The Museum of the City of New York has mounted a handsome exhibition of photographs of the city Hart Crane rhapsodized in his epic poem of the early 1930s, “The Bridge”:

Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights
Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,
Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces –
Mysterious kitchens … You shall search them all.

But this is not the city where “a bedlamite speeds to the parapets” to take a suicidal leap; rather, it is the city of lights and glamour and modernity. In “The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940,” Gotham is pristine, exciting, and almost believable.

Samuel Gottscho (1875-1971) was born in Brooklyn and, while still an amateur, took some of his first pictures of Coney Island at night.The architecture of the Luna Park amusement area was based on fantasy and accentuated with extravagant displays of lights, which the young Gottscho caught in fairytalelike pictures. When he quit his job as a traveling salesman at age 50 to become a full-time professional photographer, the dark of night continued to provide the backdrop for some of his most dramatic images.

The heightened drama can be seen in two pictures of “Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street Seen From Central Park,” one a daytime view taken in 1932, and the other a nighttime view taken in 1933. Both pictures show the Sherry-Netherlands, Savoy-Plaza, and Plaza Hotels,and their reflections in the pond at the southeast corner of the park. (Alas, the Savoy-Plaza was replaced by Edward Durell Stone’s pedestrian General Motors Building in 1968.) The daytime picture is pretty enough, with the details of the three hotels’ ornate roofs clear in the morning light, and a certain interest is created by having the west side of the buildings in shadow. But the same scene at night, with the windows lit and lights reflected in the pond, has an aura of magnificence. After all, skyscrapers may be man’s way of finessing gravity, but electric lights let him alter his circadian routine.

Gottscho took many wonderful pictures of New York at night, of its buildings and bridges and bright thoroughfares. “Queensboro Bridge From Manhattan” (1932) was taken at dusk from a building high enough to show the intricate span arching over the East River and what was still called Welfare Island, with the lights of Queens fading in the distance. “Manhattan From the St. George Hotel, Brooklyn” (1933) looks in the opposite direction across the East River at the towers south of the Municipal Building serenely lined up along the river. “View Looking Northwest From the Empire State Building” (1932) covers an enormous area in which the buildings are seen only as smaller and smaller receding patterns of lights.

The show also includes a whole section devoted to Times Square at night. Gottscho did not portray it as Louis Faurer,Ted Croner, and other New York School photographers came to see it in the 1950s – a place of crass commercial exploitation and penny glamour – but, as in “View Looking North From Forty-Fourth Street” (1932), simply an exciting place to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in “Red Dust.” In “RKO Mayfair and Palace Theatres” (1930), there is no irony in the seven-story-tall sign that offers a chance to see Constance Bennett in “Sin Takes a Holiday” at “popular prices.” Gottscho’s is an art of surfaces: He does not plumb psychological depths, and there is no upsetting ideology.

Gottscho was also a successful architectural photographer in great demand by the leading architects, developers, and decorators of his day. He photographed exteriors, but was equally adept at interiors: commercial spaces, offices, and luxuriously appointed apartments. He recorded the mansions and estates of the wealthy in the Northeast and in Palm Beach. Many of the pictures in the exhibition were taken for clients – “Entrance Vestibule of the Stetson Shoe Store” (1937), “Museum of the City of New York,” (c. 1932), “Dressing Room of William Paley Townhouse, 29 Beekman Place” (1936) – but Gottscho was bewitched by the city, and shot many pictures on his own time. His pictures of the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows demonstrate not only his technical excellence, but also his rapport with the built environment and his admiration for what talented men create.The two pictures of the symbols of the fair, “Trylon” and “Perisphere” (both 1939), one taken in daytime and the other at night, show he shared its planners’ confidence in the future.

“The Mythic City” is mounted in a room with chocolate brown walls. The brown picks up the sepia tone of the vintage prints and mimics the nighttime setting of many of the images.The walls, in effect, recede.There are about half a dozen freestanding panels in the center of the space with mural-size enlargements on either side. All this puts the viewer in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the pictures: It would not be too surprising if Fred Astaire in top hat and tails and brandishing his walking stick danced out from among the panels to complete the impression of urbane elegance.

Under the leadership of Susan Henshaw Jones, the Museum of the City of New York has regained its energy in recent years. “The Mythic City” follows the exhibitions of New York pictures by Magnum photographers, Danny Lyons, Berenice Abbott and Douglas Levere, and others. Each is different, but now that New Yorkers are feeling good about their city again, we are fortunate to have a place where our photographic heritage is preserved and displayed.

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Bonus notice: There are only about a dozen pictures in “Josef Sudek and the Magic of Prague Cathedral,” but if you’re in the vicinity of the Czech Center, do yourself a favor and stop in. Sudek had a love affair with light: He set his camera so that the vast space of the cathedral is hallowed by the sun.

Gottscho until February 20 (1220 Fifth Avenue at 105th Street, 212-534-1672). Sudek until December 30 (1109 Madison Avenue at 83rd Street, 212-288-0830).