To The City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal

1. Intersection [Includes Photo Gallery]

 1 INTERSECTION C ontrasts mark a city. Old folks encounter young ones; strangers mix with neighbors; new buildings spring up among old; signs, people, buildings, animals compete for attention; people from different jobs and backgrounds cross paths. The intersections of these contrasting elements provide much of the verve of city life, but the most basic intersection in a city is that between streets. A crossing of streets literally allows one to tack in a new direction, to move from one place to another; it often provides a moment of slowdown or a stop in the course of moving along one’s way. Photographs not only depict this geographical condition but convey a mental one as well. From the sweep of a nighttime street in downtown Dallas with its shimmering lights to the sharp angularity of the corner of Macy’s at Herald Square in Manhattan and the smoother curve of a corner in Phoenix, the intersections of city streets link the arteries of a city, the paths that make circulation and mobility possible (Figures 1.1–1.3). The physical plan of street intersections in urban space reveals a geometric pattern of related shapes when seen in aerial view (Fig. 1.4). But, on the ground, the patterns set up the random crossings of people in urban life. Pictures of this human intersection pulse with poignancy, displaying the “what if” and “maybe” and “why not” of the whimsy of convergence. The photograph freezes these possibilities, allowing the imagination to play out what might have happened next, and the visual frame replicates at least some of the chance of the moment. It is as if parade onlookers in Cincinnati—African American boys perched atop a structure and a white mother and kids seated below, looking 12 C H A P T E R O N E every which way—might soon begin to see one another and strike up a conversation (Figure 1.5). More often, though, the pictures of intersecting people show disengagement from persons nearby (Figure 1.6). With backs to each other on a park bench, two women eat lunch and read newspapers, nearly touching—and yet each absorbed in her own personal world (Figure 1.7). Two African American women in downtown Houston, photographed in midconversation , are fully engaged, amid a sea of others with their eyes elsewhere. Out of the busy flow of the sidewalk, only one man in the background seems to notice the photographer (Figure 1.8). A street hawker interrupts the path of walkers, hoping to make a momentary connection (Figure 1.9). Haphazard crossings invite disregard or engagement. Intersections form corners where collisions—of all sorts—can occur. The photographs of people passing by, gazing elsewhere, nearly crashing, suggest both what could happen by surprise and what one might miss by looking the other way. The mobility and near-collision associated with intersections and streets, though, mask the ways in which corners are stable markers, a moment of knowing where one is even if it is impossible to know what will next be encountered (Figures 1.10–1.12). The shadowed picture of a corner under the elevated trains in Chicago suggests such nuance, revealing the layers of intersection that occur moment to moment—up above by train, below in the street by car and trolley, and on the sunlit sidewalk by pedestrians. Light pierces the corner, spotlighting some parts of the intersection while others remain in the dark (Figure 1.13). Certainly one of the tantalizing aspects of city life is the isolation of events. Something can happen on one block and, right around the corner, there may be no awareness or consequence of it. Corners conceal what else is going on by limiting what one can see. A commentatordescribedtheplightofAfricanAmericansinWashington ,D.C.,emphasizing just this conjunction: When the outsider stands upon U Street in the early hours of the evening and watches the crowds go by, togged out in finery, with jests upon their lips—this one rushing to the poolroom, this one seeking escape with Hoot Gibson, another to lose herself in Hollywood glamor, another in one of the many dance halls—he is likely to be unaware, as these people momentarily are, of aspects of life in Washington of graver import to the darker one-fourth. This vivacity, this gayety, may mask for a while, but the drastic realities are omnipresent. Around the corner there may be a squalid slum with people jobless and desperate; the alert youngster, capable...