Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker St
From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, New York received an influx of Italian immigrants, many of whom settled in The South Village neighborhood. Once home to large Irish and African-American populations, The South Village became an Itailian enclave representing a community that has shaped the texture of the city to this day. Mandaro’s cheese shop, pictured in Berenice Abbott’s 1937 photograph Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker St, was one of the businesses catering to the burgeoning Italian-American populace. Serving fresh ricotta and mozzarella with newly-strung charcuterie hanging in the windows, Mandaro’s became a staple on Bleecker. The shop represented a crucial part of the area’s thriving businesses: shop owners were able to pass down trades to their children, turning them into skilled workers and feeding the success of the community. The Mandaro storefront seen in Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker St is a symbol of the industry and entrepreneurship of one growing immigrant community, while signifying the displacement of another.
Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker St is one of the hundreds of photographs Berenice Abbott shot as part of her Changing New York series. Inspired by French photographer Eugène Atget’s documentary style of photographing Paris as it disappeared into modernization, Abbott proposed Changing New York to the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935. In contrast to the romanticly manipulated images of the popular pictorialist movement, Abbott’s work heralded a new era of sharply focused photography that straddled the line between art and photojournalism.
Beyond being a creative pursuit, Changing New York was a sociological study of the built environment. Fascinated by urban planning, man-made forms and functional objects, Abbott believed the habitats we construct say as much about humanity as our faces and bodies. The images in Changing New York show a city at the cusp of change, a phenomenon brought on by the collective behavior of the city’s inhabitants.
