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.”

Hoyt Avenue North, west from 31st Street, looking forward the Triborough Bridge, 1935. The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly the Triborough Bridge) is actually three bridges, a a viaduct, and 14 miles of approach roads connecting Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Construction began on the bridge in 1929, actually on the day of the stock market crash, October 25th. The construction barely continued after early 1930 due to extreme financial instability. The project was "saved" by Robert Moses in 1932-1933 when he advocated the the state legislature to create the Triborough Bridge Authority to fund, build, and operate the Bridge. He unsurprisingly became the head of the Authority. The bridge officially opened to much fanfare on July 11, 1936. For the approaches to the East River suspension span, a number of large apartment houses had to be demolished on Hoyt Avenue North (the empty land on the right of the photograph depicts the results of these demolitions).