New York City in the late 70’s and early 80’s was in some ways very different from the New York of today, but in many ways very much the same. Long before it’s destruction, the World Trade Center dominated the skyline as a symbol of the city’s importance to the country. The Statue of Liberty and the Wall Street Stock Exchange were respectively symbols of freedom and U.S. economic power. Broadway, world-class museums and restaurants - a major center for network television, advertising, a vibrant music, art, and fashion scene all contributed to making New York one of the great cities of the world.
World Trade Center - August, 1980
As a historical reference for this period, the Vietnam War had ended in the early 70’s, however this time was not without some worldwide upheaval. The Iranian revolution began with the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran - the subsequent hostage crisis dominated the U.S. news cycle for 444 days from late 1979 to early 1981. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 to support the Afghan Communist government. Both of these important international events have had far reaching historical influence. The rise of Iran as a Middle East power, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the growth of fundamentalist terrorist groups can all be traced in a certain degree back to these events.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s, New York was a series of contrasts. Unlike today, the hip grungy art scene existed in the Soho district. This chaotic anarchist art scene included affordable loft apartments, the onset of graffiti art, a thriving drug culture, and the heyday of punk and new wave music. In contrast, further uptown you had the more bourgeois Broadway, Radio City Music Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and established museums such as the Modern Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Guggenheim. Also uptown and at its zenith was Studio 54, the center of the short-lived disco scene - plenty of alcohol and drugs for sure, but it couldn’t have been more different than what was taking place in Soho and the East Village. I existed somewhere between those worlds, leaning maybe a little toward the bourgeois side (after all, I made my living in commercial photography).
This blog is intended to give a feel for what New York City looked like in the late 70’s and early 80’s through my experience and street photography. These photos are a collection of street images I took during this period. While there were plenty of homeless, crazy people, junkies, and beautiful people roaming the streets, I was more interested in design, lighting, the vitality and diversity of the city rather than trying to make a social statement. It was lonely enough being one among millions of people in a very compact area without focusing on the depressing underbelly of the city.
Manhattan looking uptown from the Observation Deck at the top of the World Trade Center
I arrived in New York shortly after graduating from photography school in California. I believed the old axiom, “if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.” Back then, the world was not digital. There was no such thing as cell phones, desktop computers, digital photography, or photoshop. Photography was all film (positive transparency or negative film) - any retouching was done by hand. In my opinion, New York was at the top of the commercial photography spectrum. Film formats ranged anywhere from 35mm to 8”X10”. I got my first job as a grunt studio assistant and gradually worked my way up the ladder as a freelance assistant, then studio manager - eventually opening my own studio where commercially I did still life advertising and some fashion work to earn a living. I learned a lot along the way, but the stars in my eyes eventually began to diminish. In reality, I was much more interested in the test work I did for myself than I was in the commercial stuff.
Manhattan island was even then packed with tall buildings and a dense population. You could get just about anything by walking around the corner from wherever you were. The Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground of the first photo below celebrated its 100th birthday in 1983. Iconic landmark buildings existed then as they do today with the exception of the World Trade Center. The Flatiron, Metropolitan Life, and Empire State buildings are but a few. Who hasn’t seen King Kong meeting his end at the top of the Empire State building?
Manhattan architecture was then very much a mix of the old and new. There were buildings of all sizes and shapes - office buildings, old and new apartment buildings, brownstones, small apartment walkups with a retail store on the bottom floor, converted loft buildings, luxury Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, large department stores and hotels. You name it - the architecture ran the gamut. Fire escapes were a feature of all the older high rise buildings. Water towers also doted the skyline. Many buildings also featured sculptured figures - every now and then some old construction material would drop off a building to the sidewalk below. When your time was up, your time was up.
