Tempo of the City

Artists and storytellers find the city’s heartbeat in its shared spaces—its streets and subways.  

This gallery highlights depictions of these iconic urban pathways. The varied works draw inspiration from New York’s lively pedestrian life and chaotic traffic, bringing to life the under- and above-ground transit networks where strangers and neighbors intermingle, inspire, irritate, or simply ignore each other as they go about their business in the anonymity that only New York’s crowds can offer.  

The moods of these works are as varied as the city’s own contradictions: from the speed and density in the images here, to the meditational solitude depicted on the opposite wall; from the streets as places of joyful self-expression to hard looks at the challenges of urban life; to the myth-making depictions of the city as a place of threat and even dystopia that have shaped so many views of New York. 

Monitor
Daybreak Express 
Directed by D.A. Pennebaker, 1953 
Run time: 5:23 min 
Courtesy of Pennebaker Hegedus Films  
Filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker follows the route of the soon-to-be-destroyed Third Avenue elevated train, set to the score of Duke Ellington’s “Daybreak Express” in this masterpiece of experimental cinema.  

Right
Tempo of the City I 
Berenice Abbott, 1938 
Gelatin silver print 
Museum of the City of New York. Museum Purchase with funds from the Mrs. Elon Hooker Acquisition Fund, 40.140.249  
Audio Tour: 101
Here Berenice Abbott captures New Yorkers as they speed around, utterly absorbed in their own daily lives. Abbott’s landmark work on the rise of the skyscraper city as a global metropolis in the 1930s, Changing New York, was the subject of a solo show at the Museum of the City of New York in 1937. 

Top Far Right
[Home Trek from “El–Views”] 
María Domínguez, 2001 
Acrylic paint on paper 
Courtesy of the artist 
Audio Tour: 100
This study for a public art piece in the Chauncey Street station of the J/Z line is by María Domínguez, an important muralist of the Loisaida scene in downtown Manhattan. Her work can also be seen on the cover of pianist Eddie Palmieri’s Grammy-winning Latin jazz album Sueño. 

Bottom Far Right
Bronx Express 
David Bekker, c. 1937–1938 
Linoleum cut on paper 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the Print Committee, 2001.12.1 

Middle
Subway No. 12 
Masaaki Sato, 1976
Screen print 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Masaaki Sato, 83.27.1
In an interview, artist Masaaki Sato commented that New York’s subway system reminded him of systems of the human body, with subway cars flowing in all directions, moving through the city like life blood. He began thinking about blood cells which inspired him to paint this subway station full of holes. 

Top Left
Young People #2 
Isabel Bishop, 1972 
Oil on gessoed Masonite 
Private collection, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery New York 
With a long career that dated back to the1920s, Isabel Bishop came to focus on Union Square scenes. Along with Reginald Marsh and others, she was an important artist of the 14th Street School, a group of figurative artists concerned with depictions of working-class life in the area. 

Bottom Left
Roosevelt Ave Station A, Jackson Heights 
Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, 2014 
Archival ink print 
Collection of Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao 
Audio Tour: 102

Right
[“Take the A Train” sheet music] 
Billy Strayhorn, 1939 
Ink on paper 
Private collection 
When Duke Ellington offered a job to pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn, he invited him to his house with directions that began with the line “take the A train.” Out of that came one of the century’s most popular songs, with swinging lyrics exhorting listeners to “hurry” on the then-new subway line to go to Sugar Hill in Harlem. 

Monitor
[Scene from The Crowd] 
Directed by King Vidor, 1928 
Run time: 44 sec 
Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.  
Crowds are one of the defining features of life on the streets and subways in New York City. In This masterpiece of the silent era, the lead character ultimately learns to make peace with, and navigate, the crowd. 

ALONE

Being alone in a city of millions can be both a blessing and a curse. It also has been a powerful motif in portrayals of New York. Some observers highlight the welcome, serendipitous moments of introspection and solitude. Others emphasize the alienation that can come from being isolated in an empty or inhumane city, turning New York into an indifferent wilderness. 

Artists have used the city’s larger-than-life infrastructure to particularly powerful effect in many of these depictions. The elevated train tracks and the subterranean tunnels provide plays of light and shadow, layered elevations, spectral moments, and unexpected turns, weaving stories about New Yorkers overshadowed by a city they cannot fully grasp. 

