January 1938. Agricultural workers on a sugar plantation near Ponce, Puerto Rico. View full size. 2.25 inch nitrate negative by Edwin Rosskam.

January 1938. Train loaded with cane on a sugar plantation near Ponce, Puerto Rico. View full size. 2.25" nitrate negative by Edwin Rosskam.

Another bird's-eye view of Eleventh Avenue, a.k.a "Death Avenue," on New York's West Side as captured by the Bain News Service circa 1911. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. View full size.

Equestrian signalman on the New York Central's Eleventh Avenue freight line circa 1911. In a 1930 article on the West Side tracks' demise, the New York Times wrote of the "eight men and twenty-four horses comprising the famous 'cowboy troop' [or 'West Side Cowboys'] whose function it has been for years to ride ahead of the puffing locomotives as they wheeled along Death Avenue." The dangerous street-level tracks were eventually replaced by a 1½-mile viaduct, the High Line, that after decades of abandonment is being turned into a long, thin elevated park. View full size. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

W.T. Grant department store fire at New York's Sixth Avenue and 18th Street in April 1916. View full size. George Grantham Bain Collection.

Mounted flagman and freight. Another circa 1911 view of the Eleventh Avenue rail line in New York near West 26th Street. View full size. George Grantham Bain Collection. The light spot at the top is from deterioration of the emulsion.

A detailed circa 1910 Manhattan streetscape of rail cars at West 26th Street and Eleventh Avenue, known as "Death Avenue" for the many pedestrians killed along the New York Central's freight line there. View full size. Removal of the street-level tracks commenced on December 31, 1929. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. Update: Click here for the largest version.