The regularity of the Queensboro Bridge’s four peaks, and the indistinctness with which everything else in the drawing is rendered, present great difficulties for anyone wishing to ascertain the point of view in drawing fifteen. A 1910 photograph of the bridge shows a structure with two smokestacks – perhaps a power plant – on the Manhattan bank of the East River at about Fifty-Seventh Street. In the photograph the stacks appear taller than the peak of the Bridge, but in the drawing they appear shorter, suggesting that length of the Bridge is located between the stacks and the spectator. If these smoke stacks are the same as those in the drawing, than drawing fifteen is seen from the Manhattan river bank, perhaps ten blocks north of the bridge – at about Sixty-Ninth street.

The Queensboro Bridge, also called the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, was completed in 1909. It was designed by Gustav Lindenthal and Henry Hornbostel – Lindenthal contributing the structural design and Hornbostel the ornamentation (which, my research suggests, included the elaborate stele grid work – the bridge itself is held up by the concrete arches on which its spans rest). It links midtown Manhattan with Long Island City in Queens. While far less celebrated than the Brooklyn Bridge, the it is known to most readers of American literature because of its prominent role in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Like many of the book’s chapters, "Queensboro Bridge" has a dual focus. The chapter title, and the first part of the prose, emphasize the Bridge itself. The Bridge is also the most clearly rendered feature of the drawing. The later section of the prose focuses on the island over which the Bridge passes. Called Blackwell’s Island here, the name of the island was changed to Welfare Island in 1921, just as New York, the Nation’s Metropolis was being published. The Board of Aldermen made the change for reasons to which Marcus alludes – in order to distance the island from its reputation as a receptacle for the most lawless impulses in the city. Apparently the name Blackwell’s had become so closely associated with the most violent features of the prison system that even the name Welfare – which would seem to refer more directly to these facilities – was seen as an improvement.

Through the 1920s the City worked to build hospitals on Welfare Island and to relocate its prisoners to bigger, more modern facilities. 1935 the prison at Rikers Island was opened and the prison on Welfare Island was closed. In 1971 the name was changed again, this time to Roosevelt Island, and plans were made for an experimental residential community which would be densely populated but which would exclude automobiles from its streets. While the plan was executed only in part, the completed portion is still in use, and the Island retains the name Roosevelt.