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 many wonderful things to take in–my favorite is the traffic which appeared to operate with no car lanes, stoplights or stop signs. Pedestrians thread their way through moving vehicles and oncoming trolley cars but oddly things seem less dangerous than they do now. (Perhaps the lack of organization simply caused drivers to be more watchful?) I won’t attempt to explicate any of the other remarkable sights–just watch for yourself. The one thing I will attempt to nail down, though, is the date (roughly) that this was filmed. First of all, the person who posted this is wrong–it’s not 1929 it’s 1931. This was simple to verify since all the marquees advertising movies are movies released in 1931. But when exactly in 1931 is this? From the look of the way people on the street are dressed–lots of overcoats, the usual hats–one might assume late fall, early winter. But a look at the release dates of the movies show that all of them were released in the spring of the year–‘Dance Fools Dance’ (starring Joan Crawford) on 3/21, ‘The Front Page’ on 4/31, ‘Trader Horn’ on 5/23 and ‘My Past’ on 5/31. Although ‘The Front Page’ and ‘Trader Horn’ were formidable hits it wasn’t the norm for movies to stay in theaters for months at a time. The Crawford vehicle and ‘My Past’ were unlikely to have stayed in theaters through the fall–Crawford had four movies released that year of which ‘Dance Fools Dance’ was the first. So I think we’re safe to say that we are in the late spring of the year. Which begs the question: why is everyone dressed so heavily? You might guess that a cold-spell had suddenly descended upon Manhattan Island. And you’d be correct! A check on the daily weather report for the semi-randomly chosen date of June 10th 1931 from the New York Daily News (courtesy of the amazing newspapers.com) shows that the sunset was at 8:25 PM and at 8PM the temperature was 58 degrees. Thus those June evenings of 1931 were a little chillier than expected, leading the denizens of Times Square to button up their overcoats and occasionally look over their shoulders at the large camera placed on a truck bed photographing them for reasons unknown.