On the way to work in the morning, have you ever looked up and wondered what the street that your office is on used to look like? What was there before the building you work in?
Questions like those flashed through the mind of a communications official of the Whitney Museum a couple of months ago. The answers are now online, in a then-and-now project that pairs paintings of long-ago New York City street scenes with photographs taken from where the artists had stood with their easels and palettes.
Or as close as Max Touhey, the photographer the Whitney brought in for the project, could get.
Sometimes he could not go into the buildings the artists had been in — or the buildings that replaced those buildings — so he used modern tools to see the scene from more or less the same angle. He flew a drone outside windows he was confident the artists had been looking through as they worked. Once, on Eighth Avenue at 4 a.m., he raised a 30-foot-tall tripod to the height of an apartment where a painter had lived.
The Whitney called the project “Putting Artists on the Map” because the museum created an interactive map as a tool to view the then-and-now pairings. But the title is also a play on the Whitney’s importance as a showcase for American art from the museum’s very beginning: Most of the “then” images were shown in the first Whitney Biennial, in 1932.
The interactive map also shows where artists in past Whitney Biennials had their studios, along with subway stations where works by Biennial artists have been installed (as part of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority program, and not in the unauthorized way Keith Haring created his public art in the 1980s).
Angela Montefinise, the communications official whose brainstorm led to the then-and-now idea, had been walking up Hudson Street, thinking about that first Biennial.
And then she noticed a chimney.
“I said to myself, ‘That exact chimney is in the painting.’” She was talking about a painting by the Precisionist George C. Ault that is on display at the Whitney. “I pulled up the painting on my phone and said, ‘Oh, yeah, it matches.’ I thought it was so interesting that that chimney still existed in the same spot.”
The museum enlisted Touhey, who specializes in architectural photography, and compiled a list of paintings from the first Biennial. “It was interesting to see that at that moment in time, many artists were depicting New York,” Kim Conaty, the Whitney’s chief curator, said. It was, she added, a moment when “we had a lot of artists whose thinking was in line with urban realism.”
To match the Ault, Touhey searched for the perfect angle and ended up at a deli on Hudson Street. He was hoping to gain access to a room upstairs, facing the street.
“Long story short, I was not able to get up there,” he said, so he got clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly a drone from the sidewalk, close to the building, so that he captured the chimney (and the back of the much newer Gansevoort Meatpacking hotel in the distance).
One photograph in “Putting Artists on the Map” was not in the 1932 show — “Dobbs Hats,” by Jane Dickson, whose work has been included in three exhibitions at the Whitney, including the 2022 Biennial. It was painted in 1981 and shows a hat store next to a porn theater.
“You’d think you could find this Dobbs Hats,” Touhey said, “and next to it there was a marquee for a porn shop. There were plenty of those back in the day.” A quick Google search turned up nothing on Dobbs Hats, but on Dickson’s Instagram feed he found a comment that gave the location: Eighth Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd Streets. The year of her painting, Rolling Stone magazine described 42nd Street as “the sleaziest block in America.”
Touhey set up the 30-foot tripod at the height of the window in the apartment where Dickson had lived.
“A couple of homeless guys popped over to chat,” Touhey said. “One of them asked me to take a portrait. I’ll never turn down a good street portrait.”
Weather
Expect sunshine with temperatures in the mid-80s. In the evening there’s a chance of thunderstorms, with temperatures dropping to the upper 60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 27 (Memorial Day).
The City University of New York School of Law is known for its diversity and activism — and, in the past couple of years, for strongly worded pro-Palestinian commencement addresses.
This year, the administration canceled the annual student speech. The school announced the change in September, before Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
My colleague Maia Coleman writes that there has been a backlash, just as there was when commencement speakers made support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel a focus of their remarks. Several students have sued university officials, saying that the school is infringing on their First Amendment rights by not allowing a student-elected speaker to deliver an address.
Two guests who had been scheduled to speak at this year’s graduation — Deborah Archer, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Muhammad Faridi, a partner in a Manhattan law firm who is in line to become the president of the New York City Bar Association — recently withdrew from the event. It is scheduled for Thursday at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
The location is also different: Commencement ceremonies in the past two years have taken place at CUNY facilities. The capacity at the Apollo is smaller., the law school noted. The Apollo also requires guests to have tickets.
The lawsuit, filed by eight law school students or soon-to-be-graduates, is the culmination of a simmering conflict over politics related to Israel that has been building for almost two years. The eight students claim that the school engaged in retaliation by breaking with recent tradition when it decided to bar students from nominating a peer to speak at graduation and from recording or livestreaming the event. Those decisions were made in response to the commencement speeches of the two prior speakers and reflect a “repression of speech related to Palestine,” the complaint said.
The speaker chosen by students last year was Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Yemeni immigrant and activist devoted to the Palestinian cause who used the speech to denounce “Israeli settler colonialism.” Her remarks brought criticism from officials — including Mayor Eric Adams, who spoke at the same ceremony. A couple of weeks later, he condemned the “divisiveness” of Mohammed’s speech. Later, the CUNY chancellor and board of trustees disavowed her address in a statement, calling it “hate speech.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Sample sale
Dear Diary:
I recently heard that my favorite Scandinavian outerwear brand was having an online sample sale offering steep discounts. So I went to the company’s retail shop in SoHo to double-check my size before buying anything.
While I was trying on puffer jackets at the store, I shared the main mirror with another customer.
“That’s nice,” I said to her, commenting on a parka she had tried on.
“I like it, too,” she said. “I’m new to this brand.”
If a salesperson had not been there helping us, I might have told the woman about the sample sale. As it was, I left the shop and went to another store across the street.
Not long after I entered, the same woman rushed up to me.
“I’m so glad I saw you again,” she said, excitedly. “If you liked those jackets, there’s a sample sale … ”
— Kari Jensen
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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