Vintage Photos of Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1950

Ellis Island is a historical site that opened in 1892 as an immigration station, a purpose it served for more than 60 years until it closed in 1954. Located at the mouth of Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, Ellis Island saw millions of newly arrived immigrants pass through its doors. In fact, it has been estimated that close to 40 percent of all current U.S. citizens can trace at least one of their ancestors to Ellis Island.

When Ellis Island opened, a great change was taking place in U.S. immigration. Fewer arrivals were coming from northern and western Europe—Germany, Ireland, Britain and the Scandinavian countries—as more and more immigrants poured in from southern and eastern Europe.

Among this new generation were Jews escaping from political and economic oppression in czarist Russia and eastern Europe and Italians escaping poverty in their country. There were also Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks, along with non-Europeans from Syria, Turkey and Armenia.

The reasons they left their homes in the Old World included war, drought, famine and religious persecution, and all had hopes for greater opportunity in the New World.

In the fall of 1950, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt went out to the island in Upper New York Bay to make some pictures. The rough machinery of politics had brought confusion and delay to the processing of thousands of men, women and children looking to step on to American soil. But beyond chronicling the impact that political rivalries in Washington were having on real lives, Eisenstaedt’s pictures also encompass a more permanent truth about the immigrant’s journey, and these images mirror photographs made at Ellis Island decades before.

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Beautiful Girls in New York City, 1944

In 1944, Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed a group of fashionable ladies in front of Rockefeller Center. The series photo called “Beautiful Girls in New York City.”

World War II had a big impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. There was a shortage of fabrics and the economy was shrinking, which caused a lot of people to end up in poverty. Since fabrics were scarce, clothing of the 1940s women style was simple, but still costly.

Most of the women’s fashions during the 1940s were designed with small waist, and skirt above the knee. Do-it-yourself home fashions were encouraged, and women were educated on how to conserve material or update older dresses to the latest fashions. Again, these fashions reflected the style of the utility clothes.

On the Night of May 2, 1977, Bianca Jagger Rode Into Her 27th Birthday at Studio 54 on a Horse

Studio 54 was a staple of the 1970s and ’80s party scene. It was a serious celebrity playground, with regulars like Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Taylor, and Farrah Fawcett. Bianca Jagger can comfortably take some of the credit for making Studio 54 a household name, considering she threw her 27th birthday party at the club a week after it opened. This gave Studio 54 enormous publicity, and helped it become one of the most iconic party spots of all time.

Obviously Jagger’s husband, Mick Jagger, celebrated the night with her. Some other big names that made an appearance were Liza Minelli, Halston, and Calvin Klein. Model and actress, Jerry Hall, also showed up, but this was about 20 years before she became Mick Jagger’s second wife.

The club was filled with white balloons and one wall featured a light bulb display spelling out Bianca. To her surprise, a white horse greeted Jagger at the club. Wearing her red, flowy dress, Jagger mounted the horse and a naked Hugo led her to the dance floor. The photos of that moment landed Jagger on the front page of newspapers around the world.

“I would like to set the record straight. Mick Jagger and I walked into Studio 54,” Jagger wrote in a letter to the Financial Times, following an interview in 2015.

“Steve Rubell (Studio 54’s co-founder) had apparently seen a picture in a magazine of me riding a white horse in Nicaragua and he thought it would be a clever idea to bring a horse to the club as a birthday surprise for me. It was a beautiful white horse that reminded me of mine, and I made the foolish decision to get on it for a few minutes. The photographed image went around the world, giving rise to the fable – that I arrived at Studio 54 on a white horse.”

Jagger’s renewed insistence that she did not arrive horseback to the popular Seventies establishment is as a result of her work as an environmentalist and animal-rights campaigner.

“No doubt you will agree with me that it is one thing to, on the spur of the moment, get on a horse in a nightclub, but it is quite another to ride in on one,” she continued. “I find the insinuation that I would ride a horse into a nightclub offensive. Hopefully this letter will finally put this Studio 54 fable – out to pasture.”

