The YouTube artist known as NASS has unleashed a new, wonderful example of his/her/they’s superb work–restoring footage of old urban environments, colorizing them (expertly), adjusting the frame rate and adding a realistic sound bed of background noise. I love these videos and have posted a number of the New York City and Los Angeles ones before. (Like most people who’ve lived exclusively in those cities, the many other fascinating views of different cities simply don’t interest me. This is the definition of the word ‘shallow’.) In this video we’re in downtown Manhattan in 1939, visiting the different ethnic neighborhoods. We get views of Chinatown, the Lower East Side Jewish district and Little Italy. As always, people are dressed so much better than they are now, and the general pace of interactions is so much more civilized than in the current day, that we truly are witnessing not just a different lost New York but a distant, lost civilization. And read the comments–every time one of these restorations goes up somebody invariably comments something along the lines of “look at all those people–they’re all dead now.” As we use to say at Walter Reed Jr. High School (circa 1978) “No shit, Sherlock.”