Old Pics New York City!

[LeCom]

New York kicked ass. Now it's... meh. Less organized and too many wannabe towns have better skyscrapers.

By the way, I just noticed that the construction photos of the ESB look a lot like those of Taipei 101.

I respect your opinion, but New York City now is just..."meh?"

If you have yet to walk through Midtown and Downtown Manhattan, please do that ASAP.

If you already have...then, whatever.

[Wu-Gambino]

Great thread, what a history.

[Booze]

Superb thread.

Flatiron Building is a symbol, central park looks like heaven and dowtown Manhattan truly great.



As I see it, NYC should have never allowed some buildings to dissapear. Re-Building does not always mean evolving, even in the case of the most unique city in the world.

[New Jack City]

not bad,but i prefer nowaday NY than it B4.

[giergel]

Waauw!!! NYC has/had so many art deco buildings back then! I really can't wait to go to NYC, I wish I lived over there!!!

[BigMac]

[RafflesCity]

The ESB must have been so shocking to the world back then!

[BigMac]

Earlier years of the Statue of Liberty:

[BigMac]

This thread by ablarc on WNY has many older pictures also.

[New Jack City]

Great shots BigMac, thanks for posting those! I've never seen the podium shots of the Statue of Liberty being construction, interesting.

My favorite is the last picture with the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan, it's a classic no doubt. It's a perfect showing of the old "romantic" Lower Manhattan skyline feeling people refer to.

[jimm]

Amazing City

[BigMac]

[SJM]

Wow very nice thread! So much history packed in here!

[The Messiah]

Great pics guys.Here is another one of the Singer Building

Too bad it has been demolished

[sasha ITALIA]

[GVNY]

Please thank Ablarc for these wonderful photos. I hope he doesn't mind these photos included in the thread, based on the same subject.







With pleasure, ENJOY!









Woolworth


West St., 1885


Herald Sq., 1888. 6th Ave. El.


West St., 1890


Terminal, 1892. Alfred Stieglitz.


Winter, 1893. Stieglitz.


Broadway, 1894


Herald Sq., 1895


Lower Broadway, 1899. Lots of hats.


Police Parade, 1899. Bowler hats, hardly any women.


Tiffany’s, Union Sq., 1899. Early car and some figures added by artist.


Getting a ticket, 1900


Easter, Fifth Avenue, 1900.One car visible, coming towards foreground.


Hester St., Lower East Side, 1901.


Flatiron, 1903. Burnham.


Broad St., 1904. Stock Exchange and Federal Hall.


Municipal Building under construction, 1904. McKim. No cars.


The Belmont Coach, 1905, four horses. Dogs run free.


Easter, Fifth Ave., 1906. No cars.


City Hall subway, 1907. Turkish headhouses.


Lower East Side, 1908.


Herald Square, 1909. Skyscraper beyond is NY Times Building in Times Sq. Cars have replaced horses.


Automatic Vaudeville, Union Sq., 1910.


Downtown skyline with Singer Building., 1910. World’s tallest.


Downtown skyline with Woolworth Building., 1913. World’s tallest.


Birdseye, 1913, with artist’s enhancement. Hand colored.


Federal Crowd Control, 1918. Machine guns in front, modified phalanx. Soldiers on sides assigned to upstairs windows. Wilson feared antiwar riots, losing mind to small strokes.


Times Square from New York Times Building., 1922.


HMS Leviathan and Singer Building., 1923.


Fifth Ave., 1924. Buses and taxis on parade.


Coney Island, 1928. Walker Evans.


Lower Broadway Tickertape, 1928. For Bremen crew, first east-west transatlantic flight.


1928. Three biggest spires not yet built. Fairchild Aerial Surveys.


1935 Philadelphia, just for fun. Skyscraper density nearly matched New York’s. Fairchild.


Chrysler Gargoyle, 1929.


42nd Street, 1929. Walker Evans.


Building the Empire State, 1930. Lewis Hine.


Icarus, 1930. Hine.


Liberty, 1930. With symbols.


1931. Fairchild.


Midtown, 1931. The tracks lead to Penn Station. Post Office spans tracks, may some day be Penn Station. Fairchild.


