To See a City: Percy Loomis Sperr and the Total Photographic Documentation of New York City, 1924-45

By Susan Smith-Peter

Using crutches because of an early bout with meningitis, Percy Loomis Sperr managed to photograph nearly all of New York City from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sperr sought to document and preserve the city as fully as possible. He was interested in telling the story of New York through the lives and environments of everyday people. This work brought him into contact with important photographers such as Berenice Abbott and, to a lesser extent, Walker Evans. And his work has deeply shaped our vision of this New York City during the Jazz Age and Depression era. Among other things, it helped set design for such movies as The Godfather and The Great Gatsby (1974) and serves as the foundation for such popular apps as OldNYC and Urban Archive. Yet the artist himself remains little known. This blog sets out to establish the basic facts of his life, and suggests lines of possible research, using his previously unanalyzed writings and undigitized albums as well as his better-known works.

Born on December 27, 1899, Sperr attended Oberlin College, where he served as the associate editor of the Annual and the managing editor of the Review.[1] In 1916, a list of graduates places him in Columbus, Ohio, care of the Stoneman Press.[2] As he told the Newark Sunday News in 1963, the year before his death, “the first of my sins was to teach in a small private school in California. I taught the ABCs, trigonometry and everything in between. The school closed while I was on vacation, so I wandered around in printing, freelance writing and photography.”[3] His draft card for World War One shows that he was already living in New York in 1917, at 2887 Bailey Avenue in the Bronx. It also noted that his right leg was permanently paralyzed and that he was a printer at the Lumitone Art Company.[4] His World War Two draft card was even blunter, simply stating, “lame.”[5]  He moved to Staten Island in 1924, during which time he was “principally a freelance writer, doing articles largely for the Sunday magazine sections of newspapers. Many of these articles concern[ed] aspects of the New York Public Library.”[6]

Fig. 1. Photographs of the Annual Feast of Saint Anthony of Padua, East 106th St., New York City, 1924, by Percy Loomis Sperr (undigitized), the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library.

His articles from the 1920s show a young man fascinated by the immigrants of New York City and engaged with preservation. His first article for the Tribune, “A Dinner for One,” is a somewhat awkwardly written account of a “True Bohemian” who explores with pleasure the cuisines of the many cultures found on the Lower East Side.[7] He would continue to be drawn to immigrant culture, describing with sympathy the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua in Manhattan, including a ex-voto thanking the saint for saving a Italian-American man from death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.[8]  The New York Public Library holds a related photographic album, which gives more photos than were included in the article, including this study of a shop window and proprietor (Fig. 1).[9] 

Another article around this time focused on the Ellis Island Hospital Library and its multilingual pushcart library. He again provided a compassionate account of the patients at the hospital, most of whom would be returned to their place of origin after their stay. Their sufferings were eased by reading books and newspapers in their native language. He noted that the Chinese patients had the fewest choices and had to read the same Chinese-language newspapers again and again.[10]

During this time, he worked in the Map Division of the NYPL, as did Walker Evans.[11] In an article from 1924, he relayed how the Map Division answered many practical questions, such as the possible location of gold in Alaska, the proper location of factories, issues of right of way and other legally-significant topics.[12]

This was part of his long association with the Library, which serves as the basis for his limited renown today. A search for his name in NYPL’s digital collections will return 18,000 hits, and several albums there remain undigitized. In addition, the Staten Island Museum, Historic Richmond Town and the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, hold significant collections of his work.

He worked mostly for the American History and Genealogy Division, now the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library. Archival material at the Milstein Division notes that they bought 215 of his photos for $126 on September 15, 1942, for around fifty-nine cents a photo.[13] This helps to explain why his photographs of NYC streets are usually not especially artistic. He had to take a great many photos to make enough money to cover his expenses.

Fig. 2. Jewish storefronts in the Lower East Side (undigitized), Photography Collection, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library.

He worked for the New York Public Library’s Streetscape and Townscape of Metropolitan New York City, 1860-1942 project, which resulted in the massive documentation of all five boroughs street by street that now underpins OldNYC and Urban Archive, apps that have geolocated his and others’ photos. He also worked for other projects, such as Romana Javits’ Picture Collection, as we see by a 1934 photograph of Yiddish-language storefronts on the Lower East Side that was filed under “New York City, Immigrant Life” (Fig. 2). [14]These projects, which sought to document New York City in an encyclopedic manner, were congenial to Sperr’s own vision of his photography.

