Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

THE RETREAT OF ‘PLATO’S RETREAT’

Yesterday’s posting of a TV commercial advertising the 70s swingers club ‘Plato’s Retreat’ has provoked a good deal of controversy in the…oh, I can’t lie. It provoked no controversy whatsoever. And so I will double down with more on the infamous sex club. Above is a 1985 local New York

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MANHATTAN CABLE TV–BROUGHT TO YOU BY…

1970s New York was messy, smelly, worn-out and stale. Plenty has been written (and much of it romanticized) about 70s New York, so what else is there to say? Well, watch the above commercial for ‘Plato’s Retreat’, a sex club that was located in the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway and

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LADIES OF FIFTH AVENUE

On March 11th 1927, the Fox Movietone cameras were sent out to Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan to shoot some footage of stylish young flappers traipsing about the area outside of Saks Fifth Avenue, presumably for a newsreel featurette. The surviving footage–just a snippet of what was shot–has been colorized

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BUILDING THE EMPIRE STATE

Having just come from a doctor’s appointment on 31st Street between Park and Madison and thus having spied the lurking grandeur of the Empire State Building on nearby Fifth Avenue, I decided to search out the famously scary photographs of the workmen sauntering around the framework high in the sky

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SNOW IN 1898

In honor of the approaching snowstorm in the east (I am tucked securely away in my New York City apartment) I’m posting this fragment of a sleigh-jam in Central Park in 1898. The fat guy who crosses frame at 37 seconds is a cop, no doubt–his self-important gait, while not

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“ROB THE MOB”- GRAFFITI ART IN THE 90’s

“Graffiti represents man’s desire to communicate”- Anonymous Graffiti has become a prominent force in urban settings in the late 20th century. New York City conceived graffiti and it will always be the “capital and cultural centre of graffiti”. At its inception in the 60’s the mention of the word would

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NEW YORK F@&#ING CITY ON FILM!

I’m in New York City, my proper home when I’m not pretending to live in Los Angeles. And it’s impossible to wander around this incredible place without imagining whatever you’re looking at as it might have looked one hundred or more years ago. I find this phenomenon to be specific

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