If any of my children should read this — you might find this to be of interest. (That means you, Jenny, Katie, and Robby!) My dad was living in New York City at this time. He was 18 when the picture below was taken. Two years after the picture below was taken, he joined the Horse Cavalry. Six years after the picture below was taken, he met my mom while guarding an airfield in Bangor, Maine. A little over eight years after the picture below was taken, he was a pilot in a B-25 skip-bombing in the Pacific with a son that he wouldn't see for another year — me.

Berenice Abbott: CHANGING NEW YORK 1935-1938

American master photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is probably best known for Changing New York, her 1935-1938 Federal Art Project documentation of the city's rapidly changing built environment. Abbott became interested in photographing New York in 1929 when, as a fashionable portrait photographer, she visited the city after a nearly a decade in Paris and saw that the nineteenth century city she had once called home was becoming almost overnight a leading metropolis. Allied intellectually with modernist European photography, she was nonetheless eager for a new arena in which to exploit her developing aesthetic. Re- established in New York, her solid international reputation as a classical portraitist generated commercial assignments from Fortune and elsewhere, and in 1932 she took up an 8 x 10 inch view camera, destined to become her standard equipment for nearly the rest of her career.

A & P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.)
246 Third Avenue.
Mar. 16, 1936.

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