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Vintage Photos of Auto Polo Matches in New York From Early the 1910s

Auto polo was a motorsport invented in the United States with rules and equipment similar to equestrian polo but using automobiles instead of horses. The sport was popular at fairs, exhibitions and sports venues across the United States and several areas in Europe from 1911 until the late 1920s. It was, however, dangerous and carried the risk of injury and death to the participants and spectators, and expensive damage to vehicles.

The official inventor of auto polo is purported to be Ralph “Pappy” Hankinson, a Ford automobile dealer from Topeka who devised the sport as a publicity stunt in 1911 to sell Model T cars. The reported “first” game of auto polo occurred in an alfalfa field in Wichita on July 20, 1912, using four cars and eight players (dubbed the “Red Devils” and the “Gray Ghosts”) and was witnessed by 5,000 people.

While Hankinson is credited with the first widely publicized match and early promotion of the sport, the concept of auto polo is older and was proposed as early as 1902 by Joshua Crane Jr. of the Dedham Polo Club in Boston, with the Patterson Daily Press noting at the time of Crane’s exhibition that the sport was “not likely to become very popular.”

Auto polo was also first played in New York City inside a regimental armory building in 1908 or 1909. The popularity of the sport increased after its debut in July 1912, with multiple auto polo leagues founded across the country under the guidance of the Auto Polo Association. The first large-scale exhibition of auto polo in the eastern United States was held on November 22, 1912, at League Stadium in Washington, D.C. Another exhibition was staged the following day at Hilltop Park in New York.

(Photos: Library of Congress)

20 Sweet Photos Captured Springtime in Brooklyn in 1949

This is Brooklyn just four years after the end of World War II.

In 1949, when Brooklyn on the north side of Prospect Park was still a collection of working-class and middle-income neighborhoods and urban decay had yet to take hold, a LIFE photographer went out and took some photos.

In a LIFE spread titled “Spring Comes to Brooklyn,” Ralph Morse captured street life in the neighborhoods located in the shadow of the Williamsburgh Bank Tower. The images look like simple snapshots. Backyard gardens are planted. Kids play in the (strangely car-free) streets. Teenagers hang around corner candy stores and newsstands...

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Al Pacino’s Mugshot After Being Arrested on Suspicion of Attempted Robbery, 1961

Nobody usually looks their best when posing for a police mugshot.

It happened on the night of January 7, 1961 in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, when Al Pacino was only 20 years old. He was just a young actor at the time, and along with two actor friends, Vincent J. Calcagni and Bruce Cohen, was apparently on the way to an acting job when he was detained by several police officers.

The cops had gotten suspicious when the vehicle that the three actors were traveling in circled the block multiple times. When the officers approached the car, they found the three men inside wearing black masks and gloves. Upon further inspection, the cops also found a loaded .38 caliber pistol in the backseat. Calcagni, Cohen, and Pacino were charged with possession of a concealed weapon and eventually taken to jail.

Bail ended up being set at $2,000, but no one could afford it, so Pacino and his pals spent three days behind bars. During questioning, Pacino — who was described by the arresting officer as being “very helpful” — explained that they pistol in the trunk was actually a prop, which he and his friends needed for an acting job. Criminal charges were eventually dropped.

Now, it’s not entirely outside of the realm of possibility that Pacino would be caught in such a shady situation, considering he was something of a street kid and a troublemaker during his early teen years.

Though he eventually left that life behind him, and, following the success of his role as Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, launched an acting career that would span nearly 50 years.

Times Square During the 1940s Through Fascinating Photos

Times Square is a major commercial intersection in central Manhattan at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. It acquired its name in 1904 when Albert Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, moved the newspaper’s headquarters to a new skyscraper on what was then known as Longacre Square. The name stuck, even after The New York Times moved across Broadway in 1913.

Times Square is sometimes referred to as “the Crossroads of the World”, “the Center of the Universe”, “the heart of the Great White Way”, and “the heart of the world”. It is one of the world’s busiest pedestrian areas, and also the hub of the Broadway Theater District and a major center of the world’s entertainment industry.

