NYC 100 YEARS AGO (almost…)

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 are in New York City in 1929–I dated it upon seeing that the Astor Theater in Times Square was showing the movie ‘Hollywood Revue’ which was released in June of that year. Since movies didn’t often play more than a month or two in their initial release, this suggests to me the we’re in the summer or early fall of the year and thus the stock market crash hasn’t happened yet. There is no Empire State building yet visible as we look down Fifth Avenue and no Waldorf Astoria in our views of midtown Park Avenue. And Washington Square in Greenwich Village was still allowing cars to drive through it, entering through the famous Arch (believe it or not). There’s a view of Riverside Drive looking upward from the shore of the Hudson River, a view never to be seen again after the mid-1930s, when the West Side Highway was built over it. People bustle about, all of them in hats, and Park Avenue has low black wrought iron fences protecting the center island planting from unruly pedestrian traffic. I wonder when they were removed? Perhaps their disappearance is what gave New Yorkers the license to pillage the city some forty years later…and now that peace has been restored (for the most part) perhaps we can bring them back again.

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