Street Scenes: Cropping Into History

On Fifth Avenue: A cropped image, c. 1900. (See Full Size Image Here.)

I spend a lot of time looking through visual archives to find images to use in my research and my design work. One of my favorite archives to peruse is the Library of Congress (LOC). The LOC happens to hold one the best collections of American images: roughly 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies made by the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC).

The Washingtons in New York: The Nation, the Publick, and the Enslaved

George: "Mary, Please come with me to New York!"
(Illustration by Norman Rockwell, 1932)

On April 23, 1789, just one week before being sworn in as the first president of the United States, George Washington and his staff settled into the country's first executive mansion, located at 10  Cherry Street in New York City. For nearly two years, before being moved to Philadelphia, the seat of the U.S. government would be located in New York City; and Manhattan would be home to the President and First Lady. The new nation was just starting to recover from the long years of war, and nowhere was this better in evidence than in Manhattan.

Owners of America, NYC

"By their banks ye shall know them," Alfred Henry Lewis

In 1908 and 1909, Cosmopolitan Magazine published a series titled, "Owners of America," profiling some of the country's wealthiest men. (The magazine modestly touted the series as "one of the most interesting that has ever appeared in an American magazine.")

Accompanying the article were images of the Manhattan homes of the "owners."

Jackie, A New Yorker

Jack and Jackie Greet New York, 1960

After becoming First Lady, Jackie Kennedy seemed to do anything to avoid Washington, D.C. She did indeed officially live in the White House during John Kennedy's presidency, but she spent far more time away from the capitol than she spent in it. (Spoiler Alert: New York City was one of her favorite places to go.)

Take a Walk: Time Traveling Through the City Streets

Time Traveling on the Upper West Side, 1971 (click text here to go to film)

Take a Walk

New York is made for walking. And it's a city that lends itself to image making, from still photography to home movies.  To see the city from a "common" or everyday point of view seems both literally and figuratively quite pedestrian. But with the passage of time, that point of view becomes magical, offering viewers the opportunity to time travel and walk through the streets of Manhattan in another era.

Bright Lights, Big City: Early 1980s New York

The Write Crowd: McInerney, Janowitz, Ellis, 1980s, NYC

"Die Yuppie Scum" was common graffiti that writer Jay McInerney remembers spotting around his East Village neighborhood in the early 1980s. A graduate of Williams college, McInerney studied creative writing (with Raymond Carver) at Syracuse University, and in the early 1980s, he was back in New York City, living in the East Village and working as a reader at Random House. Meanwhile, he wrote the novel that would make him famous.

Coney Island on Their Mind

"Hot town, summer in the city/ back of my neck getting dirty and gritty." 

The Beauty of the Miniature: Helena Rubinstein in New York City

Madame Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965) was a revolutionary force in the world of beauty. She was an entrepreneur, a businesswoman, and a marketing genius. During a long and successful career that spanned six decades and made her one of the richest women in the world, Rubinstein operated salons all over the world and launched scores of products that were sold globally. She was a magnificent purveyor of the idea that all women can find personal satisfaction through the pursuit of beauty. 

A Decisive Moment: Marilyn Monroe in New York

Marilyn Monroe: The City at Her Feet

New York City, 1955. Gazing down at Park Avenue, Marilyn Monroe stands on the balcony of the Ambassador Hotel, at Park between East 50th and 51st Streets. She was in New York in self-imposed exile from Hollywood. She had come back to the city she knew and loved in order to change her life.

The Chrysler Building: A Symbol of the Times

1931: A Dazzling New York Skyline of Architects

Photo:  L-R: A. Stewart Walker (Fuller Building), Leonard Schultze (Waldorf-Astoria), Ely Jacques Kahn (Squibb Building), William Van Alen (Chrysler Building), Ralph Walker (1 Wall Street), D.E.Ward (Metropolitan Tower), Joseph H. Freelander (Museum of New York).

At the Beaux-Arts Ball held in New York City on January 23, 1931, the party was not to be topped...but some of the attendees were!

Thanksgiving Day Menus & Traditions: New York City

Thanksgiving dinner at the Hotel New Yorker, at the height of the Great Depression, cost $2.25.
Guests could not only choose turkey as an entree, but also lamb, lobster, or beef. Sardines, baked grapefruit, and "whipped" potatoes also appeared on the hotel's holiday menu. The Art Deco hotel, located at 481 Eighth Avenue, had opened in 1930.

