Here’s some outstanding colorized footage of New York City in 1948-49. (The dates are approximate based on the cars of the period). The YouTube artist known as NASS posted this a few days ago and as always I’m sharing it with you. It’s a remarkable moment of time travel, thanks to NASS’s ability to revive old black and white footage and give it a new, verite life. What the purpose of this footage was remains a bit unclear–it’s not simply documentary footage as several clues point to it having a certain amount of intentional staging; at 4:35, for instance, we see two men peering over the railing at the traffic emerging from the Park Avenue tunnel south of Grand Central Station. Their actions are then repeated in a second take–their gestures are just different enough to prove definitively that they were directed to do the same thing twice. Even though plenty of pedestrians stare at the camera as they pass, indicating that they are not professional extras, enough foreground action appears staged which leads me to think the filmmakers were essentially using real people unknowingly as background and simply hoping for the best–which in this case would be not looking at the Goddam camera. The reel ends with some invaluable footage of the old Penn Station. Again, foreground people appear to be performers with the background action simply being busy New Yorkers, coming and going, lost to us forever except for this fine footage shot seventy-five plus years ago.