Borders & Boundaries

A recurring theme in Hine’s album is the division of urban space by borders and boundaries.  Although Broadway runs continuously up the island, cutting diagonally through the supposedly uniform grid, there were repeated efforts to impose dividing lines.  Hine photographed the visible remnants of earlier borders: the last of a row of elm trees planted along Vesey Street in the eighteenth century to mark the edge of the churchyard, then the city limits; the defensive walls raised across upper Manhattan at the outbreak of the War of 1812; and the iron fences that enclosed the once fashionable residential square of Bowling Green.

Hine also documented where invisible lines had been drawn – by police, reformers, or property owners – to safeguard the financial district, contain vice, or check the advance of working-class populations.  His album exposes the vulnerability of such borders to the everyday spatial practices of city dwellers and to the flow of urban capital. The city was defined less by rigid “borders” than by porous, shifting “boundaries,” such as those between neighborhoods.*

Hine’s third volume addresses the blurriness of the city’s outer boundary.  He described Upper Manhattan as a “border land”—a broad interzone in which the urban erratically and unceremoniously dissolves into the rural, and capitalist property relations give way to “squatter sovereignty.”  This disorderly mixing of urban and rural elements in the borderlands of American cities troubled many of Hine’s contemporaries, including other Pictorialist photographers.   Yet he invites the viewer to examine it as a landscape in its own right, one full of unexpected contrasts and possibilities.

*For more on the opposition between “borders” and “boundaries,” see Edward S. Casey, The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)