The Bowery Boys: New York City History
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION Until May 21st, you can vote every day in the Partners In Preservation initiative, which will award grant money to certain New York cultural and historical sites among 40 nominees. Having trouble deciding which site to support? I’ll be featuring on a few select sites here on the blog, providing you with a window… Read More
Edward Steichen, The Blue-Green Flatiron (courtesy the Met) The Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s new exhibit on three masters of early 20th Century photography “Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand” says as much about New York as it does the three subjects themselves. And many pictures have nothing to do with the city. Alfred Stieglitz became the maestro of… Read More
Above: a freaky face hanging from the former mansion of Sinclair Oil tycoon Harry F. Sinclair (today, the Ukrainian Institute at 2 East 79th St.)Here’s a great little diversion for your day — the photo website Gargoyles of New York, cataloguing all the grotesque grace adorning the nooks and corners of city skyscrapers, cathedrals and… Read More
Edith Shain, the Kissing Nurse, Dies at 91 Photo Life Magazine
Another day older (seven or eight years old, to be exact) and deeper in debt: the daily grind of the young bootblack at City Hall Park, photos by Lewis Wickes Hine, dated July 25, 1924. (Courtesy LOC) Hine was a social reformer, similar to Jacob Riis, who used photography to illustrate the reality of poverty… Read More
The picture above, taken in 1855, may be the oldest existent photograph of New York’s City Hall building. This is three years before the famous fire, caused by celebratory fireworks, destroyed the cupola and crown. The year this picture was taken, Fernando Wood became mayor of New York’s, beginning a dominance of Tammany Hall that… Read More
Above: Diane Cook’s dreamy “Little Red Lighthouse, Fort Washington Park, Manhattan, 2002” You can see the picture above and lots of other impossibly good-looking pictures at the Museum of the City of New York‘s new show The Edge of New York: Waterfront Photographs. The exhibition features an array of images from all eras of New… Read More
Top: the Brooklyn Bridge in 1925. Bottom: Underhill on the boardwalk: the photographer captures a seemingly meloncholy day in Coney Island, with Childs Restaurant at right Nobody in New York’s early history captures the romance of early city life more than the first photographers — the men and women who wiled away with expensive, limited… Read More
I’m busily working a new podcast which will be available by tonight. In the meantime, enjoy this really old photograph of the extravagent photo studio of Charles D. Fredricks, sometimes known simply as C.D Fredricks. This picture of his ‘Temple of Art’ was taken, according to the National Archives, in 1850, although I believe it… Read More