Richard Howe - THE MANHATTAN STREET CORNERS

NEW! Washington Heights west of Broadway from 160th Street to HIllside Avenue

Richard Howe’s Manhattan Street Corners is a fabulous achievement, unabashedly grand in conception and scope, a 21st century counterpart to Atget’s Paris of a hundred years ago. Created for digital distribution, this perfectly realized, visionary project is both a sublime research tool and an astonishingly accessible portrait of the city, capturing a fleeting moment in 11,000 images of its ever-changing subject. And the images are gorgeous!

Vincent Virga, author of  Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History
of the United States  (Knopf, 1997) and Cartographia:
Mapping Civilizations  (Little, Brown, 2007)

in memoriam

D A R R A G H P A R K
1939 — 2009

friend, artist, inspiration

. . . how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses . . . The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

Marcel Proust: Swann's Way

There are about 11,200 street corners in Manhattan — the exact number is a matter of definition and even a matter of judgment (followers of this site will note that I have revised my last estimate upwards again) — one for every 134 or so of the 1,500,000 people who live on the island.

Streets and sidewalks represent the largest single category of land use on the island of Manhattan, accounting for 29% of its total area and 51% of its public space. Their 3,300 or so intersections connect them into a single space that is by far the largest of Manhattan’s public spaces: 6.2 square miles, nearly five times the 1.3 square miles of Central Park, the island’s second largest public space.

The network of Manhattan’s streets and sidewalks extends pervasively across the whole of the island—scarcely anyplace in Manhattan is more than a few minutes walk away from a street, and from there almost any other place on the island can be reached without once having to exit the public space of streets and sidewalks.

Manhattan’s streets and sidewalks are its greatest public commons. Everything else on and about the island connects to them: homes, offices, shops, newstands, restaurants, subways, train and bus stations, ferry docks, heliports, parking garages, police and fire stations, places of worship, schools, hospitals, gyms, theaters, museums, concert halls, parks and playgrounds, the rivers, the bay.

Out of their daily shared experience of Manhattan’s public commons, the 3,000,000 disparate life-worlds of Manhattan’s residents and commuters coalesce into the life-world of the island's streets and sidewalks themselves. Almost everyone who lives or works in Manhattan enters this great public space almost every day: on the way to or from work or shopping or visiting family or friends or doing anything at all that involves getting from one place to another—or even just going out, stepping into this ever and never changing river of urban humanity for its own sake, for the sake of joining in, of re-affirming one's membership in the city.

Manhattan’s street corners are our village squares. Almost anything that takes us out into the public space of our neighborhoods will take us to or through at least one street corner. Street corners are where we go whenever we go out to buy groceries, do laundry, see a movie, go to church, catch a bus, eat out, visit a friend, get a paper, go to school, get a haircut, find a taxi, have our nails done, go to work, take a walk, come back home. Jane Jacob’s human comedy of the urban street reaches its pinnacle on Manhattan’s street corners.

Street corners are such an ordinary part of everyday life at street level in Manhattan that we usually don’t pay much attention to them unless we find ourselves in an unfamiliar neighborhood where the character of the street corners seems strange to us, or when the deliciously over-ornamented 19th century brick and stone building on the corner nearest us is demolished to make way for yet another undistinguished high rise. Otherwise, we scarcely notice how their buildings and people, shops and signage, colors and sounds—even their smells—are telling us, again and again, not only where we are, but also who we are.

Manhattan’s street corners—from Broadway & Battery Place downtown to Broadway & Ninth Avenue in Inwood, and from 57th Street & Sutton Place on the East River to 57th Street & Twelfth Avenue on the Hudson—are as diverse as the people who live here and as various as their lives and languages, histories and cultures, interests and concerns. Manhattan's street corners are its collective self-portrait.

If you imagine an ordinary moment
at an intersection in New York City,
and there is a pause because there is a streetlight,
and some people are stopped and others in motion,
and some cars are stopped and others in motion;
if you were to put that into film terms as a “freeze frame”
and hold everything for a second,
you would realize
that there’s a universe there of totally disparate intentions,
everybody going about his or her business
in the silence of their own minds,
with everybody else
and the street
and the time of day
and the architecture
and the quality of the light
and the nature of the weather
as a kind of background or field for the individual consciousness
and the drama that it is making for itself at that moment,
and you think about that,
that’s what happens in the city,
in that somehow the city can embrace and accept and accommodate
all that disparate intention,
at one and the same time,
not only on that corner,
but on thousands of corners . . . .

E.L.Doctorow, introducing Ric Burns’ New York: A Documentary

Richard Howe’s photographs of Manhattan street corners capture the many identities of a multi-faceted city. The sequences of images read like a film where we are peering into the lives of the people who define the city’s character. This is a poignant way to distinguish New York, presented in a fashion that pays great respect to the aesthetics of photography. The New-York Historical Society looks forward to including these works in our collections.

Marilyn S. Kushner, Ph.D., Curator & Department Head,
Prints, Photographs, & Architectural Collections,
The New-York Historical Society

The Manhattan Street Corners is my working title for a project to produce a comprehensive photographic portrait of everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan. Between March and November, 2006, I systematically photographed very nearly every one of the island’s roughly 11,200 street corners.

The photographs from this effort are currently available for viewing in the following galleries (click on a title to open the gallery):

SAMPLER

The 11,095 Manhattan street corners displayed in the above galleries represent about 99% of the estimated 11,200 total. The remaining 1% consists of the 100 or so corners that I have identified as missing from the original shoots, and which I will be adding to the site as a background task while I move on to the next phase of the work, which includes replacing the current Flash galleries with a more flexible map-based search engine.