Dustin Hoffman's New York

Dustin Hoffman, New York City, 1969: An Actor's Actor. Photo by John Dominis

Dustin Hoffman's New York - Jenny Thompson

In many ways, Dustin Hoffman can be seen as a quintessentially New York actor (despite having been born and raised in California). Many of the films Hoffman made through the late 1960s and 1970s not only captured the American zeitgeist, but also created a portrait of New York City. Hoffman, himself a resident of the city from roughly 1958 until 2002, lived through many changes New York underwent and his films capture those changes.

Mid-Century Modern: Inside the Mad Men's Living Room

Places! Don & Meagan Draper's NYC apartment, c. 1968

According to a brief shot of an envelope in a recent episode of Mad Men, Don and Megan Draper live on Park Avenue. No surprise there for an up and coming power couple; where else would they live if not in one of the most stylish areas of the city?

Summer Retreats: New York Style

"By the way, old chap, what do you people do in New York when summer comes?"

"We get out," Miss De Peyster broke in . . . "New York is simply deserted in summer. There is not a soul in town." 
Rupert Hughes, The Real New York (1905).

Mary Lincoln in New York

“It is imperative that I should do something for my relief, and I want you to meet me in New York, between the 30th of August and the 5th of September next, to assist me in disposing of a portion of my wardrobe." Mrs. Lincoln to Mrs. Keckley

On September 16, 1867, a small dark haired woman dressed in mourning clothes checked in as "Mrs. Clarke" at the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th St. She was waiting for a friend who would arrive any day. Mrs. Clarke had business to transact in the city.

How the Other Half Lived ...and Lives

"Bandit's Roost," Richard Hoe Lawrence, c. 1890, Museum of the City of New York

The New York City tenement of the nineteenth century once stood as perhaps the most potent symbol of poverty. The narrow, dark, and crowded houses populated New York City by the thousands in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

New York (on film): A View from a Window

Greenwich Village View: Rear Window was filmed on a set built at Paramount Studios in LA

Movies have long been filmed on location in New York City, from the earliest days of silent film production. But New York films set within interiors that offer a view of the city--or even just a suggestion of the city outside-- often brilliantly evoke the city as a thematic element that propels the plot forward. Indeed, these films set within sets often use the city to evoke the great "world outside," as it were, and infuse the drama with a heightened sense of the film's moral underpinnings.

A (New Yorker's) Christmas Poem

1862 Illustration from Moore's "A Visit From Saint Nicholas"

On July 15, 1779,  Clement Clark Moore was born in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University in 1798 and went on to enjoy a successful career as a professor. But he is perhaps best known and remembered as the author of "A Visit from Saint Nicholas," commonly known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

Moore was born and lived in the family home known as the "Chelsea House" at roughly 420 W. 23rd Street (the house later giving the name to the NYC neighborhood).

Crystal Palace

 

Crystal Palace, New York City, Illustrated News, July 30 1853

In July 1853 two prominent news weeklies, the Illustrated News (July 23 and July 30, 1853) and Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (July 23, 1853), published commissioned engravings depicting events during the opening of the Crystal Palace.  

Food, NYC

The restaurant at Astor's swanky St. Regis Hotel, c. 1905

"God! The restaurants! 

New York has become the Florence of the Sixteenth Century. 

Genius on every corner." 

                                                    -Six Degrees of Separation

"No city in the world is better supplied with restaurants and eating-houses of every kind than New York." This observation in the 1896 edition of Rand McNally and Co's Handy Guide to New York City, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Other Suburbs is true today. The city's reputation as a food lover's paradise is well earned. From street food to fine dining, the available fare reflects the very city itself in its diversity and energy.

Storm Clouds

Words are difficult to come by after witnessing the devastation brought on by Hurricane Sandy. In the wake of that storm, it is hard to imagine the losses, suffering, and tragedies endured by so many along the east coast. Looking down the long path to the days and weeks and years to come, and the tremendous efforts to rebuild--and perhaps reconfigure--New York, it is tempting to harness the power of the cliches: New York, New Jersey, and all the areas affected by the storm will rebuild and be stronger and better than ever; Americans are resilient and come together to help each other in the face of tragedy.

Fashion on the Foot in Old Manhattan

"Only a shoe! How small a matter, and yet how important!

 The Human Foot by William Beneke, 1888

Fashion chronicler extraordinaire, Bill Cunningham, highlighted the appearance of some dazzling shoes on the streets of Manhattan in a September 2012 "On the Street" column and accompanying slide show for the New York Times. The idea of the "shoe on the street"--the display of fashion on the foot in Manhattan--is something that traces its origins back to the earliest days of the city itself.

