Blossom Restaurant, The Bowery
Berenice Abbott began working on her series, Changing New York, in 1935 as a way to document gentrification in the city. While the project shows many architectural scenes and urban landscapes, there are also a number of images of storefronts: an easy way to show the way times had changed. In this way, small everyday moments were elevated into important slices of the city’s history. A man leaving a barbershop after a haircut became a symbol of a time when those services cost less than fifty cents. It’s fascinating to look at these split-seconds of history and realize that together, all of them made up the diverse and rich history of the city we know and love today.
