Nick Yablon, "From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C. G. Hine's 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway" (Columbia UP, 2026)

In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in

New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named

Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length.

Taking

pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown

Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway

animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of

change.

Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses;

horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown

famers.

Hines’ photographs lingered in the collection of the New York