What you might first notice from flipping through these galleries is how comfortingly pedestrian the streets of New York really look: here are old women shopping, bunches of teenagers coming home from school, block after block of undistinguished buildings. There is little Times Square razzle-dazzle in evidence, this is a city of people going about daily life. But then you come across a photograph of something like the vacant building at the corner of Spring and Elizabeth streets that served as a spectacular showcase for graffiti artists and realize that in New York the mundane is pretty wonderful.

Sara Kramer, Managing Editor, New York Review Books, in A Different Stripe:
Notes from New York Review Books Classics, April 7, 2008.

One of my intentions in undertaking The Manhattan Street Corners project was to catch the island at a single, if necessarily extended, moment in its history. This meant taking the photographs in the shortest time possible for me working alone.

I began photographing in mid-March, 2006, and finished in mid-November of that year. A total of 82 shooting days were required. About a third of the days in this eight month period were either unsuitable, weather-wise, for shooting, or were pre-empted by other obligations. The initial post-production work (downloading, backing up, provisional editing, etc.) following each shoot typically took up another whole day.

Afterwards, in 2007, I caught a handful of corners I found I had missed along the way and also did some necessary reshooting. I still, occasionally, discover another missed corner or decide to reshoot one. These post-2006 photographs amount to perhaps 2% of the total.

I photographed each corner just as I found it, almost always as seen from its diagonally opposite corner. Some of the photographs have no people and no traffic, others are completely dominated by people or even, in some instances, by traffic; the majority are somewhere in between. Most of the photographs simply show what people were doing on the corner when I got there: crossing the street or waiting to cross it, shopping, hanging out, riding a bicycle, and so on — in short, doing what people do at almost any street corner anywhere in Manhattan.

With a few exceptions (e.g., Alphabet City & East Village, Downtown below Chambers Street), the galleries follow an avenue block by block from south to north, with the — usually four — corners presented in the clockwise sequence: Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest (note that these nominal compass points are relative to the long axis of the island which is about 29º off from true north -- "Manhattan North" is in fact very nearly north-northeast). Intersections with fewer than four corners, or with more than four, follow the same clock-wise sequencing.

There are a few gaps here and there in the sequences, sometimes because I was prevented by the police or other security forces from photographing a corner and sometimes because I inadvertently and inexplicably simply failed to take the photograph (perhaps because some of the shooting days were very long). These omissions are being rectified as I find them.

More often, the gaps are due to the fact that not every corner that is logically provided for by the Manhattan street grid actually exists, in some cases because of blocks that are two or even three blocks long on one or both sides of the street, in others because of parks or squares that interrupt the basic pattern.

I settled on the 1 x 3 panoramic aspect ratio in order to concentrate the images on the human, sidewalk level of the streets. Besides cropping to this aspect ratio, the images have been processed to correct perspective, to ameliorate lens and camera distortions, and to adjust exposure, white balance, saturation, and other general image parameters.

The current presentation of the work in the Flash galleries on this website is no more than a stop-gap means to make the photographs available for viewing as quickly as possible. It is my intention to develop The Manhattan Street Corners into a fully searchable image database with a map-based user-interface.

Prints from The Manhattan Street Corners can also be made to order in sizes ranging from 12" x 4" on up to as much as 120" x 40", though not all the images hold up equally well in enlargements beyond 36" x 12" (inquiries to richardhowenyc@yahoo.com).

Selections from The Manhattan Street Corners were exhibited in November, 2009, in the St John's University (Queens) Art Department's mezzanine exhibition space, in conjunction with a lecture on the project by Richard Howe in the University Art Gallery on November 3, 2009. Selections from The Manhattan Street Corners were also exhibited in the East Village MCC's 7th & Second Gallery in November, 2007, and a further selection was exhibited there in February, 2008.

Selections from The Manhattan Street Corners were featured in The Sunday New York Times, City Section, Sunday, November 30, 2008, to accompany an essay, "Cornerville," by the writer Joseph O'Neill, author of the Pen/Faulkner Award winning novel Netherland. (click here)

The Manhattan Street Corners project was featured on New York Review Books' blog, A Different Stripe, on
April 7, 2008. (click here)

In 2007, four 12" x 36" prints from The Manhattan Street Corners project were acquired by the Library of Congress for its permanent collection through a gift of Nancy Glanville Jewell. The acquisition was featured with three of the prints in the Fall, 2007, issue of the Library's Madison Council Bulletin. (click here)

A number of prints from The Manhattan Street Corners, ranging in size from 4" x 12" on up to 30" x 90", are currently featured as the window display (see photo above) of New York Central Art Supply's Furniture & Framing Annex, 102 Third avenue, between 12th and 13th Streets (tel. 212-420-6060).

You said: "I'll go to some other land, I'll go to some other sea.
There's bound to be another city that's better by far. . . ."
. . .
You'll find no new places, you won't find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you'll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you'll grow old.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don't exist. . . .

Constantine Cavafy: "The City" (translation by Daniel Mendelsohn)

A veritable visual anthropology of Manhattan!

Moshe Shokeid, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University

Thanks to
Peter Alsberg, Joan & Robert Benedetti, John Corigliano, Darragh Park, Bill Hoffman, Alan Kusinitz,
Becket Logan, Carl Morse, Geoffrey Rogers, Moshe Shokeid, Vincent Virga, and Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig,
for their unflagging encouragement and support for the Manhattan Street Corners project.

And a special thanks to Ben Benedetti and Kathy Jungjohann
for their generous assistance in producing this website.

about richard howe