The Winter Art Show

We are looking down Broadway on a fine day in I860. In certain ways the unknown artist has been highly literal: Thomas Y. Crowell, the publisher, is in business in the proper place (and will continue to turn out books for another 130 years before finally going under), and across the way the Astor House wears a suit of striped awnings. We know the year, and even the month—June—because P. T. Barmim has hung his museum with banners heralding Oriental exhibits to mark the arrival of Japan’s first delegation to America. But despite such concrete reporting, this marvelous Broadway, with its crystalline light, its broad and sharp-edged vistas, has more to do with Ganaletto’s Venice. In reality, the pell-mell thoroughfare always pretty much looked as if it were under bombardment. It still does.