From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower C. G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine photographed buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, theaters, workshops, and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the precarity of the street’s denizens, such as sex workers and pushcart vendors, as well as its animal, arboreal, and botanical populations. In an unpublished three-volume album that he titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower,” Hine assembled more than three hundred photographs, numerous newspaper clippings, and a typed essay. In 1917, he donated the album to the New-York Historical Society, which is where the historian Nick Yablon rediscovered it.

Yablon's new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, is a history and commentary on C. G. Hine's work that explores his connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time. Presenting a selection of Hine’s photographs, Yablon probes how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about contemporary urban development and how they shed light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.