-grown trees. The Con Edison tower is blocked by Zeckendorf Towers, a 1987 apartment complex, which fills the entire block at the southeast corner of the square.

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