bereniceabbott

Beautiful memories, thank you!!

"At the time of the 1879 Tenement House Act, which first regulated the city's low-income housing, Mayor Edward Cooper invited a group of prominent businessmen to form the Improved Dwelling Association. The Association invested $300,000 in the first model tenement and by law was limited to a five percent return on its investment. "Constructed in 1882, the tenement was laid out along the perimeter of First and Second Avenues and 71st and 72nd Streets, with an open courtyard in the center, admitting light and air. Fifty years later, Abbott documented this space as a communal laundry line: ropes with pulleys led from apartments to five-story poles imbedded in concrete. "Abbott made two exposures, with the laundry and poles forming different abstract configurations. She later recalled that winter day, the laundry frozen stiff and the children huddled together, too cold to move (McQuaid, 375). "In the 1960s, the tenement was replaced with one of the Upper East Side's many full-block, white-brick apartment buildings." (more) -- Museum of the City of New York

Thanks for sharing . Great SHOT

"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. " — more: Museum of the City of New York

The New York Journal Bldg. was originally the Virginia Hotel.

beautiful...I love Berenice Abbott