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To See a City: Percy Loomis Sperr And The Total Photographic Documentation Of New York City, 1924-45

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.”

ByThe Gotham Center for New York City History logoThe Gotham Center for New York City History
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Castle Clinton icon

Castle Clinton

His special love was for the harbor. “Out of all this endless material for story-photographs,” he wrote in the same article, “the harbor produces that which interests me the most,” noting that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Albert Einstein collected ship pictures, too. His business card noted “A growing collection of over 30,000 views of: 1. New York Harbor: Ships, old and modern; Skylines, Dock Scenes, Harbor Craft, Sunsets, Bridges, Naval Vessels.” Only then did it turn to “2. New York City, all five boroughs: Street Scenes, Skyscrapers, Old Houses, Foreign Quarters, Pushcarts, Farms, Old New York Scenes.” One observer noted that, “he would climb up sometimes on a ship’s mast or out on her bowsprit, unmindful of the danger involved, in order to obtain a different or an exciting view. His keen eye would quickly discern an out-of-the-ordinary harbor scene during his daily walks around the waterfront.” The Mariners’ Museum holds a dynamic and artistically-interesting group of his photos of the harbor, but they have attracted relatively little attention compared to his street views.
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Robert F. Kennedy (Triborough) Bridge Approach icon

Robert F. Kennedy (Triborough) Bridge Approach

The New York Public Library also hired Sperr to take photographs of buildings that were about to be torn down. This resulted in his series, “Collection of Photographs of New York City, 1931-1942,” which shows condemned buildings in several boroughs, as well as photographs of the erection of major projects, such as Gowanus Parkway, shown here at Hamilton Avenue in Brooklyn (Fig. 3). As a recent blog put it, these are “photos of power,” which the authors connect to the massive reshaping of New York City by Robert Moses, the “power broker” who created the modern NYC infrastructure but destroyed neighborhoods and most of his relationships along the way. (Both the Gowanus and the Triborough Bridge were built by Moses; the blog includes Sperr’s photographs of the latter’s construction, found in another massive NYPL project, “Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s.”]
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Robert F. Kennedy (Triborough) Bridge, Main Span icon

Robert F. Kennedy (Triborough) Bridge, Main Span

This may seem to contradict Sperr’s interest in historic preservation, but as Randall Mason, a scholar of the subject, notes in his study of NYC from 1890 to 1920, preservation was then about creating a new “memory landscape” through the introduction of markers and monuments, and sometimes required demolition of old buildings and even slum clearance to present the kind of infrastructure preservationists wanted.Sperr’s own photographs have enabled the creation of a digital variant in the apps OldNYC and Urban Archive, which undergirds the present urban fabric with a rich substrate of historical information, especially the Sperr collection. It is possible that his photographs are of power but not by power. As described in The Power Broker, Moses rudely ousted from influence the elite members of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), who were closely connected to the creation of the New York Public Library, as well as most of the major cultural institutions of the city and parks throughout the state in that era. The ASHPS had been the major force for preserving historic houses and ensembles such as City Hall Park during the Gilded Age. It is intriguing to speculate whether Sperr’s photos are documenting the destruction of buildings and neighborhoods not to celebrate but to remember. Further research in the ASPHS papers, held at the Library, might shed light on this question; although it is possible the Library conducted its own project unconnected to the Society. Once Moses had finished “scourging the patriots out of their parks,” as Caro put it, the members of the ASHPS may have used their other institutional bases to document Moses’s activity.
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115-118 West Street icon

115-118 West Street

It is highly likely that she was aware of the NYPL project and used Sperr’s photographs to scout out locations suitable for her own work. Unlike Sperr, Abbott was able to write herself into the history of photography, partly by promoting the work of French photographer Eugene Atget, whose documentation of a changing Paris influenced her. Antonello Frongia, the Italian scholar of photography, has shown significant parallels between earlier Sperr photographs and Abbott’s later shots of the same sites, including Vista from West St. Looking Southeast with 115-189 West St. in Foreground. Many other parallels can be found when comparing the two projects. Frongia argues that “in Sperr, Berenice Abbott could perhaps see a sort of lesser Atget, a silent photographer completely absorbed in the project of her adopted city and of what was disappearing in it.”
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Stapleton Union African Methodist Episcopal Church icon

Stapleton Union African Methodist Episcopal Church

Why, then, has Sperr been so unknown to art historians? First, Sperr never oriented himself to the art world. His focus was on ordinary consumers rather than collectors and most of his exhibits were at libraries and New York institutions such as the Municipal Reference Library, where he presented an exhibit of his photographs of the municipal fleet, rather than at art galleries. An article in the Defender Trade Bulletin explained his vision: to sell to customers in a bookshop, where he took a desk in order to exhibit in the window; to develop nautical magazines and other institutions as regular clients; and even his success in selling a great many reproductions of Old New York photos to the Fanny Farmer company, which used them in a redecoration of their stores.
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New York Civil Court Staten Island Branch icon

New York Civil Court Staten Island Branch

In his photo book, Island Scenes: Pictures of Staten Island, Its Beauty Spots, Historic Houses, Parks, Bridges, Public Buildings and Other Points of Interest Selected from a Portfolio of over 5000 Views, he emphasized the old and the new side by side on the island, starting with bridges, then moving to public buildings, “the ancient houses,” and beaches, parks and playgrounds. While lacking the artistic ability to contrast old and new in the same photo that Abbott had mastered, Sperr was moved by the same idea. When Sperr’s collection of 3100 negatives, 14 glass-plate negatives and 2089 photographic prints he donated to Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island becomes publicly accessible, we may gain a new appreciation for his work, but it is unlikely to secure for him a place in the history of photography, as the subject matter is mainly Staten Island.
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