Right
M Train on Route to Manhattan Approaches the Williamsburg Bridge 
Richard Estes, 1995 
Oil on illustration board 
Collection of Louis K. Meisel and Susan P. Meisel 
The renowned photorealist painter Richard Estes has long been fascinated with the public life of New York City. Here a solitary commuter on the M train appears indifferent to the spectacular views afforded by the Williamsburg Bridge. 

Middle
James Dean in Times Square 
Dennis Stock, 1955 
Gelatin silver print 
Museum of the City of New York. Centennial Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, 2022.18.92 

Far Right
Woman On Bus 
Frank Paulin, 1958 
Pigment print 
Museum of the City of New York. Centennial Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, 2022.18.81 

Left to Right
After the Gold Rush 
Neil Young, 1970 

Fever to Tell 
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 2003 

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM 
Simon & Garfunkel, 1964 

Little Girl Blue 
Nina Simone, 1959 

Ink on cardboard 
Private collection 

Streets and subways can paradoxically become ideal sites to fulfill the very human need for solitude, privacy, and anonymity. Album covers explore this idea of getting lost, celebrating meditation, or lamenting urban loneliness. 

Mott Street Canticle or “Saturday Night” Chinatown Blues
Henri Chang, 1972 
Ink on paper 
Courtesy of Henry Chu, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) Collection 
Audio Tour: 141
This image puts Manhattan’s Chinatown at the center of a quintessential urban experience: the lonely and bored flâneur. Published by Basement Workshop, an Asian American artist collective, the book’s name, Yellow Pearl, is a play on the anti-Asian stereotype of the so-called “yellow peril.” 

Left to Right
[Page from City of Glass: The Graphic Novel] 
Written by Paul Auster, adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, 1994, reissued 2004 
Reproduction 
© 2004 Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzucchelli 
In the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s detective novella New York City streets are a sweet existential maze where the character loses, and ultimately finds, himself. 

Lifeline 
Pascal Campion, April 13, 2020 

After the Shift 
Owen Smith, April 20, 2020 

Grand Central Terminal 
Erik Dooker, March 30, 2020 

Ink on paper 
Private collection 

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, The New Yorker’s covers poignantly depicted city residents—especially the “essential workers” who were at the greatest risk from the virus. 

Far Left Top
Four A.M.
Jean Zaleski, 1957
Oil on canvas
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Ms. Jean Zaleski, 89.9.1

Far Left Bottom
Untitled, Subway
Bruce Davidson, 1980–1981
Chromogenic color print
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Jeanne & Richard S. Press, 2006.25.14 
Photographer Bruce Davidson captures a lone New Yorker in an interstitial pause, leaning against a pillar in the middle of a subway platform.

Top
Blue Zone 
David FeBland, 1998 
Oil on canvas 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of David FeBland, 99.106.1 

Bottom
Third Avenue El 
Hedda Sterne, 1952–1953 
Oil and spray enamel on canvas 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel H. Silberberg, 1946 (64.123.4) 

JOY

Despite their sometimes-harsh side, the streets and subways of New York are also valued by artists as sites of both individual and communal joy. In the works on view here, images of joy are all around: kids and an open hydrant, a masterful musical performance on a subway platform, a scene of romance, or a street festival affirming old traditions amidst an ever-changing city. 

Tellingly, many artistic representations of these joyful moments center around working-class or immigrant communities gathering to exercise their right to the city. At other times, artists remind us that New York is an endless playground for children of all ages. 

Right
Subway Playground 
Benton Spruance, 1951 
Lithograph 
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art, 1930–1970 

Far Right
Child Teasing Another, NYC 
Diane Arbus, 1960 
Gelatin silver print 
Museum of the City of New York. Centennial Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, 2022.18.3 
Diane Arbus studied photography with Berenice Abbott and was known for her penetrating portraits of liminal characters and people at their most unique, vulnerable, or spiritual. These two little ones all but own the sidewalk with their cuteness. The city is also theirs. 

Right Middle
Untitled — Bushwick, Brooklyn 
Andre D. Wagner, 2015 
Gelatin silver print 
Collection of Andre D. Wagner 
Audio Tour: 110
The city’s streets are a source of constant inspiration for Andre Wagner. Many of his photographs center on the human face, where emotions concentrate most purely. This image is a reminder that there are corners of the city unequivocally commandeered by childish joy. 

Monitor
[Scene from In the Street] 
Cinematography by James Agee, Helen Levitt, and Janice Loeb, 1948 
Run time: 4:05 min 
Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division  
Shot in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) this short was spearheaded by legendary street photographer Helen Levitt; part of a long tradition of commentary advocating for progressive social change.  