Now known worldwide as a symbol of the American spirit, Times Square is home to many popular Manhattan attractions, including Hard Rock Cafe, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, and ABC’s Times Square Studios (where Good Morning America is filmed).

Here is a set of fascinating black and white photos that shows what Times Square looked like in the 1940s.

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Stunning Portraits of Edie Sedgwick Photographed by Nat Finkelstein, 1966

Nat Finkelstein was the house photographer for the Factory from 1964 to 1967, he created spontaneous portraits not only of Factory regulars like Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga but also of the artists and celebrities who drifted in and out of the Warhol orbit.

Finkelstein was on hand when Warhol presented Bob Dylan with one of his Elvis “Flaming Star” silk-screen portraits, and took pictures of Allen Ginsberg and Salvador Dalí. He captured Sedgwick and Nico, of the Velvet Underground, at their most glamorous, and photographed the first Velvet Underground performances and recording sessions.

Here are some stunning portraits of Edie Sedgwick taken by Nat Finkelstein in Warhol’s Factory in 1966:

Skater Performing on a Tiny Ice Rink in Store Window, New York City, 1939

What is said to be the world’s smallest ice-skating rink was constructed in a display window of a New York City furniture store as a novel means of letting passers-by and possible customers know about the cool shopping conditions afforded by the store’s new air-conditioning plant.

This miniature ice carnival made a novel display for a store window, 1939. (via Modern Mechanix)

Measuring only twelve feet long and six feet wide, the rink was placed immediately behind a sidewalk window, and decorated on three sides with evergreen branches and artificial snow to give it an outdoor effect. A figure skater was then hired to perform on the tiny rink, as shown in the picture.

Torches of Freedom: Photographs of Women Smoking Publicly During the Easter Sunday Parade in 1929

Cigarette companies began selectively advertising to women in the late 1920s. In 1928 George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, realized the potential market that could be found in women and said, “It will be like opening a gold mine right in our front yard.” Yet some women who were already smoking were seen as smoking incorrectly. In 1919 a hotel manager said that women “don’t really know what to do with the smoke. Neither do they know how to hold their cigarettes properly. Actually they make a mess of the whole performance.” Tobacco companies had to make sure that women would not be ridiculed for using cigarettes in public and Philip Morris even sponsored a lecture series that taught women the art of smoking.

On March 31, 1929, at the amidst of the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City, a young woman, Bertha Hunt, stepped out into the crowded Fifth Avenue and lights up a Lucky Strike cigarette. This act, however, is not advertising for Lucky Strike or for any other cigarette brand for that matter. It is a public relations campaign, aimed at encouraging women to have equal opportunities – including the right to smoke and not be classified as a “fallen woman” – the name given to prostitutes and “characterless” women.

Miss Hunt issued the following communiqué from the smoke-clouded battlefield: “I hope that we have started something and that these torches of freedom, with no particular brand favored, will smash the discriminatory taboo on cigarettes for women and that our sex will go on breaking down all discriminations.”

The incident was highlighted even more because the press had been informed in advance of Hunt’s course of actions, and had been provided with appropriate leaflets and pamphlets. Eddie Bernays – the father of public relations – whose secretary just so happened to be, Bertha Hunt, cleverly arranged this public relations campaign. Apart from the issue of smoking being taboo amongst women, there was also the issue that, “…women didn’t care for the green packaging of lucky strikes, and the manufacturer concluded that changing the color was too expensive.” Bernays was able to address this problem by incorporating the similar shade of green into the latest women’s fashion. This, in turn, made women subconsciously like the green and associated the packaging of the cigarettes with that of their clothing.

While walking down the street Hunt told the New York Times that she first got the idea for this course of action when a man on the street asked her to extinguish her cigarette as it embarrassed him. “I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the situation.” The New York Times dated April 1, 1929 ran a story titled, “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom”. As women all over the country took to this new found symbol of their emancipation aggressively, Bernays must have had the last laugh at the ironic date of the story.

