From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower

From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower not only introduces C. G. Hine’s overlooked photo album to a wider audience but also uses his photographs to bring the historical landscapes of Broadway to life. Nick Yablon’s skillful storytelling joins these images with deep, place-based histories to help readers see Manhattan anew. – Francesca Russello Ammon, author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar LandscapeFrom the Skyscraper to the Wildflower is a rich and utterly engrossing visual and narrative exploration of unexpected and contradictory layers of history embedded along Manhattan’s spine in the early twentieth century. Yablon beautifully connects Hine’s survey to the history of photography, real estate, commercial enterprises, social change, and ecology. – Elizabeth S. Blackmar, coauthor of The Park and the People: A History of Central ParkDeeply scholarly but highly readable, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower is an in-depth exploration of a unique and personal historical artifact, offering new insights into the history of New York City. – Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, author of Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s ChicagoYablon makes a persuasive case for Charles Hine as a distinctly compelling figure in the history of representation of New York City. By contextualizing Hine’s efforts, Yablon lucidly anatomizes the city’s understanding of itself in the early twentieth century. Like Broadway slicing across the city’s matrix, Hine’s independent perspective carves a unique avenue through the contending priorities of civic pride, commercial promotion, nostalgia, tourism, “aesthetic” photography, historic preservation, and Progressivism. This absorbing account of his work brings three-dimensionality to a phase of urban history we thought we knew. – Joel Smith, author of The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and TimeHere is a clairvoyant ambit of a New York in transition, its jimsonweed and cellar holes, corners and verticalities, throngs and solitaries shimmering and footnoted in photographic starkness. – John R. Stilgoe, author of What Is Landscape?

Nick Yablon is professor of history and American studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (2009) and Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (2019).