Jimmy Picker’s 1983 Oscar-winning short.

Wonderful post about NYC record stores over at Flaming Pablum.

From the New York Times, here’s Stephen Farrell on the quiet-as-kept City Hall library:

But while book titles can be searched online, the books themselves cannot be downloaded or taken out. They must be read on site, in one of two large rooms: one is somewhat dark and filled with bookshelves and old newspaper clippings; the other has a few computers and the librarians.

The volumes stocked by the library are not the kinds of books most people would consider summer reading — “Financial Problems of the City of New York” is one title — and they also tend to be large and bulky.

“Sometimes they will say, ‘It’s a lot of reading.’ I always say, ‘Well, you know what, I wish I had time to sit and read it. I would love to do it,’” Ms. Bruzzese said. “I think a lot of people, too, are used to electronic things now, they expect to find something on a computer. They see a book this size, and they think, ‘Oh, it’s a lot to read.’”

Below the library are the cavernous storerooms and vaults that contain some of the maps, books, photographs and other items that are part of the Municipal Archives. They document the city’s government and leadership dating back to the unification of the boroughs into New York City in 1898, and back to the first mayor of the city, Thomas Willett, in 1665.

[Photo Via: the Atlantic]

Found over at Kottke, this map of midtown Manhattan circa 1890.

From National Geographic Found. (A dope site.)

Alan Taylor’s In Focus is a great site–bookmark it, folks.

Here’s a gallery of the Rotten Apple back in the Seventies.

My father did some work for CTW in the 1970s. He’d bring us home Sesame Street albums and once we cleaned our rooms were allowed to listen to them. One time, Dad took my sister and me to visit the set of Sesame Street. We sat on this stoop and looked into Mr. Hooper’s store. Nobody was filming. The crew was busy. I remember a kid riding a bike around. We sat there, next to Oscar’s garbage can, quietly, and wondered where Mr. Hooper was.

[Pictures via: Loosetooningaround]

Mugged, mugging. I remember hearing those words all the time growing up. Always aware that it could happen, that it would happen. When it did, getting mugged didn’t mean you’d be killed, just that someone would take your shit.

That is mind, here’s David Freeman’s 1970 New York magazine story, “Mugging as a Way of Life”:

Twelve years ago, when the moon was made of paper and a pleasant old man was the President, Hector Diaz moved with his mother, his grandmother and a platoon of assorted relatives from the slums of North San Juan to El Barrio in the slums of North Manhattan. None of the Diazes spoke English and there were 10 people in three rooms, but the rooms were big, the plumbing was inside and the older Diazes took strength in little Hector, who was 9 and had eyes the color of ripe olives and who seemed to learn English faster than he grew. On Hector’s 11th birthday the family moved to Simpson Street in the South Bronx and Hector moved to the streets, where along with more English he learned the ways of the IRT and of airplane glue.

Two years ago Hector moved from Simpson Street to Avenue C on the Lower East Side, where he changed his ecstasy from glue to red wine in brown paper bags and then to heroin in glassine envelopes. Hector is still the only Diaz who can speak English and his eyes still look like olives, but green ones now, stuffed with red pimento. The Diazes, or what’s left of them, still live on Simpson Street and Hector visits them occasionally. But Hector spends his days on the streets of the Lower East Side, where he and a friend named Louise share their nights in burnt-out buildings and support themselves by mugging their neighbors.

For a time, in the fifties, the streets that run east of Avenue A to the river and below Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge on New York’s Lower East Side were almost a shrine, praised as the breeding ground of armies of doctors and lawyers all of whom looked like Harry Golden. Praising the tenements of their youth (“Sure it was tough, but we had love and desire . . .”), Lower East Side alumni sounded like Nixon talking about his astronauts. Today the incipient Jewish judges are gone, and the hippies of a few years ago are mostly gone, departed for communes or the suburbs. The streets and the buildings, exhausted from generations of bright, aggressive youngsters followed by stoned hippies, look tired, as if they need a rest after 65 years of social ferment. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are gone; the streets are lined with garbage now—human and automotive—and the people are mostly Puerto Rican. The billboards are in Spanish and in every store window a red sign screams “How do you know you don’t have V.D.?/ ¿Cómo sabe Ud. que no tiene enfermedad venérea?” The old-law tenements are crumbling, collapsing, burnt-out hulks. Their windows are covered with tin and plywood and their roofs are ripped away so that the sunlight floods into the upper stories like shrapnel.

[Photo Credit: Steven Siegel]

Gotta love the Petrossian Building on 58th Street and 7th Avenue.

Picture by Ampersand Design.

Check out what I found over at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York–man, this is so dope–Roy Colmer’s photo collection of New York City doors. Three thousand pictures taken in 1976.

Here’s the front of my grandparents apartment building:

Man, this brings back memories. I was five when this picture was taken. Sometimes, the Internet is cool in unexpected ways.

Over at Curbed New York, Hana R. Alberts takes a look at New York City’s ballparks.

[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]

Nice piece by Jim Dwyer in the Times on Louis Requena, a fixture of the New York sports scene for decades:

“When I met Pop at the old stadium, he had a booth in the back of my pizza station, Main 11,” Alva Robinson said. “We got to be friends — swapping pizza and pictures. I do popcorn now. I’m the popcorn lady. But I always made sure Pop had his ice water, soda.”

Pop went by other names at the stadiums where he took pictures for most of the last 55 years. Señor. Magic (Lens). Or simply, Lou. In the backstages of the city’s ballparks, which run on a barter economy of small favors and easy smiles, scores of people who didn’t know what else to call him were part of his everyday life for decades.

Many of them turned out at the Greenwich Village Funeral Home on Tuesday where his full name and the dates that staked out the 93-year span of his life were listed on a digital display: Louis Requena, Dec. 12, 1919 – June 20, 2013.

“Eleven years ago, first day I’m shooting a game for The A.P., and I’m pretty anxious, and my editor says, ‘find this older guy,’ ” said Frank Franklin, a photographer for The Associated Press. “He showed me around, made everything smooth. First inning, there was a play at the plate, runner sliding under the tag. That was the picture, and he nailed it. He was in his 80s.”

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Times]

A 1955 PSA by Milton Caniff. Via the most cool site, The Bristol Board.

[Featured image by Sy Kattelson]

North Brother, the abandoned island in the middle of New York City.

From our pal Diane Firstman comes This Technology Has Been Disconnected:

Saul Leiter: “I started out as a fashion photographer. One cannot say that I was successful but there was enough work to keep me busy. I collaborated with Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs.

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

A Leiter gallery over at On-Line Browsing.

Questions: Taken literally, what’s incorrect in the final scene of Annie Hall (shot from inside O’Neal’s Balloon)?

After that it got pretty late, and, we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her, and I thought of that old joke. You know, this guy goes to his psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And the doctor says, “Well why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships– you know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.

Answer: It wasn’t late at all. If you notice the light, it’s coming from the east, which means this scene was shot early in the morning.

Not that it makes any difference…unless you are an anal New Yorker.

“That’s a polite word for what you are.”

Celebrating 125 years. 

[Photo Credit: David Handschuh, N.Y. Daily News]

From 1939…