THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORKTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 N A23You might not always notice it, but under
Manhattan’s bright sunshine, among the
canyons of skyscrapers, stretches a second-
ary city. It unfurls throughout the day, and is
gone by night: the city of shadows. They’re
a photographer’s dream and a renter’s
nightmare.
Shadows may be celebrated, navigated
or avoided — but to grasp them fully, we
need to look at the city’s grid system. The
wide avenues and perpendicular cross
streets aren’t exactly aligned with the
points of the compass. “One of the beauties
of Manhattan, particularly in spring or fall,
is that the grid is about 30 degrees off true
North,” the architect and shadow consult-
ant Michael Kwartler told The Times in
2016, when the paper mapped every shad-
ow in the city. Intersections, for example,
“tend to be very bright because the sun is
going diagonally across them at lunchtime,”
(1)said Mr. Kwartler.
In 1916, the first zoning resolution in New
York went into effect. Among other things,
it required that after a certain height, a
building had to be tiered — which created
some of the most iconic silhouettes in the
Manhattan skyline.
For New Yorkers who want their own
place in the sun, to cast their own shadows,
Central Park provides 840 acres of open
space. And for photographers, Manhattan’s
cityscape has long offered dramatic van-
tage points — like a bird’s-eye view of Fifth
Avenue and 39th Street, where long shad-
ows crowd the city below. (2)
A trip through The Times’s photo archive
— home to more than 4 million prints — re-
veals the allure of shadows around the city
for the paper’s staff photographers. Sam
Falk, who started working for the paper in
1925, captured cinematic light and shade at
the original Penn Station,(3)the year be-
fore its demolition began. Thirty years later,
shadows caught the eye of our staff photog-
rapher Marilynn K. Yee on the roof of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. (4)
In 1996, the year after a photo of Ellis Is-
land — captioned “In the Shadows of Immi-
grants” —(5)was taken, photographers’
film negatives were digitally scanned,
rather than made into prints. Today, no-
where are shadows more lovingly docu-
mented than on Instagram, where over 8
million photos are hashtagged #shadows,
outnumbering those with the more affec-
tionate label #ihaveathingforshadows.
Looking at photos like these, who wouldn’t?
2 MANHATTAN, 19371 MANHATTAN, 19563 PENN STATION, 1962 4 METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, 19925 ELLIS ISLAND, 1995By ANIKA BURGESSThe Shifting City: Shadows of New York
FAIRCHILD AERIAL SURVEYS/UCSB LIBRARYEWING GALLOWAY, INC.SAM FALK/THE NEW YORK TIMES MARILYNN K. YEE/THE NEW YORK TIMESEDDIE HAUSNER/THE NEW YORK TIMES SUZANNE DECHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMESPAST TENSE
As we digitize some six million photo
prints in our files — dating back more
than 100 years — we are using those images
to bring vivid narratives and compelling
characters of the past to life.
nytimes.com/pasttense
ONLINE:PAST TENSE