After spending close to 10 years in Paris, during which she assisted Man Ray, befriended Atget and established a successful portrait studio, Abbott returned to the United States in 1929 to find herself in a changed and rapidly changing New York. Influenced by the work of Atget, whose archive she had purchased after his death, she began photographing the city, documenting the rapid transition from old to new.

In 1935 she successfully applied for funding from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. In the application she wrote of her intention to capture 'the spirit of the metropolis… its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present… a synthesis which shows the skyscraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it… It is important that they should be photographed today, not tomorrow; for tomorrow may see many of these exciting and important mementos of eighteenth and nineteenth-century New York swept away to make room for new colossi. Already many an amazing and incredible building which was, or could have been, photographed five years ago has disappeared.'

This photograph shows Milligan Place, a secluded courtyard in Greenwich Village, a two-minute walk from the apartment at 51 West 10th Street she shared with her partner, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland.

Gelatin silver print (252 x 201 mm, 10 x 8 in), annotated with the location, negative number, and date, in pencil, and with Berenice Abbott's 'Federal Art Project "Changing New York"' and "50 Commerce St., New York City" hand stamps on the verso.