City Lane

Armin Landeck

According to Landeck, this is Minetta Lane in New York City's Greenwich Village. Minetta Lane is named for Minetta Brook, whose course it followed from Macdougal Street to the turn at Minetta Street. In 1896, Stephen Crane wrote that both Minetta Lane and Street had until recently been "two of the most enthusiastically murderous thoroughfares in the city."

Landeck’s view of the intersection of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village is not much changed today. Two of the oldest streets in New York, Minetta Street is also one of the shortest in the city and is one of the most storied, even making an appearance in the 1973 Al Pacino true crime police corruption film, “Serpico”. Now, the surrounding neighborhood hosts popular dive bars, restaurants, and the Minetta Street Theater, with the Comedy Cellar just around the corner. In 1945 Landeck captured the intersection in a quiet moment with only two figures standing together in the background.

Landeck leaves the meat of the image to the architecture, as he is wont to do, employing his signature precision and eye for detail to render the textures of brick, stucco, asphalt, and the spindly arms of wrought iron in miniature, as well as the shadows cast in mid-morning or mid-afternoon by the urban canyons of New York City.