Sarah Wrote That

Night Scene, West from 500 Fifth Ave, showing Times, Paramount, Astor & Edison Hotels.
Byron Company, 1937 (photographer unnamed)

by Wired New York contributor @ddny2k

Impressions of the Maiden Voyage of the ‘Queen Mary’ to New York (1936)
Charles Chislett
Yorkshire Film Archive | Cunard Queens [blog]

You really do want to click through to this 30 min. black and white silent film (unfortunately not embeddable). Chislett brought his camera through Times Square at night, on the El, up to “The Yankee Stadium,” and to the top of the Woolworth and Empire State Buildings. He traveled across the Atlantic third class:

The cost of a trip to New York was, for cabin class, £53.15s (equivalent to £2,710 in today’s money, r.p.i.) – according to Merseyside Maritime Museum, this was enough to “keep a family with three children in food for over a year.” The cost for third class was £18.10 (equivalent to £942 in today’s money, r.p.i.) …[…] taking into account how average earnings have risen since 1936 makes it equivalent to £3,530. A considerable sum for a 31 year old bank employee (and this may well have been the cost for just for a one-way ticket!).

The Third Avenue El with Grand Central Depot on the right:

Looking down the 42nd St Branch not long after it was converted to a shuttle in 1879.

[Joseph Brennan, Beach Pneumatic: Alfred Beach’s Pneumatic Subway and the beginnings of rapid transit in New York]

Dusk
Central Park at West 65th Street

Central Park, February 2006

kateoplis:

Battery Park city landfill, 1977

The accompanying piece by poet Cynthia Zarin is a stunner:

That weekend in September we had gone to Sandy Hook because I was dissatisfied with my life, and angry at having to live it, and to have summer end. We drove down through the long cattails, and I was unhappy because the beach that I love doesn’t have cattails. I didn’t like the boardwalk, or that the water was warm. The baby didn’t care. She was thrilled to see the tiny crabs burrowing in the sand. She drank her red juice, and it made a red mark around her mouth, and I remember being tired of juice and juice boxes and the heat. The baby tracked sand over the towels with her wet feet, and I looked across the water to where we could see New York City gray with dust rising up in its stone caldron and I said, “The last thing I want to see when I go to the beach is the twin towers.” That is what I said.

Reblogged from kateoplis

7 Jul 2010 13:30