Sikorsky Clipper, 1931. New spires gleam. River traffic, piers, ocean liner in slip.


Midtown’s lineup of spires with sky in between, 1931.


Six engines! 1931.


The valley between, 1931.


Brooklyn foreground, 1931. Small scale dense area between bridges on Manhattan side now a Ville Radieuse. Fairchild.


Spires of Gotham, 1932


Tropical Drinks Five Cents, 1932


Subway execs inspect new subway car, 1933. Breakthrough blowers ventilate with windows closed! Cane seats.


Columbus Circle, 1933. No Time-Warner, no Trump International, no Venetian palazzetto.


Just $24 in1626? More than that in 1933.


Three-point perspective, 1934.

Berenice Abbott photos, 1935


Chambers at Oak. Horse-drawn wagon.


Bowery.


Henry St. Beyond, Towers of Zenith loom in the mist.


Mad King Ludwig in Greenwich Village: Jeferson Market, then Jefferson Courthouse, now Jefferson Library, 6th Avenue.


Murray Hill Hotel with fancy fire escape.


Cities Service Tower. Horse-drawn wagons lingered into the mid-sixties.


Prickly skyline with famous bridge, 1935.


Times Square, 1935. Betty Boop on the marquee. The Astor came down mid-sixties, along with Penn Station and Singer Building: a bad time for beaux-arts. Streetcars in the square, no overhead wires.


Times Square looking South to Times Building. Mid-sixties this was stripped to steel skeleton and re-clothed in kitsch marble by mod illustrator Peter Max. More bad times for beaux-arts.

Berenice Abbott photos, 1936


The El featured potbellied stoves.


Fifth Avenue bus in Washington Square.


Dapper in front of Dock Department.


Billie’s Bar, First Ave. at 56th.


Bowery and Doyer. 3rd Ave. El.


Christopher and Bleecker. A wood-clad survivor.


Church of God, E. 132nd St.


Ferry, Chambers St.


Greyhound and Penn Station.


Herald Sq. Chain-drive trucks also survived into the sixties.


Manhattan Bridge.


Milk Truck, Greenwich Village.


Newspaper (Park) Row. Center building once tallest. Berenice Abbott.


Park Ave. and 39th.


At Hudson River terminus of Cortlandt St., motorized and horse-drawn vans transferred goods to and from barge-borne railcars.


Pike and Henry, Lower East Side, with Manhattan Bridge and a horse.


S. Klein On-The-Square, Union Sq. Contraposto.


Union Square with Turkish subway kiosk. Is that man using a cellphone??


Magnificent Manhattan spires from Willow and Poplar, Brooklyn. Cathedrals of Commerce.

Berenice Abbott photos, 1937


Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn.


Avenue D and 10th St. Chain-drive truck.


Hester Street.


Riverside Drive Viaduct. .


Oyster House, South Street, under Manhattan Bridge, with pile of oyster shells.


Father Duffy, Times Square. Andre Kertesz, 1937.


Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn (now DUMBO), Kertesz, 1937.


Henry Hudson Parkway at 72nd St.: fancy interchange. Fairchild Aerial Surveys, 1937.


Rockefeller Ctr., 1937. St. Thomas’ Church at left, site of Jackie O’s funeral. Fairchild.


Simply Add Boiling Water, 1937. Photo by Weegee.


The old Met(ropolitan Opera), Garment District, 1937. Weegee.


Still clean and gleaming, the Towers of Zenith, 1937.

Berenice Abbott, 1938


Duke Mansion, a tobacco tycoon’s, 1 E. 78th St. at Fifth Ave.


40th between 6th and 7th. Zoning generates the form.


Flam & Flam, Lawyers, 165 E. 121st St.


Wall Street from 60 Wall.


From 60 Wall Street.


Cathedral Parkway (110th Street).


Columbus Circle. Building with Coke sign another of Hearst’s skyscraper bases. Unlike the one Foster is currently completing, this one was torn down for the Gulf and Western Building, now re-imagined by Phillip Johnson as the Trump International Hotel.

[GVNY]

More black and more white!









By 1850, a decade after Daguerre took the first picture, photography was already a big thing in New York.

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Purpose-built artists’ studios on 10th Street, Greenwich Village in 1858 (left); and again in 1938, about a decade and a half before they bit the dust. Love those convertible coupes.


