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I stumbled across this gallery of vintage New York photographs while cruising teh interwebs and thought others might be interested. They're almost all black and white and date from 1885-2001, with the majority from the period between ~1920-1955 (after a recognizably modern city emerged, but before the Modernists ruined it). All Manhattan pictures, sadly, but plenty of small street scenes, especially from the Lower East Side. Tons of architecture porn.


This one might be my favorite--a Lower East Side street scene with the Manhattan Municipal Building in the background, at the corner of Oak and Chambers. With the exception of the municipal building, every single thing in this picture is gone. There isn't even an Oak Street in Manhattan anymore. It's all been replaced with this:



Thanks, Robert Moses.

In the same vein, some excellent photographs of various New York City sites taken by Samuel Gottscho turned up on the Shorpy photoblog. There was an exhibition of his work in 2005 and a subsequent book: The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel Gottscho, 1925-1940.

This photograph, of 30 Rockefeller Plaza from 1933, is ace. That's all there is to say about it.

http://www.shorpy.com/30-Rock

Also- Red, have you burned through a roll yet with that Nikon or whatever it was you were using?


Edit: fixed link; evidently I can't embed the image directly.

Thanks for the Link Red. To think that so many wonderful buildings were lost to modernism is sad.

Simplicius wrote:Also- Red, have you burned through a roll yet with that Nikon or whatever it was you were using?

Yeah. It came out looking like shit. I'm going to bring it with me into the Pine Barrens on Sunday and try again.

Thanks for the link. Now to see if I can recognize any of the places

You can certainly see the influence of places like Edinbrough and Glasgow in the street architecture, especially in the earlier photos.

Neato. There's a scene in Mad Men, season 3, episode 2, where the guy who developed Madison Square Garden wants the ad agency to convince people to not be so angry about tearing down Penn Station. Show is set in 1963 or so, about 8-9 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis at this point. He declares that "this is the greatest city in the world. If you don't like it, leave."

It would appear that some of what made NYC so great 'left' because of people like him.