Image from Lost New York by Nathan Silver.

The caption reads “Some typical speculative row houses near Lenox Ave on West 133rd Street, about 1882.

A good friend of mine from the homeland (NYC) just sent me this book and it’s a goldmine.

This image in particular struck me as familiar but also so foreign. I feel like we’re all familiar with such a picture of a “development”: the lone house on freshly razed earth, sort of a harbinger (or hope) of future density. But I’m used to this as a suburban scene.

To think this is a picture of West Harlem blows my mind for its expanse and lack of density. More and more I repeat the mantra “New York is always changing” (and I don’t even live there anymore), always trying to believe it’s cyclical and not vectorial. In other words, that the changes of New York now are not terminal, that there will be a swing again (some day) back to people living in NYC because they want to be NY’ers not because it’s where the money is. But I worry it is an arrow and not a circle.

And then I see this picture. Just over a hundred years ago 133rd St was so empty. Perhaps my vision is too narrow to be thinking in terms of decades not centuries.

But of course, these houses can barely be found anymore as the skyscrapers seep out from Wall Street and Midtown–but that’s for another post, another time.