Nick Yablon: From Skyscraper to the Wildflower
Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway
Nick Yablon
Columbia University Press
May 2026, 344 pp.
In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length. Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of change.
Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses; horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown farmers.
Hines’ photographs lingered in the collection of the New York Historical until they were discovered by Nick Yablon, a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Iowa. Now they appear in Yablon’s new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway, published by Columbia University Press.
Combining Hines’ photographs with his own analysis, along with maps and other images, Yablon depicts Broadway, its peoples, its buildings, and the many neighborhoods that Broadway traverses, at a distinct moment in time. A digital companion to From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, with a selection of Hine’s photographs, an interactive map of Broadway, and more, is at skyscrapertowildflower.com.
Nick Yablon is professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019). He has also produced an interactive map website for the Broadway book: https://skyscrapertowildflower.com/.
Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York City History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu