Over at the New York Review of Books, here’s Bruce Davidson on taking pictures on the Iron Horse in the early ’80s:

In the spring of 1980, I began to photograph the New York subway system. Before beginning this project, I was devoting most of my time to commissioned assignments and to writing and producing a feature film based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, Enemies, A Love Story. When the final option expired on the film, I felt the need to return to my still photography—to my roots.

I began to photograph the traffic islands that line Broadway. These oases of grass, trees, and earth surrounded by heavy city traffic have always interested me. I found myself photographing the lonely widows, vagrant winos, and solemn old men who line the benches on these concrete islands of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I traveled to other parts of the city, from Coney Island to the Bronx Zoo. I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I’d photographed several years before. The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the decaying nearby neighborhoods. I photographed the people I had known there, survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. I walked along Essex Street to visit an old scribe who repaired faded Hebrew characters on sacred Torah scrolls. He and his wife, both survivors of Dachau, worked together in their small religious bookstore. Occasionally, he’d allow me to take a photograph as he bent over the parchment with his pen. When the flash went off, he would wave me away. I would return later with prints that he put into a drawer, carefully, without looking at them. Sometimes, returning from his shop during the evening rush hour, I would see the packed cars of the subway as cattle cars, filled with people, each face staring or withdrawn with the fear of its unknown destiny.

Dig the book, a cherce holiday gift.

Oh, hell, and while we’re at it:

Check out this gallery of New York City photographs by Stanley Kubrick.

From How to Be a Retronaut, where else?

As a kid, the scariest neighborhood I could think of outside of Harlem was Alphabet City. It was a world away from the Upper West Side, which had its tough blocks and dangerous stretches. I heard about Alphabet City in frightening terms, as in “You don’t want to go down there.” Then, when I was thirteen, I remember this movie poster:

I never saw the movie and it would be years until I went downtown to that neighborhood. By the time I got there it was called the East Village.

[Photo Credit: Ribonyc]

Check out this photo gallery of Penn Station over at Retronaut.

I found it difficult to look at these pictures without feeling torn up.

Big city of dreams.

Pictures of New York by Louis Faurer via Everyday I Show.

Our good pal Mark Lamster had a long piece in the New York Times last Sunday. You don’t want to miss it:

IT sounds like something out of a dime novel, or maybe a Nicolas Cage film. Behind the mute facade of a largely windowless neo-Gothic tower lies an ingenious system of steel vaults traveling on rails. Within those armored containers, which have been in continuous use since the Jazz Age, are stored some of New York City’s most precious objects and, presumably, a good number of its darkest secrets.

This building actually exists, and you will find it on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Second Avenue, just north of the end of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. It is the Day & Meyer, Murray & Young warehouse, and since it opened in 1928 it has been the storage building of choice for many of New York’s wealthiest families, most prestigious art dealers and grandest museums.

The company’s early client list reads like a condensation of the New York Social Register, with names like Astor and Auchincloss, du Pont and Guggenheim, Havemeyer and Vanderbilt prominent. The press baron William Randolph Hearst stored entire rooms bought in Europe there during the construction of his castle at San Simeon, Calif.

Congrats to Mark for the story, and another job well done.

More NYC goodness from Vivian Maier (via Retronaut):

Ah, the Old Days…

I remember it well.

Recognize most all of these spots. This one here (below) was on 49th street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. When I first worked as a messenger in the Brill Building, summer of ’88, you couldn’t walk a city block without running into a porno theater. I remember making runs from 49th and Broadway down to the Technicolor lab which was on 44th street between 8th and 9th, seeing the viles of crack cocaine scattered along the sidewalk, and being propositioned by the hookers with bruises on their legs and arms. I moved fast in those days.

This trip down memory lane has been brought to you by Mitch O’Connell. In six parts: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Peace to Cliff C for point out this New York City greatness.

Bernice Abbott (1954)

Ah, if only we had a time machine and could go back and sit in the Polo Grounds. Man, that’d be nice.

[Photo via The Mighty Flynn]

Take a New York Minute out to look at this great photo gallery of the disappearing face of our city. From Retronaut, where else? Oh, and dig the book, by James and Karla Murray.

