John Wanamaker Building, New York

In 1929, Berenice Abbott returned to New York from an eight-year stint in Paris, drawn by the possibilities of photographing the city. She worked from this time through the mid-thirties on the exhaustive documentary project that would be published as Changing New York a decade after her return. This photograph records the pedestrian bridge linking the main building of John Wanamaker’s department store on East 9th Street in Manhattan, to an annex building Wanamaker had built across the street to the south in 1902. This so-called “Bridge of Progress” was constructed in 1908, in an architectural style intentionally reminiscent of the Ponte dei Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs) in Venice. The Bridge of Sighs is so named because it conveyed prisoners from the prisons to the interrogation rooms in the Doge’s palace. Unlike its Venetian model, Wanamaker Bridge of Progress was two stories tall, but Abbott frames her photograph to crop out its upper passageway. Perhaps she intended to play up the bridge’s emulation of the Bridge of Sighs, introducing a melancholic feel to this structure named to celebrate the mercantile bustle of New York.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Stuart M. Blumin, and presented at the Johnson Museum August 11–December 23, 2012)