The home of Louis Comfort Tiffany, jeweler and art nouveau craftsman, 1885. Designed by Stanford White, this impressive pile stood till 1936, packed with stained glass and iridescent things. Looking built for the ages, its life span was actually less than either of its creators’.


Another of White’s concoctions: Washington Square Arch, shown here in 1895 before the statues of George were added. Through the arch you can glimpse another White opus, Judson Memorial Church. Cars drove through the arch till 1971.


White’s Colony Club, Madison at 31st, 1904.


A dour portrait of Stanford White, founding partner of the eminent McKim, Mead and White, Architects. In fact White shared his clients’ enthusiasm for the good life conducted in various hideaways around town.

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The second Madison Square Garden, Fourth Avenue, 1892. White designed an apartment for himself in the tower. Here, beneath a nude huntress Diana, he conducted his affair with the beauteous Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, and was famously shot dead by her jealous husband Harry (1906). The building itself expired in 1925. Today’s Garden, where Dubya will soon be anointed, is the fourth.

Beauty to kill for, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw:

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Somehow she looked different in every picture:

..

She must have been iridescent as a peacock feather. Not one woman, but many.


“Tired Butterfly”, photo by Rudolf Eickemeyer

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Distraught husband, Harry Kendall Thaw. Inncocent by reason of insanity. Insane to have fallen for a pretty face. Insane to have cared so much.

The entire lurid story: http://www.4reference.net/encycloped...yn_Nesbit.html

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Just for fun, four images of women from 1906:

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Gustav Klimt


Gustav Klimt


Pablo Picasso

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Also on Madison Square: another elegant icon of the ragtime era, Burnham’s impossibly majestic Flatiron, world’s tallest skyscraper when built, here in 1903 photos by Alfred Stieglitz (left) and his good friend, Edward Steichen (right). Steichen was the poet of murk, and Stieglitz married Georgia O’Keefe.


Stieglitz and Steichen, much later.


Three modes of wheeled transport in Madison Square, 1904.


Lower East Side: airshaft of dumbbell tenements, so-called because they flared out at street and in back, leaving airshaft and consequently legal bedrooms under the code. Imagine the view.


Car races train on billboard, Madison Avenue at 42nd Street, 1910.


Lower Manhattan, 1910. Singer now world’s tallest.


Next it was Woolworth. This photo after 1927.


Graf Zeppelin over New York, 1928.


Solid piers on both rivers, 1929.


Building the Empire State, 1930.


West Side Highway, the first urban elevated highway. Gone a bit over a quarter century-- after a section collapsed-- this provided drivers with a thrilling ride past ocean liners and skyscrapers, with narrow lanes and sharp angle turns. Built for Model T’s.




A city of spires, 1931.


Penn Station.


Penn Arcade.


George Washington Bridge before stiffening trusses and second level, 1931. O.H. Ammann, engineer; Cass Gilbert [of the Woolworth Building!], architect. Tower trusswork was to be clad.


1932


Wallabout Market, Brooklyn, 1932.


Ellis Island, 1933.


Gramercy Park West, 1935. Berenice Abbott photo.


Seventh Avenue south from 35th, 1935.


512-14 Broome Street between Thompson and West Broadway, 1935. Abbott.


Queen Elizabeth, 1935.


Fish, 1935. Abbott.




Stone and William Streets, 1935. Abbott.


601 West 23rd Street, 1935. Abbott.


Firehouse, 1936. Abbott.


McGraw-Hill with 9th Avenue El, 1936. Abbott.


General Electric Building, 1936.


MacDougal Alley, Greenwich Village, 1936. Abbott. At that time, the alley still went through to Fifth Avenue.


3rd Avenue and 46th Street, 1936. Andre Kertesz photo.


The Flatiron again, this time in 1937.


771 Broadway, 1937. Berenice Abbott.


1937. Abbott.


Battery Park, 1937.Castle Clinton roofed over: aquarium?


Rockefeller Center, 1937


Summer, Lower East Side, 1937. Photo by Weegee (Arthur Fellig)


Central Park with Savoy Plaza, 1937

[GVNY]

Just fantastic.