Photography in the Village

At mid-century Broadway distinguished itself as New York City’s and Greenwich Village’s main thoroughfare, an artery characterized by wealth and luxury, and by poverty and struggle. As the city’s prominent commercial strip, Broadway’s shop windows displayed fine jewelry, glittering glass, luxurious furniture, and extravagant silverware – providing a constant lure of advertisements and commodities. A stroll down Broadway simultaneously revealed beggars and vagrants, bakers and butchers, Irish immigrants and soldiers, artists and poets, merchants and celebrities. In his introduction to the Pen and Ink Panorama of New-York City, Cornelius Matthews described New York as the heart of America, and Broadway as the heart of the City, representing the bustle, anxiety, and life of the republic. Amidst the dry goods stores, piano-makers, mirror manufactures, luxury hotels and fashionable churches, photographic portrait galleries also proliferated on the Village’s great thoroughfare. Mathew Brady operated four different galleries on Broadway – and two in Greenwich Village – and identified himself with the street’s bustling excitement, capturing throughout his career, the character of Broadway. In Walt Whitman’s 1875 Specimen Days, he recalled Broadway as “that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity,” where he saw the likes of “Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, Seward, Martin Van Buren…the first Japanese ambassadors,” all of whom sat before Brady’s camera.

This Stereograph by E & A. T. Anthony depicts pedestrians, carriages and coaches making their way down Greenwich Village's great thoroughfare. The stereograph, a pair of photographic images arranged side by side on a single support, when viewed through a stereoscope designed to hold the particular medium, gives the appearance of a three dimensional image.