View of Exchange Place from Broadway, New York

Like many American artists of her generation, Berenice Abbott gravitated to Paris in the 1920s. There she met Eugène Atget, whose decades-long photographic archive of Paris influenced her to document the changing face of New York City as skyscrapers were replacing nineteenth-century buildings. In the midst of the Depression, she produced over 300 images; she distributed many to schools and libraries in New York, mounted several exhibitions, and published the project in 1939 under the title Changing New York. Here Abbott highlights the "new" New York, emphasizing the city's modernity with extreme cropping of the skyscrapers. Yet by the time she made the picture in 1933, the buildings in the foreground were already relics: the canyon effect produced by their sheer verticality had inspired a zoning resolution in 1916, which stipulated that buildings above a certain height must have stepped facades as they rise to allow sunlight to reach the street.