A book launch for Nick Yablon's "From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: Charles G. Hine's 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway"
Throughout 1905, amateur photographer C. G. Hine spent his free hours roaming the length of New York’s Broadway, capturing the architectural oddities, street people, and botanical life of that storied street. He assembled these remarkable photographs into a hand-made, three-volume album titled From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower.
Ten years ago, historian Nick Yablon stumbled upon the album in the collections of the New York Historical Society. He now brings the album to a wider public in a new photobook, published by Columbia University Press. Through a series of short essays accompanying each photograph, Yablon reveals how Hine recorded a street under threat from developers, reformers, and others seeking to refashion it.
Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Nick Yablon is professor of history and American studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (2009) and Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (2019).