What a 1935 Edward Hopper painting says about the “transitory nature of modern life”

You can be forgiven if you don’t recognize the bridge Edward Hopper depicted in this 1935 painting. It’s the Macombs Dam Bridge, linking 155th Street in Harlem to the South Bronx. (Today, this view of the bridge would include Yankee Stadium just across the Harlem River on the Bronx side.)

Opened in 1895, this swing bridge was once traversed by horse-drawn carriages; it was also a popular spot fo catch the cool breezes coming off the Harlem River on sweltering summer days.

Hopper didn’t see the bridge as a connector of humanity though. His vision of the bridge is cool and sterile—absent of people and isolated from the neighborhoods it links.

“For some, modernity resulted in an increasing feeling of alienation, as people began moving through spaces at a faster pace,” states the Brooklyn Museum, which has the painting in its collection. “Edward Hopper captured this transitory nature of modern life in paintings infused with a sense of isolation and estrangement.”

It’s classic Hopper, exposing the contradictions of the modern machine age, with engineering and communications advances designed to bring people together yet actually leaving them more disconnected. “There are no signs of life in the city. Instead, an eerie stillness pervades the scene, resulting in a disquieting mood,” continues the museum caption.

I’m not aware of other works by Hopper that depict Upper Manhattan. But he has captured the city’s bridges before—like this view from the Williamsburg Bridge.

‘Inertia and desolation’ of Sunday in New York in the 1920s

Like so many paintings by Edward Hopper, “Sunday,” completed in 1926, is shrouded in mystery. Who is this lone man sitting on the curb, and what’s the significance of the row of empty storefronts he’s turned his back on?

The scene may be ambiguous, but the sense of isolation and disconnection conjured by the image will feel familiar for New Yorkers in the 1920s and the 2020s as well.

“Sunday depicts a spare street scene,” explains the Phillips Collection, which owns the painting. “In the foreground, a solitary, middle-aged man sits on a sunlit curb, smoking a cigar. Behind him is a row of old wooden buildings, their darkened and shaded windows suggesting stores, perhaps closed for the weekend or permanently.”

Though it’s impossible to know, this scene might be in Greenwich Village, near where Hopper lived and painted for most of his life on the Washington Square North.

“Oblivious to the viewer’s gaze, the man seems remote and passive,” the Phillips Collection continues. “His relationship to the nearby buildings is uncertain. Who is he? Is he waiting for the stores to open? When will that occur? Sunlight plays across the forms, but curiously, it lacks warmth. Devoid of energy and drama, Sunday is ambiguous in its story but potent in its impression of inertia and desolation.”

“Sunday” shouldn’t be confused with “Early Sunday Morning,” a better-known Hopper painting of a row of two-story buildings thought to be on Bleecker Street. That painting has a similar haunting, solitary feel. The same unbroken line of low-rises he depicts still exist today.