[Scene from Summer in the City] 
Directed by Christian Blackwood and Robert Leacock, 1969 
Run time: 53 sec 
Courtesy of Michael Blackwood Productions 
Produced for West German television in the fateful year of 1968, this film shows the Upper West Side in all its complexity, drama, tension, and joy.  

Right to Left
[On the Town sheet music] 
Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Leonard Bernstein, 1971 
Ink on paper 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Mrs. Betty Comden and Mr. Adolf Green, 70.22.31
With music by Leonard Bernstein, On the Town tells the story of three Navy friends on leave in New York City during World War II, as a joyous day turns into a classic voyage of self-discovery. The stage musical has the original “New York, New York” song, calling it “a helluva town”—which the movie adaptation changed to “a wonderful town.” 

She’s So Unusual 
Cyndi Lauper, 1983 

Roberto Roena Y Su Apollo Sound 
Roberto Roena Y Su Apollo Sound, 1970 

On the Corner 
Miles Davis, 1972 

Ink on cardboard 
Private collection 

Much of the joy in the city’s streets and subways comes from the ways in which music has shaped these public spaces. In a virtuous cycle, art and life imitate each other. 

Left
Homage to the People of the Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly Street—La Freeda, Jevette, Towana, Staice 
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, 1981–1982 
Oil on fiberglass 
The Broad Art Foundation
Audio Tour: 111 
Since the 1980s, artists John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres have worked collaboratively out in the open, preferably on the streets, where they invite the people of the neighborhood to be cast and memorialized. This work, long displayed on a building in the South Bronx, expresses the joy and expertise of Double Dutch jump rope. 

Right
[Lamppost from Sesame Street] 
Sesame Workshop, 2015 
Painted metal and glass 
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop 
An embodiment of the joy of city streets, Sesame Street first aired in 1969. By design, it is both somewhere and nowhere in New York City: the street has characteristics of every borough and many neighborhoods. This sign would be equally at home in Harlem, Park Slope, Morris Heights, Kew Gardens, or St. George. 

Far Right
Song & Dance Man
Frank Díaz-Escalet, 1996
Acrylic on canvas
Museum of the City of New York. Anonymous Gift, 98.140.1  
A sidewalk in El Barrio becomes a music venue, to the delight of neighbors. The figures are presumably Afro-Puerto Ricans, a telling snapshot of the islanders’ migration to the city. Artist Frank Díaz-Escalet had a leather art gallery in Greenwich Village, where his customers included the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. 

Top Right
Mott Street 
Vincent La Gambina, 1954 
Oil on canvas 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Mrs. Grace La Gambina, 92.40.5 
The Feast of San Gennaro celebrates the patron saint of Naples, Italy, and for most of the last century, New York’s Little Italy. A fruitful motif for art and pop culture, it has been a setting for TV shows and movies such as The Golden Girls and The Godfather III. 

Bottom Right
Sikh Parade 
Melissa O’Shaughnessy, 2018 
Archival pigment print 
Collection of Melissa O’Shaughnessy 
This is one of artist Melissa O’Shaughnessy’s “cosmic moments,” when the street brings things together and she clicks the shutter to accept and memorialize the scene. Celebrations such as the city’s annual Sikh Day Parade, held in Manhattan since the 1980s, open streets for diverse communities to assert themselves in public spaces. 

Pedestal
[Tito Puente memorial maquete] 
Manny Vega, 2020 
Foam core panel, construction paper, and watercolor marker 
Courtesy of the artist 
Manny Vega’s colorful mosaics can be seen all over the city but especially in the Museum’s neighborhood, El Barrio. This vibrant model of a planned memorial to the great Puerto Rican percussionist Tito Puente (1923–2000) highlights the streets as a venue for Latin music and dance. 

Pedestal Side
[Figures from “Yesterday’s New York”] 
Manny Vega, 2014 
Colored glass on plaster 
Courtesy of Basha Frost Rubin and Scott Grinsell 

STRUGGLE

New York can be a challenging place. Phenomenal wealth coexists with abject poverty, competition is fierce, and the cost of living keeps many on the edge. The resulting stark contrasts and struggles, primarily impacting the most vulnerable, are a recurrent motif in representations of the city. 

