New York: Eastside I: Allen Street

Max Pollak

Max Pollak was commissioned by author Theodore Dreiser to do a series of eight color etchings of New York which were then reproduced in his book "My City", published in 1929 by Horace Liveright. This image was as plate seven in the book and was also published by Rudolf Lesch Fine Arts, New York. Pollak printed a number of the works while in his Austria, where he was brought up.

Though the edition for the New York images was anticipated as 150 Pollak did not finish the whole edition, the stock market crashed the next year, 1929, when Dreiser's book was published, and the economic practicality of printing a full edition disappeared.

Allen Street in Lower Manhattan in New York City runs through Chinatown and the Lower East Side. During the early part of the 20th century, Allen Street was a center for brass and copper fabrication shops, often located in the basements of the buildings.

In Pollak's "New York: Eastside I" a man enters a basement shop; banners for a dressmaker and other small businesses hang under the fire escapes, a barber's pole leans toward the street, laundry flutters from the clotheslines strung from the windows as a pedestrian ambles by.