Canal Street, New York City
Fine Art Photography Print by Deborah Julian
Canal Street, New York City, is where anything loose in the city seems to tumble. This fine art photograph is a kind of composite. From Chinatown to Mcdonald’s, all along the subway spine.
Canal Street Station in Chinatown is a kind of found art everywhere you look, an eclectic composition that always catches my eye. I like how it includes so many elements that congest in New York at different speeds and with many different energies.
Women descend into the dark, grimy recesses of the New York City Subway while an idling man turns suspiciously toward me, probably wondering why I’m taking his picture. — Deborah Julian
Buy it on Etsy…
Canal Street, New York City, some history…
Canal Street started as a sluggish stream that — inadequately — drained polluted swamps into the Hudson. It was upgraded to drain The Collect, once a source of clean water, but now polluted.
Early in the 19th Century, the city filled in The Collect and build a 40-foot wide trench to drain the swamps. They kept the city from growing north. But badly engineered, it didn’t flow and became an open sewer instead.
By 1820, it was covered, and still stinking, paved to become Canal Street. Property values fell and never returned.
Today, Canal Street, near the Manhattan Bridge, is a diamond district and home to countless hawkers selling counterfeit luxury goods.
Three Newspapers and a Broken Water Fountain
In 2018, Roosevelt Island had three local newspapers and no working drinking fountains. Seven years later, one paper had disappeared, one founder was leaving the country and the word “your” was about to receive a much clearer ending.
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