Tuesday, January 28, 2025 – SOME STREETS JUST DO NOT CHANGE

By admin

A winter Scene on Christopher Street

in the 1930’s

That Looks Eerily Similar Today

Tuesday,  January 28, 2025

ISSUE #1379

EPHEMERAL NEW YORK

The chalet-style elevated train station is long gone; the Ninth Avenue El, which ran along Greenwich Avenue, was demolished in 1940. (Though Berenice Abbott keeps it alive just as the painting does in this 1936 photo.)

The cigar shop in the little Federal-style house on the left has also bit the dust. The land is part of the churchyard of St. Luke’s, and the sidewalk is occupied by a row of Citibikes.

But otherwise, so much of Beulah R. Bettersworth’s 1934 depiction of Christopher Street looking down toward Greenwich Avenue is strangely unchanged more than 90 years later.

The three-story yellow building on the northwest corner of Greenwich is still there and still yellow. The two red-brick taller buildings to the north exist as well. The curvy awning at the entrance to the Hudson Tubes—aka, the PATH train—remains in place.

Beyond Greenwich Street, the Gothic steeples of St. Veronica’s enchant and delight. Far in the background, a sliver of the Hudson River lets us know we’re at the small-scaleend of this historic street in Greenwich Village.

I tried to capture the same view today, but my camera work is no match for Bettersworth’s eye. This was her neighborhood—she lived in an Art Deco high-rise on the corner of Bleecker Street—and she depicts her neighborhood with tenderness.

I’m not the only one so taken with this streetscape. “A wintry corner of Greenwich Village lives in this painting as Beulah Bettersworth knew it when she and her husband inhabited 95 Christopher Street, a block away,” explains the Smithsonian, which has the painting in its collection. (Before that, FDR had it hanging in the White House.)

“Closely observed details draw the viewer into the painting to join Bettersworth’s neighbors hurrying through the slushy snow, catching a whiff of tobacco from the cigar store in the foreground. Snow melts from the roof of St. Veronica’s Catholic Church, whose towers are visible behind the Ninth Avenue ‘L’ station. The elevated train station had been an elegant adaptation of a Swiss chalet when it was built in 1867, but by Bettersworth’s time it was an aging relic soon to be torn down.”

More about Christopher Street is known than about Bettersworth. Born in St. Louis, she studied at the Art Students League and became a WPA painter during the Depression. She exhibited portraits and still lifes; she painted a mural for the Columbus Ohio post office that by today’s sensibilities has been considered controversial.

She died in Tucson in 1968, and I like to think she’d be quite charmed to know that the contours of this part of Christopher Street are almost frozen in time.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

Snowy day at the north end of Blackwell’s Island about 1915

CREDITS

EPHEMERAL NEW YORK

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