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Harry Sternberg was born in 1904, the same year New York City’s Mayor George B. McClellan played temporary train operator for the maiden voyage of the city’s first underground subway line. It was a nickel to ride and a whopping three miles per hour faster than the elevated railway that towered over the streets above. To the monied elite and the anxious store owners trying to attract them, the rise of the subway and the fall of the elevated rail that coincided with it was a cause for glee: no more deafening rattle, no more blocked sunlight, no more soot sullying their fine garments. But to Harry Sternberg, a child of Jewish immigrants who was raised in Lower Manhattan and, later on, Brooklyn, these were the very reasons to adore the place he called home. “It was juicy and alive, noisy, dirty, but so alive,” he mused. “Everybody was fighting and arguing and pushing and yelling and talking at once. Nothing polite about it. But, oh boy, it was alive.” Sternberg’s career was on the up and up in 1930, the year he created “Elevated Platform.” He’d befriended private art collector Walker D. Hudson a few years prior, an early vote of confidence in the young artist, and in 1928, Keppel & Co. gallery gave him a show of his prints. This, in turn, caught the attention of one Carl Zigrosser, the manager of Weyhe Gallery on Lexington Avenue through the 1920s and ’30s and one of few dealers who actively promoted the art of printmaking. When Sternberg held his first solo exhibition at the Weyhe in 1932 (which included “Elevated Platform” among the works shown), he was joining the likes of Reginald Marsh (Weyhe solo show 1930) and Diego Rivera (Weyhe solo show 1928). The brash, impassioned elements Sternberg responded to within the immigrant communities of the Lower East Side also seemed to be what drew him to printmaking. He described the process of etching like a battle, where he fought the metal plate “tooth and nail.” Critics cautioned collectors of Whistler away from his work, as its “strength and truculence” might be offensive to those used to a more delicate canon. But for an artist whose interests were in the grease and grime of locomotives, mines, and the many worlds south of 14th Street, it should only follow that a kind of hard-won grit marked his output, every line a testament to a resilience the dainty wrists of Whistler’s women would have been unfamiliar with. “Elevated Platform” is an image from the outset of the Great Depression. It carries a sense of an order disrupted—the even regularity of the tracks and steel beams in the lower half of the composition give way to a shadow-cast and silhouetted group above waiting for their train. It does not feel like a sinister darkness, just ambiguous. People mill and lean, gaze and talk; their demeanors and dispositions remain largely hidden from our view from across the platform, with the exception of two women seated centrally in the frame, the warmth of their exchange felt keenly even from afar. Sternberg’s inclusion and placement of advertisements provides a hint at the times here, too. Sales of Cuban coffee and Lucky Strike cigarettes rocketed in the 1930s, the former a still relatively affordable luxury, even among the poor, the latter an effective de-stresser and appetite-curber (ads featuring waif-like women floating above the words “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” were ubiquitous in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s). Both the coffee and cigarette ads are cut off, like a pleasure curtailed or only half-fulfilled. And as for the poster of the glamorous young woman directly behind the two ladies deep in conversation—perhaps it’s for a film, that great form of escape into fantasy still accessible to the masses. But even this is a faded image of a fleeting joy. At the far right of the composition, a woman stands at the platform’s edge, eagerly peering down the tracks to see when the train will come, seeking a path out of this skyless place. By contrast, the others appear more resigned to the moment. It could be a while, if it comes at all. It’s a schedule and a fate that’s out of their hands. Might as well enjoy whatever makes the long wait a little easier. If you would like to inquire about this work, head here.
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