A Slide show of Classic Black & White photos from the 1920's and 1930's of New York City. Showing the best and worst the city had to offer. Long before the population explosion and the sky scrapers took over the skyline.
27. Federal Crowd Control, 1918. Machine guns in front, modified phalanx.
Soldiers on sides assigned to upstairs windows. Wilson feared antiwar
riots, losing mind to small strokes.
60. Times Square, 1935. Betty Boop on the marquee.
The Astor came down mid-sixties, along with Penn Station and Singer Building: a
bad time for beaux-arts. Streetcars in the square, no overhead wires.
61. Times Square looking South to Times Building. Mid-sixties this was stripped to
steel skeleton and re-clothed in kitsch marble by mod illustrator Peter Max.
More bad times for beaux-arts.
98. Columbus Circle Building with Coke sign another of Hearst’s skyscraper bases.
Unlike the one Foster is currently completing, this one was torn down for the Gulf and
Western Building, now re-imagined by Phillip Johnson as the Trump International Hotel.
99. Jefferson Market with the hulking, deco Women’s House of Detention behind (now demolished for a park).
From the barred, open windows, the ladies would hurl obscenities at passersby.
101. Union Square West. A hilarious jumble gets A+ for accidental design.
These lots once held town houses. Their dainty footprints have been preserved, so the buildings have a
delicate scale regardless of their height. One is a miniature skyscraper.
Scale-obsessed NIMBYs take note: you need to object to a building’s footprint, not its height.
123. Three icons: Empire State. Horn and Hardart (The
Automat), New York’s original restaurant chain, long
gone. Lamp standard, now being re-installed.
125. Central Park looking southeast toward Grand Army Plaza. The baronial Savoy-Plaza Hotel dominates with
its vast, vaguely French roof and twin chimneys: another major Beaux-Arts landmark demolished mid-
sixties. Replaced by Stone’s vapid GM Building, recently acquired by Trump.
139. At the foot of 42nd Street: Normandie with three fat stacks in the middle, Queen
Mary with three skinnier stacks at bottom. Normandie burned here, Nazi sabotage
claimed. Normandie was that time’s biggest and fastest (Blue Ribbon).
140. Forty-second Street. Mid-size Beaux-Arts skyscraper on north side of street is
Times Building, of New Year’s fame. Building still exists but re-clad in mid-sixties.
146. Tisayac by Eadweard Muybridge, best known for time-lapse photos of men and horses running
before graph paper backgrounds. He also famously murdered his wife’s lover in San Francisco.