Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City (Creating the North American Landscape)

Amazon.com
There are many surprises among the 53 black-and-white photographs in Stanley Greenberg's hymn to the hum of the city that never sleeps. There is a revealing shot of the roof structure above the curved vault of Grand Central Station's night-sky ceiling that shows where those light bulbs are screwed in to form the delicate constellations commuters see every day. The anchorages of several city bridges--the chambers where the powerful cables that hold up the roadways are fastened down--are exposed to view, peeling paint, trash, and all. There is a gleaming shot of a working Con Edison turbine and a cluttered view of a derelict power station at Floyd Bennett Field, the city's first municipally owned commercial airport.

The pictures possess a certain sameness after the first 20 or so, but New York has been immortalized by many of history's very best photographers, so Greenberg has a tough act to follow. He has good company as he searches for a new angle, however, including Laura Rosen, whose Manhattan Shores is an equally quirky but richly satisfying and illuminating trek around the edges of the island, and Horst Hamann, whose New York Vertical has become an instant classic. Anyone who likes the idea of exploring the city's underpinnings instead of the subways, piers, or buildings themselves will love Invisible New York, which also contains an index in which Greenberg imparts fascinating information about each site. --Peggy Moorman


Review
"When most people, including New Yorkers, think about New York, they think only of its outer parts -- skyscrapers, bright lights, monuments, parks. Photographer Stanley Greenberg has here shown us what lies at the base of the amazing city, in a stunning series of 53 black-and-white photographs of water tunnels, dams, docks, catwalks, power stations, turbines, gatehouses and the massive anchorage of suspension bridges... His book is a record of both the functioning and the vanishing underpinnings of the city, the flip side of picture postcards -- coherent, visually magnificent and awesome in its scale. More than anything, you come away with a sense of how small you are next to the huge cooperative vision that built the metropolis."--Peter Kurth, Salon


Review
"Stanley Greenberg has been photographing New York's hidden infrastructure for... years. The result is a haunting film noir of the corroded, undermaintained machinery -- bridge supports, turbines, water valves -- that still does its best to make the city tick."--Herbert Muschamp, New York Times, reviewing a previous edition or volume


Review
"The most intense images of Stanley Greenberg's historical record are, for many, the ones we may least wish to see. These are the photographs of the ruins of our technological past. Such places, once busy but now dead and empty, lie scattered around almost every American city of any age. We refuse to acknowledge them and their existence slips beneath our vision... Greenberg leads us to these sites and makes us look at the documents of the forced march of technology; his photographs raise necessary questions not only about technological obsolescence, but also about civic responsibility and corporate culpability -- the agents that conspired to create these places."--Thomas H. Garver, from the Introductory Essay


Book Description
Invisible New York is a photographic exploration of the hidden and often abandoned infrastructure of New York City. Inaccessible and unknown to most New Yorkers, the structures and machinery captured in Stanley Greenberg's luminous black-and-white prints deliver the essential services that a city's inhabitants usually take for granted. Many of these vast and imposing facilities have in recent decades been neglected or fallen into disuse. Others remain intact and in continuous use. Greenberg's dark and poetic images document how a city works, its technological evolution since the 19th century, and the toll that deterioration and years of deferred maintenance can take on the soul of a city.With a 4 x 5 monorail view camera and using only available light, Greenberg photographed sites in all five of New York's boroughs, many now permanently sealed in the interests of national security. Among the invisible places recorded are the massive valve chambers in the water tunnels 300 feet underground and other features of New York's extraordinary water system; the anchorages of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Verrazano Narrows bridges; the dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the derelict power station at Floyd Bennett Field; the elegant, turn-of-the-century steam turbine in Brooklyn's Pratt Institute; crumbling ruins on Ellis Island and Roosevelt Island; hidden sections of Grand Central Station and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; the West Side rail yards in Manhattan; the secret Nike missile silos in the Bronx; one of the last remaining manual switch rooms in the New York subway system; the faded grandeur of the City Hall Subway Station, its bronze chandeliers and leaded glass ceilings still largely undamaged; and the vast Brooklyn Army Terminal, once the world's largest warehouse.Greenberg's photographs of this hidden city uncover long-forgotten engineering feats, magnificent examples of skilled craftsmanship, and fascinating clues about New York's industrial past, as well as reveal the increasing aesthetic apathy of today's builders. His images chronicle both the beauty and the banal necessity of this rich legacy, threatened by public ignorance and bureaucratic indifference. Invisible New York offers a unique perspective on one of the world's great cities and alerts us to the hidden sites and essential facilities found in all cities which are slowly and secretly decaying or disappearing.


Card catalog description
Invisible New York is a photographic exploration of the hidden and often abandoned infrastructure of New York City. Inaccessible and unknown to most New Yorkers, the structures and machinery captured in Stanley Greenberg's luminous black-and-white prints deliver the essential services that a city's inhabitants usually take for granted. Many of these vast and imposing facilities have in recent decades been neglected or fallen into disuse, whereas others remain intact and in continuous use. Greenberg's dark and poetic images document how a city works, its technological evolution since the nineteenth century, and the toll that deterioration and years of deferred maintenance can take on the soul of a city.


About the Author
Stanley Greenberg worked in New York City government for seven years before becoming a full-time photographer. He has received grants from the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been exhibited at Columbia University and Cooper Union, and is held in several public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work was installed in the New York City subway system in 1997 and 1998.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

This stately and haunting collection of large-format black-and-white photograhs reveals the city's hidden—and, in many places, crumbling or decrepit—infrastructure: a vault beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, once rented to a wine merchant for champagne storage; weed-ecrusted Nike missile silos adjoining Potter's Field, on Hart Island; the massive remainsof the West Side piers, rotting into the Hudson. Alongside these images, even the newly functional attic space above the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal (where the bulbs inside the constellations get changed) and the nuclear-blast-resistant water tunnel still under construction beneath the Bronx take on an Ozymandian melancholy.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices