OLIVER STREET, NOS. 13 1/2-29
MARCH 30, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 220

OLIVER STREET, NOS. 25-29
Between East Broadway and Madison Street
MARCH 30, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 221

This row of post-Civil War Italianate houses has long been home to immigrants from various religious and ethnic groups. Across the street stands the Old Mariner's Temple, New York's first Baptist church founded in 1797, and just behind it is a seventeenth century Jewish Sephardic cemetery and St. James Roman Catholic Church. In the later nineteenth-century, successive waves of immigrants--Irish, Italian, and East European Jews--settled here, dividing each house among several families. Directly across the street is P.S. 1, one of the many revival-style public schools built around 1900 to educate and Americanize the huge influx of immigrants. The block's most illustrious resident was Governor Al Smith, whose name appeared on renovation records for no. 25 in 1915.

Today these houses remain remarkably unchanged, except for a crudely renovated cornice and doorway at no. 19, which spoils the row's uniform effect. The store at no. 13 1/2 is run by Chinese-Americans, evidence of the expansion of Chinatown throughout the Lower East Side. Rising above and behind Oliver Street are the Governor Smith Houses, public housing built in 1952.

Abbott's photographs focus on the regular geometry of these urban row houses. Abbott File 221, which is a close-up of no. 23 and 25, is a study in shape and texture. Abbott File 220 is more complex: the fanciful shadow of the stepped-gable roof of P.S. 1 throws one design over another. The curlicue of the Victorian lamppost breaks up the white sky at the upper left and forms a counterpoint to the rectilinear facades. The edges of the frame are marked by signs: "store to let" relieves the blackness of the lower right, and "Henry Street" closes off the left.

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