Since 2012, photographer Margaret Morton has roamed the vacated, monumental spaces of the Farley, capturing a fleeting window between its two lifetimes. The building, designed by McKim, Mead and White, completed in 1914, and expanded in 1934, has been under demolition since 2010, soon to re-emerge as the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station. Morton’s photographs of the interior — from vast mail sorting rooms to scores of dilapidated offices — reveal a hidden world on the brink of transformation.

Margaret Morton has photographed a range of spaces from alternative built environments created in public parks, and abandoned buildings by Manhattan’s homeless individuals, to the abandoned coal mines of eastern Ukraine and the otherworldly cemeteries found throughout the mountain regions of Central Asia. Her books include The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City; Fragile Dwelling; Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives [co-authored with Diana Balmori]; Glass House and Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan. Her next book will be on the Farley. She is a professor in the School of Art at The Cooper Union and lives in New York City.

Join us for a reception with the photographer on April 17, 2017. Learn more. 

Read “Excavating the Farley” an interview with the photographer recently published in Urban Omnibus.