Monday, July 2, 2012

Map: Skyscrapers of Wall Street,1930; Broadway to the River

If interested do click through, this is quite amazing.

From the Skyscraper Museum's "The Rise of Wall Street" exhibition:

WALL STREET IN 1930 

fortune 1930

This mural is an enlargement of a drawing published in Fortune in March 1930-- the first year of publication of that magazine --as part of a five-article series on skyscrapers.  The unnamed artist with the initials "CE" depicted the full length of Wall Street from Broadway to South Street, as the artist of the Lowenstrom panorama had done eighty years earlier. The major changes were all in the western end, where skyscrapers of 40 to 70 stories now climaxed most blocks. Between Water and Front streets, there remained many buildings of four to six stories that still functioned, as they did in the mid-19th century, as the offices and exchanges for commodities brokers of sugar, molasses, coffee, and cocoa.


fortune 1930
Click on the map to zoom and pan in a new window

Fortune's focus on business and finance guided the amusing and informative captions that emphasized the various buildings' resident bankers, executives, and substantial gold reserves.

The whole exhibition may be of interest to denizens and former denizens (and maybe a few ghosts)