Urban struggle can have a lighter and humorous side as well. Others take “our” seat on the overcrowded subway, walk too slowly, make too much noise, or proselytize over a loudspeaker. Crowds, trash, and vermin are part of the daily tests that challenge every New Yorker, and enduring them can become a badge of honor. 

Both the everyday annoyances of New York life and the city’s deeper structural disparities have proven rich fodder for observers, from filmmakers and cartoonists to painters and poets. 

Top Right
Water Bug  
Roz Chast, 2022 
Ink and watercolor on paper 
Collection of Roz Chast 
Audio Tour: 132
Roz Chast has published well over a thousand cartoons in The New Yorker magazine, as well as children’s books and personal visual memoirs. In her New York world, unexpected “things” and unusual characters conspire to make life miserable and absurd—and entirely recognizable to New Yorkers. 

Bottom Right
[Cartoon about noise regulations in New York City] 
Milt Gross, c. 1925 
Ink on paper 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Mrs. Milt Gross, X2011.5.259 
Irritations of New York life include the incessant noise—and the hopeless battles against the same, as this cartoon by Milt Gross suggests. Yet some New Yorkers cannot sleep well abroad: the silence, they say, is unbearable. 

Far Right
Giving the Sardines a Laugh 
Rollin Kirby, 1931 
Graphite on illustration board 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Mr. Rollin Kirby, 43.366.606 

Monitor
Buddy the Rat 
Jonothon Lyons, 2021 
Run time: 30 sec 
@jonothonlyons #buddytherat 
Inspired in part by a viral video of the real “pizza rat,” performance artist Jonothon Lyons turns to the stuff of New York subway nightmares—and evokes laughter and indifference in equal measure.  

[Scene from Speedy] 
Directed by Ted Wilde, 1928 
Run time:  1:10 min 
Harold Lloyd Entertainment, Inc. 
In this classic silent film, Harold “Speedy” Swift takes his new girlfriend Janes on a date to Coney Island. 

[Scene from Seinfeld]  
(“The Subway,” Season 3, Episode 1) 
Directed by Tom Cherones, 1992 
Run time: 26 sec 
Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.  

Platform
Deity (In the Spirit of the Garbage Offensive) 
Shellyne Rodríguez, 2015 
Ceramic, wood, azabache charms, and brass ringlets 
Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York 
Audio Tour: 131
In 1969 the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican-led radical political movement, organized their “garbage offensive” to protest the lack of garbage collection in East Harlem. They blocked traffic with garbage and cleaned the neighborhood themselves, creating systemic disruption or dentera (literally: tooth irritation). Hence the broom with teeth. 

Far Left
[On the Bowery production still] 
Directed by Lionel Rogosin, 1957 
Reproduction 
Courtesy of Milestone Film & Video and the Lionel Rogosin Heritage Foundation 
An old Native American trail, the Bowery is one of the oldest roads in Manhattan. For over a century, it was New York’s “Skid Row,” a magnet for men down on their luck, as this searing neorealist film from 1957 makes clear. 

Middle
Entre Nous 
Tim Dlugos, 1982 
Ink on paper 
Private collection 
Tim Dlugos was an important poet of the Lower East Side, whose poetry chronicled the AIDS epidemic as it ravaged the city during the 1980s, narrating its devastating impact at a time when the public response was slow and ineffective. 

Left
“Bread” 
Frances Chung, 1972 
Ink on paper 
Courtesy of Henry Chu, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) Collection 
Chinatown native Frances Chung was a master impressionist, with punchy and disorienting verses that play off the tensions between the tourist and the local gaze. 

Left to Right
Desire 
Martin Wong, 1988 
Acrylic on canvas 
Collection of KAWS
Audio Tour: 130 
A series of gilded frames lead straight onto consecutive brick walls, dead ends to nowhere. In Martin Wong’s interpretations of his “blighted” East Village neighborhood of the 1980s, fascination with bricks was a recurring motif. Here they are both oppressive and beautiful: a course of subtle gradations of color and texture as rich as any landscape. 

[Manuscript for “Puerto Rican Obituary”] 
Pedro Pietri, 1973 
Ink on paper 
Pedro Pietri Papers, Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY 
Pedro Pietri’s poetry and performance revolved around the Puerto Rican experience in the diaspora. A foundational figure of the Nuyorican cultural movement, Pietri became a member of the activist group the Young Lords upon his return from the Vietnam War. 

