During the 1920s, an extraordinary new shoreline district – like nothing New York has seen before or since – rose along the East River south of the Queensboro Bridge: a mix of renovated row houses and new apartment houses that brought some of New York’s wealthiest and most sophisticated citizens in startling proximity to the gritty industrial uses that had traditionally lined the river – breweries, warehouses, coal plants – along with the ranks of old-law tenements that adjoined them. In 1935, this remarkable conjunction of rich and poor inspired Sidney Kingsley to write Dead End, a modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet drama set on East 53rd Street, where the rear entrance of the glamorous River House adjoined a gravel plant and a short commercial pier, used by local tenement kids as their swimming hole. For the 1937 film version of the play, reference photographers documented the spectacular, almost Venice-like residential community that had emerged in the previous decade, as well as its strikingly intimate relationship with the rough-and-tumble working waterfront surrounding it.