HOW I would have liked to have accompanied photographer Percy Loomis Sperr on his expeditions around NYC in the 1920s and 1930s, when he took upwards of 40,000 street photos for the New York Public Library. It is his photos, along with those of Eugene Armbruster, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Alice Austen, and others that give an account of what NYC streets looked like in the early 20th Century. And by the way, Sperr did it all on crutches, as he was impaired by a bout with meningitis as a child. 50 or 60 years from now, even though I will not hear about it, having by then emigrated to a more distant plane, I’d like people to see my pictures and say, “how I would have liked to have accompanied that Forgotten New York guy…”
In 1932, Sperr’s camera found the west side of White Plains Road in Williamsbridge and West East 216th Street. The Emmanuel Baptist Church, a Romanesque Revival church built in 1895, lords over the scene of a railcar diner that dotted NYC streets bu the hundreds in this era. What’s that Ogden Nash poem? “I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree/Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,/I’ll never see a tree at all.” Today, a motel and its parking lot are in place of the diner and the billboards.
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12/16/22