Traffic in New York was always an adventure. Double parking everywhere. When driving in the city, you jockeyed for position more than stayed in a lane. The streets were filled with many pedestrians and all manner of vehicles - from automobiles to bicycles, delivery trucks, buses, and taxis. Construction was always going on with cranes taking up space on the street. The typical New Yorker is aggressive if anything. It was an ordinary occurrence for a pedestrian to jump out in the middle of the street to hail a cab or get directions. However, for most people, the main way of getting around Manhattan other than walking was by subway - or a yellow cab if you were really in a hurry.
There were people on the street 24/7 - coming and going to work, shopping on Fifth Avenue, panhandlers, crazy people, tourists, ordinary people cleaning up the city, old people enjoying Central Park on a nice fall Sunday afternoon. At Rockefeller Center, a courtyard transitioned between an outdoor restaurant in the summer to an ice skating rink in the winter. Times Square has always been an attraction teeming with thousands of people, but in the 70’s and 80’s, it was an seedy mix of Broadway, XXX venues, movie theaters, and advertising billboards. It was cleaned up in the 90’s and looks very different today. While out on the street in Manhattan, you could see just about anything at any particular time, like a guy walking his pet llama promoting who knows what or a mime entertaining the crowd. One time I saw a woman walking down 23rd street smoking a cigarette dressed in nothing but her high heel shoes - buck naked during rush hour at 9 AM! I didn’t have my camera handy, so I can’t prove that one.
New York culture for me was in the live music venues and multitude of world class museums. I could view great art of the past while spending very little money. It was a great education in lighting, composition, and design. Whenever I was struggling to come up with ideas for my personal work, I would visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, or Modern Museum of Art. The Guggenheim building itself was a work of art. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it stands as one of the most unique structures anywhere in the world. Occasionally I would get invited to a party or get together at friends’ loft apartments where I got a chance to see how the other half lived. My favorite local watering hole and music venue was the Lone Star Cafe on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. No longer in existence, I couldn’t resist a bar with a giant iguana on top whose slogan was “Too Much Ain’t Enough.”
My first apartment in the city was in an old converted hotel on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village on the outskirts of the grungy art scene. One small dumpy room with a bathroom, tiny refrigerator, and a hot plate - but being poor and single, a place to sleep was all I needed. When not working a lot of long hours, I hung out in local haunts listening to a lot of live music, walked or took the subway everywhere, went to the movies, and ate a lot of pizza. Years after the early days of Bob Dylan, gentrification of the area hadn’t taken hold yet. There was still a lively night life with music venues up Waverly Place toward Washington Square Park. I had a clear site line to the Adam and Eve bar right out my window across the street - I learned to sleep despite the noise. Down the street at Washington Square Park, street musicians would preform and there was always some counter-culture thing going on. Graffiti slogans were written all over the arch walls. Building murals were beginning to become a thing back then - flyers were also glued to the building walls promoting local music gigs and off-off Broadway theater.
I met my future wife in the early 80’s and at the time lived in a one bedroom rent-controlled apartment in a three-floor walkup above a carpet store on First Avenue between 19th and 20th Streets. There was a typical New York playground around the corner - a homeless population camped out there at night during the summer. During the day, particularly on the weekend there was always a basketball game. My wife worked down in the Wall Street district and owned a car that we parked in Hoboken, NJ - it was too expensive to park it in New York. Every time we wanted to drive out of town, I would have to take the Path train to Hoboken, get the car out of the parking garage, drive through the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River which exited in lower Manhattan near Little Italy and Chinatown, try to find a parking space near our apartment, load up the car, and drive back out through the Holland Tunnel - vice versa when we came back from trips down to Maryland or up into New England. By the early 80's, I had my own studio on Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street - I could walk to work. I spent many a late night at the studio. When I wasn’t working, I was looking for work - rain or snow.
We moved away from New York in 1983 and I ended up changing careers, but I have very fond memories of my time there.
Most of the images in this blog were shot on Kodachrome film with a Nikon F 35mm camera. Scans were done with a Canon 9000F Mark II Scanner. There is minimal editing. Photoshop was used for control of contrast and color. I will post some of my New York studio still life and fashion work in a later blog.