New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott's New York

Real progress is something that needn't be commented on; it is simply self-evident. That's the principle behind this elegantly understated book, which places photographs taken by photographer Berenice Abbott in the mid-1930s alongside present-day photos of the same locations shot by Douglas Levere, whose work has appeared in such magazines as Forbes and People. In some cases, the contemporary images are remarkably similar to the Depression-era ones; take, for instance, the New York Telephone Building, which, aside from a new name (Verizon Communications Building), seems unchanged by time. Others are utterly different. In 1937, the Wanamaker's department store occupied the corner of Broadway and east 9th Street, and its facade was covered in billboards; today, a 15-story apartment building and diner stand in that same space. Some duos are similar, but with one altered element--like the absence, in 2002, of an elevated railroad track blazing through Herald Square, as it did in 1936. It's clear that Levere took care to re-shoot the photos from virtually the same angles that Abbott used--which is much easier said than done. The text that accompanies each pair of photos underlies the difficulty of Levere's task. For a photo depicting Fifth Avenue shoppers dashing around, Levere had to rent a double-decker bus, but since he couldn't get permission from the city to stop in traffic, ""the bus driver feigned an emergency, placing orange cones on the road and opening the bus hood to allow Levere to take his photograph at precisely 1:10 P.M."" This is exactly the kind of scrupulous attention to detail that makes this book work so well. 170 duotone photos.