Mrs. Taylor-Scott Hardin parades down New York’s Fifth Avenue with her husband while smoking “Torches of Freedom,” a gesture of protest for absolute equality with men, 1929.

Edith Lee smokes a cigarette on the “Torches for Freedom” march, New York, 1929.

Ten young women followed Bertha Hunt that day down Fifth Avenue, brandishing their torches of freedom. The audience’s imagination was captured as newspapers enthusiastically reported on this new scandalous trend. Bernays used “sexual liberation as a form of control.” The days that followed saw Bernays not only emphasizing the liberation movement for women as far as cigarettes were concerned, but also waxing eloquence on its slimming properties and glamour quotient that ensured women getting hooked to Lucky Strikes. Sales doubled from 1923 to 1929. Bernay’s justified his $25,000 paycheck to Hill and their fruitful association continued for another 8 years that saw a miraculous jump in the sales of cigarettes. While voting rights were yet to be granted to women, Eddie Bernays got them an equally symbolic though hollow torch of freedom in a spectacular fashion.

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The Story Behind David Bowie’s Infamous Mugshot, 1976

In the early morning hours of March 21, after a concert at the Community War Memorial arena in Rochester, David Bowie was arrested on a felony pot possession charge. The Thin White Duke, 29 at the time, was nabbed along with Iggy Pop and two other codefendants at the Americana Rochester Hotel. Bowie was held in the Monroe County jail for a few hours before being released. The below Rochester Police Department mugshot was taken four days after Bowie’s arrest, when the performer appeared at City Court for arraignment.

The Bowie mugshot was recovered by Gary Hess while he was working for a local auction house which was clearing out the estate of a retired Rochester police officer. Gary recognized the man in the picture as Bowie and literally rescued it from the garbage.

Because he was falling behind on bills and needed the extra money, Gary gave the photo to his brother, Todd Hess, to sell on eBay. The photo sold in the fall of 2007 for more than $2,700 to an “uber fan” in the midwest who had some connection with the superstar. According to Todd, the buyer made Bowie aware that she had purchased the mugshot; and, she reported, Bowie was pleased that she won the one-of-a-kind item.

According to reports in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the cops found 182 grams (a little over 6.4 ounces) of marijuana there. Bowie and three others — Pop, a bodyguard named Dwain Voughns, and a young Rochester woman named Chiwah Soo — were charged with fifth-degree criminal possession of marijuana, a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Bowie and Pop were booked under their real names, David Jones and James Osterberg Jr. The group spent the rest of the night in the Monroe County Jail and were released at about 7 a.m. on $2,000 bond each. They were supposed to be arraigned the next day, but Bowie left town to go to his next concert in Springfield, Massachusetts. His lawyer appeared and asked for the court’s indulgence, explaining the heavy penalties for breaking concert engagements. He promised the judge that Bowie would appear the following morning on March 25.

Bowie showed up for his arraignment looking dapper in his Thin White Duke clothing. It was then that his mug shot was taken — so we’ll never actually know what Bowie looked like when he was unexpectedly dragged into jail at 3 a.m. The police escorted the rock star in and out of the courtroom mostly through back corridors, shielding him from a crowd of fans who showed up at the courthouse. Reporter John Stewart describes the scene in the next day’s Democrat and Chronicle:

Bowie and his group ignored reporters’ shouted questions and fans’ yells as he walked in — except for one teenager who got his autograph as he stepped off the escalator.

His biggest greeting was the screams of about a half-dozen suspected prostitutes awaiting arraignment in the rear of the corridor outside the courtroom.

Asked for a plea by City Court Judge Alphonse Cassetti to the charge of fifth-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, Bowie said, “not guilty, sir.” The court used his real name — David Jones.

He stood demurely in front of the bench with his attorneys. He wore a gray three-piece leisure suit and a pale brown shirt. He was holding a matching hat. His two companions were arraigned on the same charge.

The defense lawyer told the judge that Bowie and the others had never been arrested before. The judge allowed them to remain free on bond until a grand jury convened. Bowie and his entourage went on with their tour, and the grand jury eventually decided not to indict anyone.

(via Open Culture)