I made these photographs in the summer of 1984, as a partner in Wayfarer Agency, for a commission from The New York Department of Cultural Affairs to document the street, river to river.
The forward by the late Brendon Gill is as follows:
Between two rivers, one headlong, the other grandly tranquil (and neither of them, to tell the truth, a river at all), this short, broad, vehement cross-street is surely the most intense of the innumerable urban experiences that confront and seduce us daily in the greatest of cities. Forty-Second Street is a song and so much more than a song: upon it stand, in the unself-conscious disarray of the many different eras and styles in which they were built, structures that would suffice to serve as the beginning and end of any ordinary city: a public library, a railroad station, theaters, hotels, restaurants, newspaper offices, honky-tonk curio shops - a galleria roofed only by the sky, pale over the icy architectural decorum of the United Nations, rainbow-colored over the neon paradise of Times Square. Pulsing with energy by day and by night, outwitting time and fatigue, the street hugs us to it and seems to promise us, whoever we are, that it will never let us go.