In a 1934 Staten Island Advance article that serves as his main artistic statement, Sperr wrote that: “The story which interests me is one which lends itself to unlimited photography – the tale of the City of New York. Here is a theme which is big enough and rich enough to challenge your industry, artistic ability and photographic skill… A village of 200 shacks, housing 500 people, grows on a Brooklyn dump; and the towers of Manhattan brighten its horizon.”[15] These sociological contrasts of rich and poor suggest that he was aware of the great issues of his time and sided with the everyday person.

His special love was for the harbor. “Out of all this endless material for story-photographs,” he wrote in the same article, “the harbor produces that which interests me the most,”[16] noting that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Albert Einstein collected ship pictures, too. His business card noted “A growing collection of over 30,000 views of: 1. New York Harbor: Ships, old and modern; Skylines, Dock Scenes, Harbor Craft, Sunsets, Bridges, Naval Vessels.”  Only then did it turn to “2. New York City, all five boroughs: Street Scenes, Skyscrapers, Old Houses, Foreign Quarters, Pushcarts, Farms, Old New York Scenes.”[17]  One observer noted that, “he would climb up sometimes on a ship’s mast or out on her bowsprit, unmindful of the danger involved, in order to obtain a different or an exciting view. His keen eye would quickly discern an out-of-the-ordinary harbor scene during his daily walks around the waterfront.”[18]  The Mariners’ Museum holds a dynamic and artistically-interesting group of his photos of the harbor, but they have attracted relatively little attention compared to his street views.[19] 

Fig. 3. Hamilton Avenue at 2nd Avenue, to Northwest, Brooklyn, in Collection of Photographs of New York City, 1931-1942, Milstein Division, The New York Public Library. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-a0e7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The New York Public Library also hired Sperr to take photographs of buildings that were about to be torn down.[20]  This resulted in his series, “Collection of Photographs of New York City, 1931-1942,” which shows condemned buildings in several boroughs, as well as photographs of the erection of major projects, such as Gowanus Parkway, shown here at Hamilton Avenue in Brooklyn (Fig. 3).[21] As a recent blog put it, these are “photos of power,” which the authors connect to the massive reshaping of New York City by Robert Moses, the “power broker” who created the modern NYC infrastructure but destroyed neighborhoods and most of his relationships along the way.[22] (Both the Gowanus and the Triborough Bridge were built by Moses; the blog includes Sperr’s photographs of the latter’s construction, found in another massive NYPL project, “Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s.”[23])

This may seem to contradict Sperr’s interest in historic preservation, but as Randall Mason, a scholar of the subject, notes in his study of NYC from 1890 to 1920, preservation was then about creating a new “memory landscape” through the introduction of markers and monuments, and sometimes required demolition of old buildings and even slum clearance to present the kind of infrastructure preservationists wanted.[24] Sperr’s own photographs have enabled the creation of a digital variant in the apps OldNYC and Urban Archive, which undergirds the present urban fabric with a rich substrate of historical information, especially the Sperr collection.

It is possible that his photographs are of power but not by power. As described in The Power Broker, Moses rudely ousted from influence the elite members of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), who were closely connected to the creation of the New York Public Library, as well as most of the major cultural institutions of the city and parks throughout the state in that era.[25]  The ASHPS had been the major force for preserving historic houses and ensembles such as City Hall Park during the Gilded Age.[26] It is intriguing to speculate whether Sperr’s photos are documenting the destruction of buildings and neighborhoods not to celebrate but to remember. Further research in the ASPHS papers, held at the Library, might shed light on this question; although it is possible the Library conducted its own project unconnected to the Society.[27]  Once Moses had finished “scourging the patriots out of their parks,” as Caro put it, the members of the ASHPS may have used their other institutional bases to document Moses’s activity.[28]

