The skyscraper gave the city another vantage point. And photography, coming out of its
infancy at about the same time, gave us a whole new medium to look at it. During the construction of the Empire
State Building, Lewis Hine made number of extraordinary photographs, pointing
his lens not at the building but at the workers. In Hine's photos, the city acquires a new dimension.
We see the hand on the wrench tightening a single nut in the steel
structure and we can look at Manhattan as a gigantic collection of moments like
that. Hine--he described his
own work as "Social Photography"--wants us to see another city before it disappears from our consciousness, the city of individual workers perilously balancing at the edge of a girder as they literally go about build it.
To the right, the Chrysler building has just been
finished. Behind, the East River,
Welfare Island (Roosevelt is only the governor of New York at the time) and the
Queensboro Bridge connecting Manhattan and Queens. Farther back you can see Hell Gate Bridge, but with the crash of 1929, construction
of the Triborough Bridge stopped as soon as it began. And the grid of Manhattan
appears at a moment of transition, where the horizontal, homogeneous fabric is
giving way to a new, vertical city.
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