Behold this nifty hour-long mini-doc called ‘Home Again; The Marx Brothers and New York City’. It’s a very well done and charming look at how the comedian-brothers grew up, what their heritage was and how New York City formed and shaped their personas. I realize that it’s not exactly breaking
When the Singer Sewing Machine factory decided to build their own office tower in 1907, they chose to do so with a bang. It was the tallest office building ever constructed and the technology involved in running the place was state-of-the-art early 20th century stuff. Alas, it’s life span was
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C51apJhZX4 The Savoy-Plaza, one of New York City’s most elegant and legendary hotels, stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th street, currently the site of the General Motors Building. This fabulously grand Beaux-Arts pile was designed by McKim Meade and White and opened in 1907. Less than 60
I often post the videos of the YouTube artist known as NASS, who specializes in colorizing old urban documentary footage, slowing the frame rate down to make them feel more realistic and adding an appropriate bed of sound. Here’s one that I somehow missed–it was posted a year ago. We
In 1980, when I was 16, my father bought an apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and we decamped from Los Angeles to spend the summer there. This was where I discovered two things of major importance in my adolescence. 1) A place where I could buy weed
Here’s a neat little four minute clip reel of 1920s New York City footage, most of it focusing on Times Square at night. The clip selection is random and a bit wonky but anything about 1920s New York City is catnip to me so I’d thought I’d share it. (Apparently
The YouTube artist known as NASS has unleashed a new, wonderful example of his/her/they’s superb work–restoring footage of old urban environments, colorizing them (expertly), adjusting the frame rate and adding a realistic sound bed of background noise. I love these videos and have posted a number of the New York
Here’s another of YouTube artist NASS’s wonderful colorized views of old New York City (with added sound bed of urban atmosphere). This time we are exclusively on Fifth Avenue in midtown. The year is somewhere between 1936-1938 based on the automobiles. The city is unusually clean–the streets literally look polished
Last week (or was it the week before?) I posted an experimental 1929 film called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’ by Robert Florey, which was a paeon to art deco New York and the then startling proliferation of the massive and impressive buildings of the era. On a very different note, avant garde
Here’s a fabulous colorized reel of various views of Broadway in the early 1930s. The YouTube artist known as NASS is responsible for many of these urban re-boot reels, in which he colorizes the footage (with great skill), slows the frame rate down and adds a quite convincing soundbed of