Hollow City

At first, Edward Hopper’s New York, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, a few blocks from where that restaurant once stood, seems like a straightforward case of grass-is-always-greener thinking. There’s more than a little in curator Kim Conaty’s companion essay: writing about Early Sunday Morning, Hopper’s 1930 painting of a cheerily (or is it eerily?) bright stretch of Seventh Avenue, she draws the following comparison between then and now: “The neighborhood barber shop, marked by its red, white, and blue pole and patronized by casual walk-ins, has all but been replaced by the destination salon. . . . Customers patronizing whichever generic chain pharmacy on any given corner may hardly even bother to look up from the screens in their hands.”