With this picture of a small poultry store displaying a sign in Hebrew and the Star of David, Abbott documented the presence of Jewish immigrant communities in Hester Street and other areas of the Lower East Side. Although these neighborhoods have changed since then, New York continues to draw large numbers of immigrants from different parts of the world, whose communities embody New York’s money, density, diversity, and creativity.

New York City draws Americans from all over the country. Some move to start a new life, others commute to work from nearby residential areas, and others visit for tourism. With this 1936 photo of the Greyhound Bus Terminal, Abbott documented the newly established bus travel industry, which provided a cheaper and more flexible alternative to railroad travel. Although the building was later replaced by a skyscraper, New York continues to be a destination for many Americans. Some of them still seek alternatives to trains and airplanes and arrive at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Street food and street carts are an integral part of the city's unique ways of life. Mobile, and usually less expensive than most sit-down fare, they enable their owners to take advantage of the crowds that occupy certain parts of the city at certain times of the day. Though Abbott photographed this food cart in 1936, it is still common to see hot dog stands, halal carts, and in some places food trucks, stationed along the sidewalks of Manhattan and other boroughs today. These symbols of the New York experience attract both locals and tourists.

Like street carts, newspaper stands still remain a part of the New York sidewalk landscape. Even though their presence was certainly stronger when Abbott captured this scene, they remain an iconic structure of city life.

In addition to newspaper stands, Abbott documented the zenith of print journalism by photographing “Newspaper Row,” a group of imposing buildings in Park Row that housed some of the leading publications of the time such as the New York World, the New-York Tribune, and The New York Times. Although several of these buildings and newspapers no longer exist, New York continues to be an important location for the production of news and other digital media. Even though Abbott documented a different era for journalism and media, she also highlighted New York's continuous role as an influential city in media culture.

One of the defining traits at the core of New York is money. Then, as now, New York has served as a key location for business and commerce on a global scale, which Abbott documented by photographing the commercial signs of Columbus Circle, including Coca-Cola's, noting their predominance over the statue of Columbus.

This permanent presence of business and commerce has allowed for the development of wealthy neighborhoods like Gramercy Park. The neighborhood of brownstones and affluent apartments that surround a gated, private park. Known for its unchanging nature, this area was designated a Historic District in 1966. In this 1935 image, Abbott photographed two of the original townhouses from the mid-nineteenth century.

The city’s wealth has also stimulated creativity through one of its renowned cultural institutions: Broadway. Abbott photographed the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1938, months before it was demolished. The theater presented operas, plays, musicals, vaudeville acts, and films. Despite its demolition and the evolution of Broadway productions over the last decades, Abbott’s photo highlights New York’s consistent role as “the cultural capital of the world.”

Social inequality made tenement buildings as much of a reality as the houses of Gramercy Park. Although these tenements are no longer there, Berenice Abbott's photo speaks to the ongoing struggles with housing inequality in New York City. Abbott noted that these buildings in this photograph are “Old Law Tenements” – buildings constructed after the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1879, but before 1901 when the “New Law” legislation passed. Densely packed together, the diverse groups of immigrants and working-class people that lived in these buildings often dealt with crowded, unsanitary conditions. Residents tossed garbage, dirty water, and waste into the air shafts between these buildings.

New York fosters a vibrant creative life, fueled by the density and diversity of the city, and alternative artistic movements continue to shape New York's cultural life as much as Broadway does. The Provincetown Playhouse, founded in Massachusetts in 1915, moved to the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village and staged their first performance on MacDougal Street in 1918. The Playhouse closed shortly after the stock market crash but reopened in 1936 under the aegis of the WPA Federal Theater Project. Abbott photographed it around this time in 1936. Though much changed, the theater is still there today and is part of New York University's theater program.