Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City (Creating the North American Landscape)

The pictures possess a certain sameness after the first 20 or so, but New York has been immortalized by many of history's very best photographers, so Greenberg has a tough act to follow. He has good company as he searches for a new angle, however, including Laura Rosen, whose Manhattan Shores is an equally quirky but richly satisfying and illuminating trek around the edges of the island, and Horst Hamann, whose New York Vertical has become an instant classic. Anyone who likes the idea of exploring the city's underpinnings instead of the subways, piers, or buildings themselves will love Invisible New York, which also contains an index in which Greenberg imparts fascinating information about each site. --Peggy Moorman

Product Description

Invisible New York is a photographic exploration of the hidden and often abandoned infrastructure of New York City. Inaccessible and unknown to most New Yorkers, the structures and machinery captured in Stanley Greenberg's luminous black-and-white prints deliver the essential services that a city's inhabitants usually take for granted. Many of these vast and imposing facilities have in recent decades been neglected or fallen into disuse. Others remain intact and in continuous use. Greenberg's dark and poetic images document how a city works, its technological evolution since the 19th century, and the toll that deterioration and years of deferred maintenance can take on the soul of a city.

With a 4 x 5 monorail view camera and using only available light, Greenberg photographed sites in all five of New York's boroughs, many now permanently sealed in the interests of national security. Among the invisible places recorded are the massive valve chambers in the water tunnels 300 feet underground and other features of New York's extraordinary water system; the anchorages of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Verrazano Narrows bridges; the dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the derelict power station at Floyd Bennett Field; the elegant, turn-of-the-century steam turbine in Brooklyn's Pratt Institute; crumbling ruins on Ellis Island and Roosevelt Island; hidden sections of Grand Central Station and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; the West Side rail yards in Manhattan; the secret Nike missile silos in the Bronx; one of the last remaining manual switch rooms in the New York subway system; the faded grandeur of the City Hall Subway Station, its bronze chandeliers and leaded glass ceilings still largely undamaged; and the vast Brooklyn Army Terminal, once the world's largest warehouse.

Greenberg's photographs of this hidden city uncover long-forgotten engineering feats, magnificent examples of skilled craftsmanship, and fascinating clues about New York's industrial past, as well as reveal the increasing aesthetic apathy of today's builders. His images chronicle both the beauty and the banal necessity of this rich legacy, threatened by public ignorance and bureaucratic indifference. Invisible New York offers a unique perspective on one of the world's great cities and alerts us to the hidden sites and essential facilities found in all cities which are slowly and secretly decaying or disappearing.

It gives one a time to reflect on the temporality of our lives and the finiteness not only of our beings, but of our dreams and visions. It gives us pause to reflect on what is important and profound about life.

When we are in these places we are really inside of parts of ourselves we don't recognize.


An excellent study of virtually unknown parts of N.Y.C.   June 11, 1999
Robert Norman (Trumbull, CT USA)
15 out of 21 found this review helpful

This book lived up to my expectations with it's beautiful photographs, insightful comments about each location photographed and rich, deep printing. A great book for anyone interested in wonderful black and white location photography, or in learning more about New York City and its' surroundings.