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Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine depicted buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, as well as workshops and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the street’s other holdouts against change, such as sex workers, pushcart vendors, horses, and the trees and wildflowers of upper Manhattan. Hine ultimately assembled more than three hundred photographs, along with numerous newspaper clippings and a typed essay, into a three-volume album, titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower.”
Presenting striking images from Hine’s album, this book offers a rare glimpse into the transformation of New York’s built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nick Yablon explores Hine’s connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time, such as historic preservation, Pictorialist photography, botany, and bicycling. He curates a selection of Hine’s photographs and investigates how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about urban development. From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower guides readers up Broadway block by block, casting light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.
— Francesca Russello Ammon, author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape
From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower is a rich and utterly engrossing visual and narrative exploration of unexpected and contradictory layers of history embedded along Manhattan’s spine in the early twentieth century. Yablon beautifully connects Hine’s survey to the history of photography, real estate, commercial enterprises, social change, and ecology.
— Elizabeth S. Blackmar, coauthor of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park
Deeply scholarly but highly readable, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower is an in-depth exploration of a unique and personal historical artifact, offering new insights into the history of New York City.
— Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, author of Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago
Yablon makes a persuasive case for Charles Hine as a distinctly compelling figure in the history of representation of New York City. By contextualizing Hine's efforts, Yablon lucidly anatomizes the city's understanding of itself in the early twentieth century. Like Broadway slicing across the city’s matrix, Hine's independent perspective carves a unique avenue through the contending priorities of civic pride, commercial promotion, nostalgia, tourism, "aesthetic" photography, historic preservation, and Progressivism. This absorbing account of his work brings three-dimensionality to a phase of urban history we thought we knew.
— Joel Smith, author of The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time
Here is a clairvoyant ambit of a New York in transition, its jimsonweed and cellar holes, corners and verticalities, throngs and solitaries shimmering and footnoted in photographic starkness.
— John R. Stilgoe, author of What Is Landscape?
Note to the Reader
Introduction
1. The Battery to Twenty-Third Street
2. Madison Square to 105th Street
3. [105th Street] to the Wild Flowers
Epilogue: On Broadway’s Edges
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index