As a child in Manhattan, author William Helmreich played a game with his father called “Last Stop.” They would pick a subway line at random, ride it to its final stop, and explore a neighborhood they had never seen before. Decades later, this inspired Helmreich to walk every block of all five boroughs, a journey that became his book The New York Nobody Knows.
Helmreich reminds me of George Bellows, an American Ashcan School artist who liked to walk the unfashionable streets of New York “to see things, to feel things, and to dope them out for the public.” Bellows routinely visited the busy river wharfs, dusty construction sites, and crowded East Side neighborhoods of 1900s Manhattan.
There is a constant and foolish demand that pictures all be pretty, as if Shakespeare had always gone around writing love sonnets.
George Bellows, 1910
Bellows subject matter is rarely pretty. But his handling of paint is unfailingly beautiful, especially his command of complementary colors.
Uprooted in New York
For years, Bellows strolled east toward the river to watch workers build the Queensboro Bridge—an engineering marvel that features prominently in popular films such as Manhattan, The Godfather, The Dark Knight Rises, Home Alone 2, and Spider Man.
To make way for the innovative two-level span, the city razed hundreds of brownstones and apartment buildings. The bridge opened in 1909 at a cost of eighteen million dollars and fifty lives.
In The Lone Tenement, Bellows portrays the eerie emptiness beneath the bridge’s approach span. People huddle around a fire to keep warm while a few others play stickball. The artist made all of these figures so small and remote, their personal stories shrink in significance.
Near the fence, two dead trees point the finger of blame squarely at the Queensboro Bridge overhead. Meanwhile, the sun smiles on a new steamship as it zips past an old schooner in dry dock.
In the center of the canvas, the last remaining rowhouse stands alone in poignant isolation. Or does it? The building’s dimensions look odd. Is it real? Or is it an architectural ghost, haunting us with memories of demolished homes and the lives lived within them?
Displaced in Paris
Fifty years earlier, the revolutionary French painter Édouard Manet watched as Napoleon III demolished more than 27,000 buildings in the center of Paris.
All of the rebuilding led to lots of moving. Families who had lived in Paris’s oldest neighborhoods for generations, who had all their friends and acquaintances there, loaded their belongings onto moving carts to be taken away.
Author Stephane Kirkland, “Paris Reborn,” 2013
Led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, this massive urban renewal program erased a much-loved Paris we will never know. But while Haussmann delivered a cleaner, more elegant city, he did so at a truly staggering human cost.
In the painting The Old Musician, Manet depicts the different types of people who were pushed to the outskirts of Paris, where they struggled to survive away from the busy city center.
At the heart of the scene, a bearded street musician plays the violin for an eclectic crowd: two young boys, a pair of street-corner philosophers, and a young girl holding a baby. Not one of them has the money to tip him.
Manet placed these figures in a barren landscape to unite them by their bohemianism rather than a recognizable location. Together, they represent human resilience in the face of rapid urban change. Off in the distance, featureless gray brushstrokes represent the demolition of Paris.
This canvas is a major public statement. Manet is saying, particularly with the old musician looking directly at the visitor, “What about us?”
Mary Morton, Curator of French Paintings, National Gallery of Art
In fact, the man holding a violin is none other than Jean Lagrène, a street musician who played the organ-grinder for tips. Lagrène occasionally worked for Manet as an artist’s model, cashing in on his aquiline nose and sun-baked cheeks.
The purposeful eye
The French have a word for men who stroll around town for hours at a time: flâneur. It derives from the Old Norse verb flana, which means to wander with no particular purpose. While many historians view Manet as the quintessential flâneur, I hesitate to apply the term to either Manet or Bellows because they walked with a sense of resolve.
The Lone Tenement and The Old Musician are serious paintings with a strong point of view. They portray the human cost of massive urban renewal projects, especially for those living on the margins of society.
In Blue Morning, the man perched on the fence is likely George Bellows himself, watching workers build the original Penn Station in midtown Manhattan. More than five hundred homes and businesses were razed to make way for this essential transportation hub.
I’m always amused by people who talk about a lack of subjects for painting. Wherever you go, subjects are waiting for you. The men of the docks, the children at the river’s edge, summer romance, amateur boxers, old people, young people. You can learn more by painting one street scene than you can by working in an atelier for six months.
Some day when I have the time, I may travel and see the world. But I do not expect to find better pictures than those which have been brought to me right here.
George Bellows, 1917, 1920
Sadly, Bellows never got to see the world. His appendix ruptured in 1925, killing him at the age of forty-two and depriving us of a major artist at the height of his career.
Postscript: If you happen to be in Cleveland…
The art exhibition Manet and Morisot traces the evolution of a friendship between two groundbreaking artists: Édouard Manet and his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, the first women Impressionist. You can see it now thru July 5, 2026 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Click the link for details.