[Handwritten lyrics notebook, including songs for Electric Ladyland] 
Jimi Hendrix, 1968 
Ink on paper 
Courtesy of the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle, WA 
Legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix set many of the songs in this notebook in New York, where he was struggling to find a place for his loud, flamboyant style.

Monitor
[Reading of “Alphabet City Serenade”] 
Diane Burns, 1988 
Run time: 1:59 min 
Courtesy of the Municipal Archives, City of New York and courtesy of Bob Holman, www.poetryspots.com  
Diane Burns (Chemehuevi and Anishnaabe), a founding poet of the Nuyorican Poets Café, wrote with dark humor about her experience with anti-Native American stereotypes. “Alphabet City Serenade” is her indictment of the forces gentrifying the Lower East Side.  

[Reading of “Puerto Rican Obituary”] 
Pedro Pietri, 1968 
Run time: 2:41 min 
Courtesy of David Hoffman, Filmmaker 
Pedro Pietri, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, created poetry and performance that revolved around the Puerto Rican diasporic experience. His epic poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” was pure New York City street: performative, hard, biting, funny, critical, political, and cerebral.  

“The Message” 
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982 
Run time: 5:59 min 
An early and canonical hip-hop masterpiece, “The Message” was written during New York’s 1980 transit strike. Its unusually slow beat lets its poetic lyrics ring to powerful effect.  

DISPLAY

The city’s streets and subways can serve as runways for New Yorkers to strut their stuff as they strive to be noticed, to mark themselves apart, to regale others with their style and outrageousness—or just because. Here, assertive claims of personal and community freedom, transgression, and uniqueness are not only normal but expected. 

Artists, many of whom themselves settle in the city looking for the same freedom and frank exchange of ideas, have in turn embraced and celebrated New York’s streets as unequalled spaces for watching people be who they truly are. The works in this section offer diverse perspectives on the city’s public spaces as places of display. 

Right
[Pendant from Uncut Gems] 
Propmaster Catherine Miller, 2019 
14-carat diamond-encrusted pendant 
Courtesy of Elara Pictures 
Audio Tour: 122
In the now-iconic scene in 2019’s Uncut Gems, jewelry store owner Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler, proudly displays this diamond encrusted Furby pendant, exclaiming “I started this shit!” The Furby instantly became a meme in the real world, while in the movie it stood as a symbol of New York’s and Howard’s excess. 

Platform
[Carrie Bradshaw’s tutu ensemble from the pilot of Sex and the City] 
Costume designed by Patricia Field, 1998 
Tulle and satin 
Courtesy of North Center Productions 
Audio Tour: 123
Spanning six television seasons (1998–2004) and two movies, Sex and the City represented the return of glitzy New York as a master narrative: the city as playground and runway for the well-to-do and beautiful. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha revealed themselves through their distinctive outfits, garments that signaled the significant social and political changes transforming New York at the turn of the 21st century. 

Top Right
[Illustration from Julián is a Mermaid] 
Jessica Love, 2018 
Paper, watercolor, gouache, and ink 
Lent by the artist 
Audio Tour: 120
Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade, a procession of beauty, outrage, color, and pride, is a riotous venue for display. Here a boy named Julián goes on a journey of self-discovery, courage, and love, and finds that the Mermaid Parade is the natural place to reveal his true self. 

Bottom Right
[Woman walking by Bergdorf Goodman] 
Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, and Michael “Tony” Vaccaro for LOOK magazine, 1952 
Modern print 
Museum of the City of New York. The LOOK Collection. Gift of Cowles Magazines, Inc., X2011.4.11919.103 

Bottom Far Right
Mr. and Mrs. Brooks in Bed-Stuy 
Russell Frederick, 2003 
Silver gelatin print 
Collection of Russell Frederick 
The photographer recalls: “Mrs. Brooks was resistant to having her picture taken. Her husband gently convinced her, saying, ‘Straighten up, and smile for the man.’” It was the last picture taken of the couple together, as Mr. Brooks passed shortly after. Himself of Afro-Panamanian descent, Russell Frederick has documented the astonishing diversity of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s streets for decades. 

Top Far Right
Untitled
Saul Steinberg, 1973 
Ink and pencil on paper 
Lent by The Saul Steinberg Foundation 
Born in Romania, Saul Steinberg went to study architecture in Milan but was pushed out of Italy by Mussolini’s antisemitic laws of the late 1930s. After moving to the United States, he created over 1,200 illustrations for The New Yorker magazine. Steinberg’s category-defying work straddled cartoons and high art, advertising, photography, and even textile work. 