Berenice Abbott, the celebrated creator of Changing New York, also undertook a project with the Museum of the City of New York in the early 1930s to take photographs of landmarks before they were destroyed.[29] Her idea was endorsed by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, author of The Iconography of Manhattan Island and associate of ASHPS. However, the money was not forthcoming, and she had difficulty in finding suitable locations.[30] It is highly likely that she was aware of the NYPL project and used Sperr’s photographs to scout out locations suitable for her own work. Unlike Sperr, Abbott was able to write herself into the history of photography, partly by promoting the work of French photographer Eugene Atget, whose documentation of a changing Paris influenced her. Antonello Frongia, the Italian scholar of photography, has shown significant parallels between earlier Sperr photographs and Abbott’s later shots of the same sites, including Vista from West St. Looking Southeast with 115-189 West St. in Foreground.[31] Many other parallels can be found when comparing the two projects. Frongia argues that “in Sperr, Berenice Abbott could perhaps see a sort of lesser Atget, a silent photographer completely absorbed in the project of her adopted city and of what was disappearing in it.”[32] 

Why, then, has Sperr been so unknown to art historians? First, Sperr never oriented himself to the art world. His focus was on ordinary consumers rather than collectors and most of his exhibits were at libraries and New York institutions such as the Municipal Reference Library, where he presented an exhibit of his photographs of the municipal fleet, rather than at art galleries.[33] An article in the Defender Trade Bulletin explained his vision: to sell to customers in a bookshop, where he took a desk in order to exhibit in the window; to develop nautical magazines and other institutions as regular clients; and even his success in selling a great many reproductions of Old New York photos to the Fanny Farmer company, which used them in a redecoration of their stores.[34]

Fig. 4. “Left by the Tide,” Percy Loomis Sperr, in Collection of Photographs of Staten Island, 1924 (undigitized). Milstein Division, The New York Public Library. Photo by Percy Loomis Sperr ©The New York Public Library

Second, Sperr’s focus on Staten Island was not likely to win him attention in the art world. While he took photos of all five boroughs, he lived on Staten Island from 1924 to his death in 1964. As he wrote, “Staten Island has been something of a Cinderella among the more powerful boroughs of New York City, but she has that lady’s beauty and charm for the princes who become acquainted.”[35] From 1942, he had a second-hand bookstore and print shop, where he was beloved by young Staten Islanders who still remember him as a kind and perhaps overly generous man who wanted books to find their own homes even if the person was unable to pay for them. In his photo book, Island Scenes: Pictures of Staten Island, Its Beauty Spots, Historic Houses, Parks, Bridges, Public Buildings and Other Points of Interest Selected from a Portfolio of over 5000 Views, he emphasized the old and the new side by side on the island, starting with bridges, then moving to public buildings, “the ancient houses,” and beaches, parks and playgrounds. While lacking the artistic ability to contrast old and new in the same photo that Abbott had mastered, Sperr was moved by the same idea. When Sperr’s collection of 3100 negatives, 14 glass-plate negatives and 2089 photographic prints he donated to Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island becomes publicly accessible, we may gain a new appreciation for his work, but it is unlikely to secure for him a place in the history of photography, as the subject matter is mainly Staten Island.[36]

Fig. 5. Percy Loomis Sperr, USS Akron flying over ferryboat President Roosevelt. The Mariners’ Museum and Park, Newport News, Virginia, Museum Collection 153164. https://catalogs.marinersmuseum.org/object/ARI42564

Third, the early work of Sperr is within the pictorialist style, which remains less appreciated (Fig. 4). Some of his work from the 1930s, possibly influenced by Abbott and Evans, takes on the more sharp and clear-edged aspects of documentary photography (Fig. 5). However, the majority of his photos are those taken of NYC streets for the NYPL, for which quantity, not quality, was the order of the day.

Still, Sperr has made it possible for later New Yorkers to create the memory infrastructures of OldNYC and Urban Archive, which aim at the total documentation of all five boroughs in the past. And he did it on crutches using a small 4 x 6 camera. If we know what NYC looked like in the past in any granular detail, it is largely due to this lesser Atget.

The author would like to thank the following students: Sanie Bardic, Krista Borst, Albion Capa, Gabrielle Courtien, Victor Cruz, Eli Gottesman, Courtney Iacone, Jenny Kelly, Kathy Long, and Adunola Sonaike. In addition, she would like to thank CSI MA graduate Peter Scasny for his translation from the Italian.

Susan Smith-Peter is Professor of History and Director of the History MA and Public History programs at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. Her scholarly work focuses on Russian regions and Russian-American relations. As part of her work as public history director, she carried out a collaborative research project with her students that resulted in this blog.

