To The City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal

2. Traffic [Includes Photo Gallery]

 2 TRAFFIC F rom aerial photographs to pictures of human encounters, random and intentional, images of intersections reveal the enduring qualities of city life—the diversity and busyness of its streets. The photographs in this chapter compress the intersections at the heart of urban life to their mechanized level. A shooting script by Roy Stryker, in fact, included “Intersections” and identified those that demanded photographers’ attention as “Cross Roads; Side Roads; Cloverleaf Passes; Over and Under Passes.”1 While roads and highways appear throughout the FSA/OWI collection, a pair of photographs exemplifies the primacy of people in the traffic of the urban landscape. The first of the photographs from 1941 reveals Times Square in Manhattan on a December morning, bustling and full; the second, five minutes later, shows the same place barren after the sounding of a test alarm for air raid protection. The photographs record the entrenchment of wartime exigencies in daily life—and they also show the vitality that traffic creates. If crossings and clashes form the basis of opportunity in cities, then the density of crowds, cars, events, machines, and buildings makes such chance meetings possible (Figures 2.1, 2.2). The photographs in the FSA/OWI collection reveal—even magnify— a characteristic new to cities during this era: cars. As the automobile became a defining element of American life, cities changed to accommodate this new machine that increased mobility but also overtook streets. Washington, D.C., led the nation in the largest number of automobiles per capita of any city, with more than one car to every three people, although Detroit followed in second 34 C H A P T E R T W O place and would have led if cabs had been excluded, because, in the motor city, “owning a car is more important than having a telephone or owning a radio.”2 The number one concern for the people of Middletown by 1935 was to improve traffic conditions by increasing parking facilities, widening streets, and constructing highways.3 In the growing congestion, traffic regulations became elaborate and noticeable, such as those governing Atlanta: “Speed limit 25 m.p.h. Right turn permitted on red light after full stop; left turn on green light only. Signs by traffic lights mark intersection where no left turns are permitted . One-way streets marked by arrows. Signs indicate where parking is permitted in downtown area; parking on right of street enforced even in residential section.”4 Traffic lights, speed signs, stop signs, traffic cops, medians, painted lines on the streets—all of these added to the visual landscape of intersections and city streets (Figure 2.3). While making the vista more crowded, these new elements also were focused more on the driver than on the walker. Pictures of recently populated cities show broader and bigger signs, aimed at attracting the attention of people moving from a distance at a faster speed. Cars became not just notable objects in the city but shaped its landscape: cars roll single-file down streets, waiting expectantly at a red light or lining one side of the road in rush hour; parking lots rim city centers; parked cars along metered slots set up a rhythmic pattern, a harmonic arrangement dependent on the uniform car styles of the era (Figures 2.4–2.6). While earlier pictures featured the weaving of people around cars, later photographs presented cars alone, as beings in their own right (Figure 2.7). People are not just squeezed by cars, but eclipsed. And cars became a base of the horizon, as in Washington, D.C., with its “imposing mass of masonry along Constitution Avenue . . . visible only through an encircling string of cars. . . . Day and night endless lines of cars flank the streets of Washington, which are further disfigured by a procession of signs intended to control this nuisance.”5 The impact of cars and all they required prompted Roy Stryker to ask photographers to shoot highways, recognizing that the “American highway is very often a more attractive place than the places Americans live.”6 Other forms of transportation add to the scene—railroads, boats, buses, streetcars, subways—necessitating massive infrastructure such as train tubes, subway tunnels, water mains, gas and electric conduits, telegraph and telephone wires, and sewers below ground that underlay the tracks, electric lines and poles, drawbridges, and gas stations above ground (Figure 2.8). Photographs depict the merging of the aboveground elements in one scene, the pedestrian vying with a car that is meeting...