Top Left
Easter Sunday Parade, (Norman Rockwell Moment) 
Máximo Colón, 2001 
Gelatin silver print 
Museum of the City of New York. Museum purchase, 2021.6.1 
Audio Tour: 121
Perhaps the most important living photographer of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Máximo Colón calls this image “my Norman Rockwell moment.” No matter how fancy New Yorkers feel, someone’s always there to pop their balloon. 

Bottom Far Left
Twins in Central Park 
Garry Winogrand, 1975 
Gelatin silver print 
Museum of the City of New York. Centennial Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, 2022.18.102 
Stepping onto New York’s streets frequently means becoming the object of scrutiny. The discomfort of being on involuntary display is a familiar experience for women in particular, as seen in the long line of staring folks in this photograph. Here Gary Winogrand captures the tension between New Yorkers wanting to be seen and the uncomfortable side of being on display. 

Bottom Left
The Critic 
Weegee, November 22, 1943 
Gelatin silver print 
International Center of Photography. Gift of Wilma Wilcox, 1986.55 
Famed crime photographer Weegee deliberately engineered this confrontation between the society matrons out for an evening of opera and the downtrodden onlooker. 

WORK

The city’s places of circulation are also places of labor for millions. Official and underground ways of working intermingle seamlessly and mark these public spaces as job sites that service all New Yorkers. The pieces in this section engage with representations of subways and streets as work spaces for everyone from vendors to transit workers and as places that have been built and are maintained by the sweat of many New Yorkers. 

Together these works show that public pathways are neither natural nor neutral spaces. They remind us of the political and economic decisions that express our social priorities, as they tell stories that often go unnoticed. 

Far Left
108th and Madison 
Alice Neel, 1945 
Oil on canvas 
Estate of Alice Neel, courtesy of David Zwirner 
Best known for her penetrating portraits of friends and families from El Barrio, Alice Neel was also a great documentarian of the daily working life of New York’s streets. This sunny scene captures sanitation workers doing their job a few blocks from the Museum. 

Middle
The End of An Epoch 
Maurice Kish, 1939 
Oil on canvas 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Maurice Kish, 73.35 
Manhattan used to be crisscrossed by elevated trains (the El) running above ground, until the El was demolished in phases from the 1930s to the 1950s. Maurice Kish documents this process as part of his general interest in industrial work in the city. 

Left
[Man Push Cart poster] 
Directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2005 
Ink on paper 
Collection of Ramin Bahrani 
Audio Tour: 151
No matter how crowded New York’s streets can be, working on them can bring feelings of alienation and solitude, particularly for new arrivals still seeking to adjust to life in the city. Here an immigrant and former rock star from Pakistan sells food from his cart, in a film that a critic remarked has “the intensity of Taxi Driver without the violence.” 

Right to Left
Push Carts, Brooklyn, New York 
Jacob Kass, 1983 
Magna acrylic and oil on handsaw blade 
American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Ray Kass and Jerrie Pike, 1999.2.7 
Jacob Kass was born in Brooklyn and worked all his life in his family’s sign-painting business. He is best known for urban landscapes painted on antique hand saws that give his scenes a patina of nostalgia. Pushcarts, a jobsite on wheels servicing both visitors and locals, have been a constant source of fascination for artists. 

Spring Cleaning the Subway 
Don Freeman, 1941 
Reproduction 
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Michael Karp, 2013.13.42.4 
Don Freeman, the creator of the children’s book Corduroy, documented the daily lives of New Yorkers of all stripes. Here Freeman shows the workers who keep the subway tunnel clean and functional, making their unseen labor visible. 

[The Muppets Take Manhattan scale set models] 
Production design by Stephen Hendrickson, 1984 
Ink on paper 
Loan Courtesy of Museum of the Moving Image, New York 
Audio Tour: 150
In The Muppets Take Manhattan, Jim Henson created a parallel universe to New York City and populated it with unforgettable creatures—some of them public transportation workers—who help keep the city on the move. 

MENACE

New York can be a scary place, and its role as a site for catastrophe and sin is a theme that has long been exploited—for profit, for fun, or as a cautionary tale. The recurring theme of the menace of New York can be found in a variety of media, from horror movies and comic books to fine art. 

These representations can be realistic, stereotypical, exploitative, and even comical. They are forceful reminders of the ruin and damage that New York can ostensibly bring to some of us. They have also contributed to a perception of New York as a dangerous place, even when the statistics on the ground suggest otherwise. 

