Even before its completion in 1887, the Brooklyn Bridge was the favored vantage from which to photograph lower Manhattan, and by 1921 the City as seen from the Bridge was not merely a view of New York, but a "View of New York." Chapter four features the book’s only use of the capitalized "View," but I believe it to be among the most central concepts in the entire text, one which is necessary to any understanding of many of the book’s later chapters.

Represented in countless postcards and picture books, the View became the canonical and definitive lower Manhattan. It could be recognized by many who had never actually been to New York City. Marcus’ concern that so many more had seen the "View" than had seen the "real" sight is evidenced in his insistence that pictorial representation alone cannot communicate the sublimity of the city represented.

The cautionary tone of this chapter is not, however, addressed exclusively to armchair travelers. There is a sense in which the "View" from Brooklyn Bridge threatened to usurp the authority of "really" being there, even for those who really had been there. The

postcard "View" had become so deeply rooted in collective understandings of New York that to go to the Bridge and see a reenactment of a postcard. Marcus is made quite nervous by this, and even as he insists that a picture can never substitute for real knowledge – the kind possessed by "a man who knows" – he is troubled by his sense that

mass culture and mass reproduction are working to reverse this priority.

In this sense chapter IV dramatizes some of the twentieth century’s most pressing anxieties about the technology and politics of representation in the machine age, but it also attempts to ease them. Marcus’ rendering of the famous vista takes great pains to divorce it from its most recognizable and familiar elements – probably in order to disarticulate the drawing from the instant recognizability of the postcard. The drawing positions the spectator on the Bridge’s pedestrian walkway, far enough from central Manhattan to see the skyscrapers through a slight fog, but not so far out that the Bridge’s distinctive stone arches are part of the scene. Two of New York’s most celebrated engineering feats – the Woolworth Building and Brooklyn Bridge – are both in the drawing, but both are stripped of their most distinctive features and rendered almost completely anonymous. The lone train car and smudge-like pedestrians might as easily be in Chicago, Boston, or San Francisco. It is not even clear that what the drawing shows see is a bridge at all – it could be an elevated highway or a river-side walkway.