The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus
Location, Location, Location: The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus The Picture Collection’s location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue put it at the center of a mid‑20th‑century image machine. Within a short walk were nearly all the industries that produced, circulated, and monetized images: newspapers and magazines, publishers, fashion houses and garment manufacturers, film and theatre studios, radio and later television networks, advertising agencies, and department stores. That geography is not incidental. It explains why the Picture Collection became, in Romana Javitz’s phrase, a “giant encyclopedia where pictures are consulted instead of the printed word” and why it functioned as infrastructure for New York’s industrial image economy. What follows sketches that geography and shows, with concrete examples, how firms and workers in Midtown used the Picture Collection and helped turn it into a major public visual resource. 1. Fifth Avenue and Times Squa...