Architectural Heritage & Holdouts

Hine highlighted architectural heritage in his album, but defined that category far more broadly than did others in the emerging historic-preservation movement.  While including Broadway’s few surviving landmarks from its colonial, Revolutionary, and Federal days, such as churches and civic structures, he also embraced commercial structures of more recent vintage.  Among these were the nation’s first luxury hotels (notably the Astor House), early department stores (such as A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace), and pioneering skyscrapers like the Tower Building.

Hine was equally receptive to humbler structures—examples of what we would now call vernacular architecture.  These included brick, brownstone, and wood-frame buildings that housed clothing stores and other small businesses, as well as improvised shacks (see the theme, “Squatter Wars”). Even transient vernacular structures—such as the wooden monuments hastily erected for civic anniversaries, or the cheap, one-story “tax-payer” stores that speculators built as stopgaps to pay property taxes while awaiting higher land values—qualified, in his view, for photographic preservation.