No. 7 Musical Hall, 444 Broadway

Federal prisoners taken at Bull Run pose before a casemate of Castle Pinckney, and over the doorway behind them their keepers or they themselves have lettered a joke: No. 7 — Musical Hall — 444 Broadway. The sign is legible on the plate, New York's theater district relocated to a brick fort in Charleston harbor.

This is 1861 photography from the Confederate side of the war — the same short season in which James Osborn of King Street carried his camera into Fort Sumter, documented in this site's photographers section. Whoever made this plate, the men in it had been prisoners for only weeks, and the humor on the lintel is the humor of a war both sides still expected to be brief.