Let’s not be coy. I didn’t have dinner with Stephen. (Lunch once, yes, but that’s a story for another time). (And there were eight of us at the table, though I was seated next to him). But last night while eating leftovers I watched the terrific video posted above which
See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York
Yesterday I posted legendary AM pop DJ Dan Ingram’s broadcast during the Great East Coast Blackout of 1965. Today we’re digging excerpts of Ingram on his 77 WABC afternoon music show from February 26th, 1975. This is classic Ingram stuff–a lesson in pure DJ word jamming, a lost art (I
On November 9, 1965, shortly after 5PM, New York City began experiencing the ominous signs of an impending blackout due to a gradual loss of available electricity. The cause of the failure was the setting of a protective relay on one of the transmission lines near Niagara Falls. The safety
Here’s some gorgeously colorized footage of lower Broadway and the surrounding environs at the beginning of the last century. Unlike the colorized footage of the city in 1947 that I posted last week, this includes the black and white version of the same footage–it comes after the colorized stuff finishes
Here’s another marvelous view of a now very vanished New York City, courtesy of the YouTube artist known as NASS. The city is seen in color (via colorization–it was originally shot in black and white) with an added soundbed of city noise, which somehow works wonder in terms of bringing
This extraordinary piece of film is a new one to me. It shows sections of a trolley ride–the camera mounted in the front of the car–down Broadway, from Herald Square to Union Square sometime in the very early twentieth century. Though the quality of the picture is poor, there is
Some director–I think it was Leo McCarey–was asked if he had a favorite movie of his own. His answer was that if he could cut together the best parts of all his movies, that would be his own favorite movie. Ask me the same question and you’ll get a different
Yesterday in my post about New York City’s Elevated Trains, I mistakenly added 10th Avenue to the many streets that once hosted El trains. Actually, 10th (and 11th) Avenue hosted something much more interesting (and grim) than an El train. For many years before the construction of the High Line
Our ‘transportation series’ (see Tuesday’s post) continues with this marvelous ten-minute short film about the history and vanishing of New York City’s elevated trains. In the first half of the twentieth century the city was jammed with El trains–2nd Ave, 3rd Ave, 6th Ave, 9th Ave, 10th Ave all had