Hine’s survey of Broadway was the first of four book-length studies of historic thoroughfares – mostly rural – that he pursued over more than a decade. He explored each on foot or bicycle, armed with a handheld camera and a cache of 4” x 5” dry plates. Integrating local histories (and legends) with his tipped-in photos, he created a kind of topographical history, a genre long practiced by antiquarian historians. He used his own company’s printing presses to publish these works, and also issued a series of hand-bound, decorative volumes documenting other excursions, which he called “Hine’s Annuals.” His Broadway survey, however, remained unpublished.
C. G. Hine, “Broadway from the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower” (unpublished photographic album, 1905) New York Historical
Along with other amateurs, Hine roamed New York City photographing historic buildings and sites before they disappeared. In his darkroom, he developed the plates and produced platinum prints – a costly process that was prized for its precision and chemical stability. To print in platinum was itself an act of preservation, as was his consignment of the photos to an album and his inscription of captions in permanent ink.
The album shows that Hine toured Broadway repeatedly in 1905, at different times of day and year. Each outing seems to have been prompted by a newspaper notice of an impending demolition, which he then clipped and pasted beside the corresponding photo. One pasted note indicates that on May 20, 1905, he made at least ten exposures between City Hall Park and the Upper West Side. He later assembled these various excursions into a single composite journey along the entire length of Broadway, spanning three volumes. The project remained open-ended; he added occasional photos through 1908, clippings through 1913, and a few earlier images dating back to 1889.
As an unpublished, home-made assemblage, Hine’s album reveals how individuals privately memorialized the city’s built environment — an aspect of urban memory often overlooked in favor of mass-circulated imagery and narratives. Its personal, scrapbook-like character is clear from the materials Hine inserted: drafts of prose, lists of sites to photograph, and notes from fellow local historians. Attending to the album’s physical form — the geographical sequencing, the interplay between photographs and news clippings, and the contextual framing provided by the captions and the typed introduction — opens multiple avenues for historical exploration.
Yet albums, like scrapbooks, were often made to be exchanged with intimates or associates. The care Hine devoted — mounting each photograph, drawing borders, inscribing captions, typing a seventy-three-page introduction, and hand-binding each volume with decorative frontispieces — suggests he intended it to be viewed by others interested in photography or urban history, if only by future researchers in the New York Historical. Hopefully now, almost a century since his death in 1931, this website – and the accompanying book – will allow those “others” to explore Hine’s work. This Broadway album offers rare insight not only into the sensibility of “gentleman amateurs,” but also into broader aspects of urban history. Above all, its focus on a single street in a single year, along with its attention to micro-scale of a sidewalk or street corner, invites us to investigate the city’s complex social and cultural geography.