In memory of 9.11, please check out the first chapter of what I think is probably Glenn Stout’s best book, “Nine Months at Ground Zero: The Story of the Brotherhood of Workers Who Took on a Job Like No Other.”

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Times]

Rest in Peace:

Kase 2.

The King of What? King of Style.

Tribute to Kase 2 by Dame

Here’s another gallery of vintage New York photography.

This one features the work of Gita Lenz.

Stunning.

My man Brad pointed out this wonderful photo gallery of old New York.

Don’t miss it.

Speaking of old New York, I was on Columbus Avenue last night with my sister and my cousin, an 18-year-old Belgian girl who arrived in New York two days ago. It’s her first trip to the States so we went out for a burger last night. She is a good kid, shy, but speaks English pretty well. We strolled up Columbus after dinner, past 81st Street where my grandparents used to live. Most of the neighborhood has changed, but here is one spot, between 82nd and 83rd, that remains. It was almost arresting to see it there, a piece of my childhood in tact.

The New Yorker movie theater (and bookstore), The Regency and the Metro, M.H. Lamston’s,  Morris Brothers, Big Apple Comics, Funny Business, Applause, Shelter, Broadway Bay, The Saloon, Paulson’s, O’Neal’s Ballon. Hell, Tower Records. That’s a quick jog down memory lane of places I used to go to on the Upper West Side when I was growing up. Long gone. And now that H&H Bagels is closed for good, some Upper West Siders feel that the old neighborhood is done, reports Alexandra Schwartz in the Times:

You can find dog accessories and artisanal soaps and Coach handbags, or trawl for oxidized silver pendants and kilt pins at Barney’s Co-op. You can withdraw cash on every corner from the bank branch of your choice. You can load up on chewing gum and razor blades at a host of Duane Reades. You can treat yourself to a perfectly mediocre manicure.

But some of us want more. We want to revel in a neighborhood brunch tradition that has nothing to do with endless waits and haughty hostesses and glasses of orange juice whose prices defy the logic of supply and demand — a tradition that means fresh bagels and whitefish with onions over the newspaper in the living room. When we’re wandering with a hangover down the silent stretch of Broadway at 3 in the morning and the need for an “everything bagel” is stronger even than the need for water and sleep, what are we supposed to do without H & H’s round-the-clock bakery at 80th Street?

Big Nick’s Burger and Pizza Joint, I think of you and your root-beer-stained tables with trepidation. The smell of grease from your nonstop griddles billows out toward 77th Street 24 hours a day, seven days a week — a siren scent taunting gymgoers and health food nuts. You’re an unrepentant West Side institution, and that means that you, bubele, must be in the cross hairs, too.

Of course, it’s only natural for neighborhoods to evolve. My generation of Upper West Siders grew up during the Clinton years in a scrubbed-up iteration of the place our parents knew. Unthreatened by the muggings that were routine a decade earlier, we claimed the identity handed down to us: a certain shabbiness, along with a good dose of brains and a scrappy sense of local pride. Few of us noticed that the neighborhood’s personality had come under assault long before we started to take the subway by ourselves, when Shakespeare & Company and Eeyore’s Books shut their doors after Barnes & Noble took over the old Schrafft’s building at 82nd Street.

I remember when Amsterdam Avenue was a scary place. And parts of Columbus and Broadway too. I knew which sides of the street to walk down and which ones to avoid back in the 1980s. I still have some family on the Upper West Side, but the neighborhood I knew as a kid is a memory. It’s safer now, well-heeled, less shabby. A different place. The old neighborhood has been gone for more than a minute.

[Photo Credit: Monika Graff, Marilyn K Yee, William Sauro, Bob Glass and James Estrin for the New York Times]

It was a treat to ride in a cab as a kid. The best was when we hailed one of those plump checker cabs, the kinds with the fold-out seats in the back. My brother, sister, and I would fight to claim those two seats.

Checker cabs were the bomb.

[Picture by Joel Zimmer]

Check out this cool photo gallery of Brooklyn circa 1974.