By Susan Smith-Peter Using crutches because of an early bout with meningitis, Percy Loomis Sperr managed to photograph nearly all of New York City from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sperr sought to document and preserve the city as fully as possible. He was interested in telling the story of New York through the lives and environments of everyday people. This work brought him into contact with important photographers such as Berenice Abbott and, to a lesser extent, Walker Evans. And his work has deeply shaped our vision of this New York City during the Jazz Age and Depression-era. Among other things, it helped set design for such movies as The Godfather and The Great Gatsby (1974) and serves as the foundation for such popular apps as OldNYC and Urban Archive. Yet the artist himself remains little known. This blog sets out to establish the basic facts of his life, and suggests lines of possible research, using his previously unanalyzed writings and undigitized albums as well as his better-known works. Born on December 27, 1899, Sperr attended Oberlin College, where he served as the associate editor of the Annual and the managing editor of the Review. In 1916, a list of graduates places him in Columbus, Ohio, care of the Stoneman Press. As he told the Newark Sunday News in 1963, the year before his death, “the first of my sins was to teach in a small private school in California. I taught the ABCs, trigonometry and everything in between. The school closed while I was on vacation, so I wandered around in printing, freelance writing and photography.” His draft card for World War One shows that he was already living in New York in 1917, at 2887 Bailey Avenue in the Bronx. It also noted that his right leg was permanently paralyzed and that he was a printer at the Lumitone Art Company. His World War Two draft card was even blunter, simply stating, “lame.” He moved to Staten Island in 1924, during which time he was “principally a freelance writer, doing articles largely for the Sunday magazine sections of newspapers. Many of these articles concern\[ed] aspects of the New York Public Library.”

Triborough Bridge ca. 1936 The Triborough Bridge was the first major bridge to link three of New York City's five boroughs; its four over-water spans interconnect The Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan. Establishment of the Triborough Bridge Authority to finance this ambitious project also set a precedent: all major New York City bridges since the completion of the Triborough Bridge have depended on the underwriting of a similar agency. Beginning in 1904, when Manhattan's new subway was extended to Broadway and 145th Street, the population of Harlem expanded rapidly. By 1913, there was a call for a bridge that could create easier access from this area of Manhattan to Queens, in order to develop sparsely settled areas of Queens and The Bronx and to bolster the value of Harlem real estate east of Park Avenue. Unable to sell municipal bonds following the 1929 Stock Market crash, those promoting the bridge concept developed the idea of a bridge authority able to issue bonds that would be repaid by tolls. By the early 1930s, the need for jobs to replace those lost in the deepening Depression field further support for such an authority. The Triborough's outstanding feature is its 1,380 foot suspension bridge between Randalls Island and Astoria, Queens. Its cables are 98 feet apart; only the George Washington Bridge cables exceed this distance. All three spans have pedestrian walks, providing Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan walkers with access to all three boroughs and to the Randalls Island Park.