It’s easy to mock or criticize the 1980s but I have rose-colored glasses on when it comes to that decade. I turned 16 in 1980 and spent the happiest decade of my life roving around the quirky, edgy and still dirty and crime-laden New York City on display in this
Today’s “whatever happened to the real New York” video comes in the form a gussied-up tourist public relations ‘video’ (ten years before their were ‘videos’) shot in the early 70s. Lightning fast cutting and annoying music take us through a whiz-bang tour of the city during the John Lindsey era.
Here’s a few minutes of ghostly, black and white silent footage of the area around Broadway and 88th/89th streets in 1971. Nothing of any interest happens–which is what makes it oddly fascinating (to me at least). The everydayness of this portrait gives it an unintended weight–it achieves gravitas through its
Subscribe in a reader What on earth was the above video made for? It’s a short film in the style of a tourist-lure travelogue promoting New York. Only its point is how lousy New York is. The Youtube poster is at least ten years off in his estimation of when
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
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
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
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
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
“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