Far Left
Car Chase from “The French Connection” 
Fiona Banner, 1997 
Screen print on paper 
Collection of Robert M. Rubin 
New York’s streets and subways are the main characters in this 1970s story of New York Police Department detectives trying to prevent delivery of an enormous shipment of heroin from France. With car chases, shootings, and subway collisions, the city unravels inexorably and with gusto. The movie’s famous car chase was filmed under the El in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. 

Middle
Subway Hand 
Charles Addams, August 1987 
Ink on paper 
Collection of Tee and Charles Addams Foundation 
Charles Addams, who developed the series of extremely quirky characters who eventually became known as the Addams Family, delighted in depicting New York as a weird juxtaposition of the mundane and macabre. 

Left

[Angry Street from Will Eisner’s New York] 
Will Eisner, 1986 
Reproduction 
Courtesy of the estate of Will Eisner 
Will Eisner, considered the “father of the graphic novel,” created a New York that was street level and brutal. Only locals, he argues on this page, have the dimmest hope of surviving the city’s angry streets. True or not, the narrative endures. 

Right
The Subway 
George Tooker, 1950 
Tempera on composition board 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the Juliana Force Purchase Award, 50.23 
All the characters in George Tooker’s Cold War masterpiece—particularly the woman at the center of the painting—seem trapped in a place that echoes Dante’s Inferno. Individual souls are lost and in existential pain; sets of stairs leading up and down denote other levels of entrapment. Reflecting on this painting, Tooker called the subway “a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.” 

Left to Right
[Taxi Driver storyboards] 
Drawn by Martin Scorsese, 1976 
Pencil on paper 
Martin Scorcese Collection, NY 

[Handwritten sheet music for Taxi Driver] 
Composed by Bernard Herrmann, 1976 
Ink on paper 
Martin Scorcese Collection, NY 

[Taxi Driver script] 
Written by Paul Schrader, 1975 
Ink on paper 
Loan Courtesy of Museum of the Moving Image, New York 

In Martin Scorcese’s classic film, the wandering taxi offers a glimpse of a bombed out New York: a place beyond repair or redemption, where locals are cursed into madness and vigilantism. The sensuous, smooth, and free flowing jazz score by Bernard Hermann deliberately contrasted with the hardship seen on screen, signaling the ongoing tension between individuals trying to survive and a city bent on their ruin. 

Monitor
[Scene from A Hare Grows in Manhattan] 
Directed by I. Freleng, 1947 
Run time: 1:16 min 
Courtesy of Waner Chappell Music Inc. and Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. 
Despite his Brooklyn accent, Bugs Bunny tells the story of his growing up on the though streets of the Lower East Side.  

Left to Right
[Cotton Comes to Harlem storyboard] 
Art direction by Emanuel Gerard, 1970 
Ink on paper 
Collection of Robert M. Rubin 

[Shaft lobby card] 
Directed by Gordon Parks, 1971 
Ink on paper 
Private collection 

The blaxploitation film genre seized on 1970s New York’s reputation for crime, chaos, and corruption through its sensationalized depictions of life in the city’s neighborhoods of color. The films often featured Black New Yorkers as heroes, victims, and villains. Though many were written and directed by white men, some productions were led by Black visionaries, including the now cult classic Shaft, directed by photographer Gordon Parks, and Cotton Comes to Harlem, directed by renowned actor Ossie Davis. 

Top Right
[The Mugger poster] 
Directed by William Berke, 1958 
Ink on paper 
Private collection 

Middle
[Murder Inc. poster] 
Directed by Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg, 1960 
Ink on paper 
Collection of Richard Koszarski 

Far Right
[Terror in the City poster] 
Directed by Allen Baron, 1964 
Ink on paper 
Private collection 

Bottom Right
[Too Young, Too Immoral lobby card] 
Directed by Raymond Phelan, 1962 
Ink on paper 
Collection of Richard Koszarski 

Bottom Far Right
[Cry of the City lobby card] 
Directed by Robert Siodmak, 1948 
Ink on paper 
Collection of Richard Koszarski 

Representations of New York City as a den of slashers, crooks, violators, and savages have been around as long as there have been movies. Most of them perpetuate stereotypes of various kinds while creating new ones for their times. Although this type of film is still produced, it was particularly common—and harmful to the image of the city—from the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s through the early 1980s.