"The Clock"-a New York Story

Joe: "Where will I meet you?"
Alice: "Under the clock at the Astor at seven." 

Released in May 1945, The Clock was filmed entirely in California, but set in New York City, with scenes taking place in sets standing in for Central Park, the Subway, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Astor Hotel, Pennsylvania Station, and various other locations.

High Class Apartments

Things are looking up: From 1901 until 1929, New York City residents would become largely apartment dwellers. With a new law passed in 1901, residential buildings were allowed to grow up, to stretch up to the sky at a height that was more than twice the width of the street on which it stood.

A Time To Be Born

Dawn Powell

Writer Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was born in the Midwest (Ohio) but lived the quintessential writer’s life in New York City. A prolific writer, she published fifteen novels, several plays and television scripts, earned a National Book Award nomination, and even saw a musical produced based on her 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born.

"I ♥ New York"

In 1977, while working for the NY advertising agency, Wells Rich Greene, Milton Glaser created New York's most iconic image: the "I ♥ New York" graphic. Glaser, a graphic designer who was born in New York City in 1929, provided his design services pro bono to the state's campaign to boost tourism. The campaign included not only use of the logo, but also a song and television spots.

Touring Greenwich Village

Born in Canada, Beals was devoted to documenting New York City

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Greenwich Village became known as a rather eccentric enclave. Artists and writers, Arnarchists and liberated women, inhabited the neighborhood. "Greenwich Village is the American parallel of the Latin Quarter," The Dial observed in 1914, pointing out that "a member of Greenwich Village is a person of a sort and not too closely of a place: he is a Bohemian."

Curiosity about the neighborhood filled with restaurants, theater, art, radical politics, and nightlife was high; and the Bohemian crowd itself was willing to instruct the outsider. Anna Alice Chapin's 1920 Greenwich Village was a perfect guide to all things Greenwich Village.

manhatta/manhattan

Still from "Manhatta" a 1920 modernist look at the city.

Painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's 1920 short film "Manhatta" is an epic portrayal of the city, made just two short years after the end of World War One.  Restored in 2006, the film draws from several of Walt Whitman's poems to create the inter-title quotes.

New York Seen/Taught from a Distance

By Rodger C. Birt

In 1980 I was offered a rare opportunity and a pedagogical challenge:  the department I had recently joined at San Francisco State University asked me to prepare to teach a semester-long (15 weeks) course “on” New York City.  It would  become part of a group of courses constructed around this unifying theme:  a city is a specific, cultural artifact,  and the study of a selected city (in a humanities context) helps serve one of the educational missions of a large state university, namely to introduce

E.B. White’s New York

In the summer of 1948, writer E. B. White (1899-1985) wrote what would become one of his most famous essays and also one of the best pieces about New York City: “Here is New York.”

According to White’s foreword (to the 1949 book version of the essay originally written for Holiday Magazine,) the essay was written on a summer visit to New York, during a “hot spell.”  White then tells readers that his essay only momentarily captures a city in flux. Even within the short passage of time since it had been written, it seems, the piece had already become outdated.

“The reader will find certain observations to be no longer true of the city,” White stated, “owing to the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum. I wrote not only during a heat wave, but during a boom. The heat has broken, the boom has broken, and New York is not quite so feverish now as when the piece was written.”

Central Park: Studied in Black and White

New York City's Central Park is a magical, stunning, wonderful place. The park initially opened in 1857.  In 1858, a competition to design the park was launched. Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux won with their innovative, brilliant plan for the park, "Greensward."

Implementing the plan of the park would take many years. Work began in 1858, but was interrupted by the American Civil War.  In 1873, the park was finally completed.

Over the years, the park has inspired writers, artists, and filmmakers. My friend and mentor, Dr. Rodger C. Birt contributes here a set of prints documenting the park in winter.

Cosmopolitan Standards of Virtue

1900 New York: Sister Carrie's City

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” So wrote Theodore Dreiser in his 1900 novel, Sister Carrie. Carrie goes to the big city of Chicago, falls in with a salesman, Drouet, only to leave with another man, Hurstwood, and off the two go to the even bigger city, New York.  

Does she assume the “cosmopolitan standard of virtue”? She certainly does. And Dreiser uses the city as the backdrop for her simultaneous rise in fortune and decline in virtue.