[1] World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, Washington, D.C., National Archives and Records Administration. Available online at ancestry.com; The Hi-o-hi [Oberlin College Yearbook] (Oberlin, Ohio: no publisher, 1913), 75. Although his gravestone gives his date of birth as 1890, this should not be seen as correct, as his relatives in Ohio where he was buried were likely not aware of his exact date of birth. 

[2] Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1916), 431.

[3] Obituary, Staten Island Advance, June 27, 1964; “Philosopher in a Book Shop; Staten Island Man has Watched Time’s Effect on City,” Newark Sunday News, January 13, 1963, 20.

[4] World War I Selective Service System.

[5] World War II Draft Card, Papers on Percy Loomis Sperr, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library.

[6] “Philosopher in a Book Shop.”

[7] P.L. Sperr, “A Dinner for One,” The New York Tribune, July 15, 1923, 8.

[8] P.L. Sperr, “An Old-World Festa Among the Skyscrapers,” Travel, March 1925, 12-13.

[9] Photographs of the Annual Feast of Saint Anthony of Padua, East 106th St., New York City, 1924, by Percy Loomis Sperr.  Album held at the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library.

[10] P.L. Sperr, “A Tower of Babel that Travels on Wheels,” The New York Tribune, October 14, 1923, 3.

[11] Antonello Frongia, “Fotografia documentaria e modernismo ‘transatlantico’: influenze europee e americane in Changing New York di Berenice Abbott,” Rivista di Studi di Fotografia 2 (2015): 62.

[12] P.L. Sperr, “The Part that Old Maps Play in Modern Business,” The New York Tribune, February 3, 1924, 12.

[13] Note from September 15, 1942, Sperr papers, Milstein Division.

[14] For the Picture Collection, see: Anthony T. Troncale, “Worth Beyond Words: Romana Javitz and The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection,” Biblion, https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/wallach-division/picture-collection/romana-javitz.

[15] Percy Loomis Sperr, “Photographs Record a City’s Growth; Amateurs Can Turn Hobby to Profit,” Staten Island Advance, February 21, 1934, 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Business card, Sperr papers, Milstein Division.

[18] Quarterly Calendar of Events at the Staten Island Museum, Fall 1952.  Quoted in “The Tale of the City of New York: Percy Loomis Sperr,” by A.J. Peluso, Jr., Sperr papers, Milstein Division.

[19] But see Philip Lopate, Seaport: New York’s Vanished Waterfront: Photographs from the Edwin Levick Collection, in association with the Mariners’ Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004).

[20] Sam P. Williams et al., comp., Guide to the Research Collections of the New York Public Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 1975), 132.

[21] Unlike the earlier photographs mentioned, this album has been digitized: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/collection-of-photographs-of-new-york-city-1931-1942#/?tab=about

[22] Devin Kelly and Andrew Beers, “New York, Then and Now,” The Outline, October, 24, 2019, https://theoutline.com/post/8141/new-york-percy-loomis-sperr-photos.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Randall Mason, The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[25] Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 317-318, 656.

[26] Mason, Once and Future.

[27]https://archives.nypl.org/mss/91.

[28] Caro, Power Broker, 317.

[29] Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (New York: New Press, 1997), 16.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Frongia, “Fotografia documentaria,” 63.

[32] Ibid., 64.

[33] “Photographer Opens Exhibit; Percy Loomis Sperr Displays Views of Municipal Boats,” Staten Island Advance, September 19, 1934, 9.

[34] Etna M. Kelley, “Selling the ‘Sizzle’ – Instead of the Photograph,” Defender Trade Bulletin 25, no. 3 (May-June 1941): 18-20.

[35] Percy Loomis Sperr, Island Scenes: Pictures of Staten Island, Its Beauty Spots, Historic Houses, Parks, Bridges, Public Buildings and Other Points of Interest Selected from a Portfolio of over 5000 Views (no place, self-published, 1937), unpaginated.

[36] Virginia N. Sherry, “Curators, Conservator Pore over Treasure Trove of Neighborhood Photos; Eventually, they Hope the Collection will be Digitalized,” Staten Island Advance, April 28, 2011. https://www.silive.com/eastshore/2011/04/curators_conservator_pore_over.html