Above I’ve posted a real weirdie. It’s stock footage of West 52nd street shot sometime in the early 1930s. It has no discernible point or reason for existence. Unlike normal stock, there is little that is simply caught. Rather it is mostly staged shots of restaurant and speakeasy tasks–a guy
Here’s an extraordinary reel of film documenting the sights and sounds of Times Square in 1931. It’s filmed with the then-experimental sound-on-film process as pioneered by Fox Movietone News. Thus the sounds of the streets are what you were really hearing, not added later and not professional mic’d. There are
Here is a British Pathe newsreel excursion to the exotic (to the British anyway) New York City neighborhood called Harlem. I leave it to you to have your own reaction to this footage–it seems to evoke strong responses from YouTube commenters many of whom are conflicted about how beautiful everything
The YouTube artist known as NASS has done it again, giving us another of his superlative restorations of urban footage from the past. His colorization and added sound effects (plus intricate frame rate adjustment) serve to recast documentary footage of the past into the present tense, allowing us to not
See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York
Here’s some gorgeously colorized footage of lower Broadway and the surrounding environs at the beginning of the last century. Unlike the colorized footage of the city in 1947 that I posted last week, this includes the black and white version of the same footage–it comes after the colorized stuff finishes
Here’s another marvelous view of a now very vanished New York City, courtesy of the YouTube artist known as NASS. The city is seen in color (via colorization–it was originally shot in black and white) with an added soundbed of city noise, which somehow works wonder in terms of bringing
This extraordinary piece of film is a new one to me. It shows sections of a trolley ride–the camera mounted in the front of the car–down Broadway, from Herald Square to Union Square sometime in the very early twentieth century. Though the quality of the picture is poor, there is
Our ‘transportation series’ (see Tuesday’s post) continues with this marvelous ten-minute short film about the history and vanishing of New York City’s elevated trains. In the first half of the twentieth century the city was jammed with El trains–2nd Ave, 3rd Ave, 6th Ave, 9th Ave, 10th Ave all had
The YouTube artist known as NASS has posted another of he/she/they’s wonderful updated urban history videos in which, by use of colorization, frame rate adjustment and an added soundbed, an old piece of documentary film becomes a most convincing and seductive new journey through the past. This is New York