whitney.org
Today the Whitney Museum of American Art is activating a singularly New York-centric map for some of the paintings in its exhibition “Edward Hopper’s New York.” |
The web-based digital map not only shows the city as Hopper saw it in his paintings; it shows the places in the paintings as they are now. The map pairs the paintings with photographs taken from where Hopper would have stood. |
Kim Conaty, the curator of “Edward Hopper’s New York,” said the idea behind the map was to prompt museum visitors to experience Hopper beyond the Whitney’s galleries. The map “doesn’t script your path to the city,” she said, “but it points to these locations of interest.” |
It also applies a degree of literalness to a painter who wasn’t always literal. Our critic Karen Rosenberg wrote that Hopper turned the city into “his own personal fantasy metropolis.” She said that “he dispenses almost entirely with street life and traffic, ignores skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge and inserts imaginary buildings where it suits him.” He ignored the Brooklyn Bridge completely: He never painted it. |
But the map points to Hopper’s “Queensborough Bridge,” 3,724 feet of stone and steel and fanciful finials that had been open for four years when he painted it in 1913. The map also shows the bridge now, in a photograph taken from about where Hopper would have stood as he surveyed its Erector Set pattern, a look the architectural historian Barry Lewis once described as a “heavy industrial aesthetic.” What is different is the landscape — the tall new buildings on what is now called Roosevelt Island and in Long Island City. |
Downriver, the Manhattan Bridge looks about the same as Hopper presented it. It’s the foreground that’s different: The building at the water’s edge appears to be ready to collapse. The carts appear to have been abandoned even as Hopper lavished attention on rendering them just so. In the “now” photo, a chain-link fence bisects the space between Hopper’s vantage point and the river. |
Some of the places on the map are approximate, not exact — the pathways Hopper would have followed have been rerouted, and some of his subjects have disappeared, like the Sheridan Theater in Greenwich Village. He painted the interior of that movie palace in 1937. |
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“We had to settle for the park where the theater once stood,” said Angela Montefinise, a spokeswoman for the museum. Her team developed the map. |
Where, exactly, is your New York? |
There’s not only a map for Hopper’s New York, there’s a map for your New York, whether you live here or not. My colleagues at The Upshot have been thinking about how New Yorkers define the city’s neighborhoods. Maybe the Upshotters have had one too many debates about exactly what neighborhoods they live in. |
But where does Bushwick start and end, anyway? Is Greenwood Heights actually a neighborhood? What do you call the area around Pennsylvania Station? How far south does the South Bronx go? And does anyone call it SoBro? What about SoHo or NoMad? |
To answer such questions, The Upshot created a reader-sourced map that asks you to identify what you call your neighborhood and to draw its borders. We’ll let you know what your answers reveal. |
