Winter, Fifth Avenue (1893)

Winter, Fifth Avenue is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1893. The photograph was made at the corner of the Fifth Avenue and the 35th Street in New York. It was one of the first pictures that Stieglitz took using a more practical hand camera after his return from Europe.

Stieglitz later wrote that this photograph was the result of a three hour wait in a rather inclement snow storm: “In order to obtain pictures by means of the hand camera it is well to choose your subject, regardless of figures, and carefully study the lines and lighting. After having determined upon these watch the passing figures and await the moment in which everything is in balance; that is, satisfies your eye. This often means hours of patient waiting. My picture, ‘Fifth Avenue, Winter,’ is the result of a three hours’ stand during a fierce snow-storm on February 22d, 1893, awaiting the proper moment. My patience was duly rewarded. Of course, the result contained an element of chance, as I might have stood there for hours without succeeding in getting the desired picture.”

The picture depicts a carriage driving through a snowy urban landscape. The effect of the snow blurring gives the picture an impressionistic atmosphere. The picture was later wrongly dated by the author as having been taken on February 22, 1892, but it only could have been made the following year, on February 22, 1893, judging by the weather descriptions of both days.

Winter – Fifth Avenue (1893) by Alfred Stieglitz

18 Vintage Photographs of Coney Island, New York During the 1940s

It was a troubling decade: America was a nation healing from the Great Depression, and had spent four years engaged in a war that would devastate millions worldwide. But on the beaches of Coney Island, New Yorkers young and old could forget their worries for the day as they splashed in the sea, relaxed with their sweetheart in the sand or chowed down on a hot dog from the original Nathan’s.

Vintage photographs from the 1940s – before, during and after America’s involvement in World War II – illustrate the carefree summers of years past. It is an atmosphere that can still be found any given day on the famed boardwalk.

See more»

New Wave Downtown Fashion by Edo Bertoglio

Edo Bertoglio is a Swiss photographer and film director. He received his degree in film directing and editing at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Francais in Paris in 1975. He moved to New York City in 1976, where he found work as a photographer for Italian Vogue, and Andy Warhol’s Interview, and other magazines.

He became involved in the downtown art and music scenes of the late 1970s and early ’80s. During this time he was married to fashion designer Maripol, whom he has since divorced. He also took his photography experience and familiarity to rock music to do photographic work for the covers of LPs, completing many assignments for Atlantic, Arista, Chrysalis Records and Warner Brothers Records. He photographed The Bongos for RCA Records and for GQ Magazine. He also worked on Glenn O'Brien’s late night countercultural talk show TV Party.

In 1980, Bertoglio and Maripol secured backing from Rizzoli, through Fiorucci, to produce a film (with rock critic Glenn O'Brien) about the No Wave music scene and the general Lower East Side milieu. The film, titled New York Beat, was directed by Bertoglio, and young graffiti writer and future artist Jean-Michel Basquiat played the lead role, which was written by O’Brien to mirror his real life. The no-wave bands DNA, Tuxedomoon, The Plastics, James Chance and the Contortions, and others appear in the movie, as well as Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Fab Five Freddy, Deborah Harry and others play bit parts. After shooting finished in January 1981 Rizzoli pulled out of funding the project, and footage lay unedited for almost 20 years until it was released under the title Downtown 81 in 2000.

See more»

Vintage Postcards Show Hotel Restaurants of New York in the 1950s

Returning World War II veterans created a post-war economic boom and the development of large housing tracts in eastern Queens and Nassau County as well as similar suburban areas in New Jersey.

New York emerged from the war unscathed as the leading city of the world, with Wall Street leading America’s place as the world’s dominant economic power. The United Nations Headquarters was completed in 1952, solidifying New York’s global geopolitical influence.

A set of vintage postcards shows what hotel restaurants of New York looked like in the 1950s.

The New Fallsview, Ellenville, New York

Goshen Inn, Goshen, New York

Grossinger's, Grossinger, New York

Grossinger's, Grossinger, New York

Hotel Astor, New York

See more»

Then and Now Photos From the Famous Funny Faces Photo Made by Brooke Shields and Christie Brinkley in 1987

Brooke Shields and Christie Brinkley first made the funny faces—twisted pouts and crazy eyes—at a party on Feb. 10, 1987. Twenty-six years later, the famous duo showed they’re as goofy as ever, recreating the silly expressions while posing together.

The gals ran into each other at New York’s Park Avenue Garage Spring Sale in 2013, where the two snapped the silly selfie, with Brinkley writing on her Facebook page: “Hey Bloggers! Reprising our famous pose from over 30 years ago. ...Yep we still got it ! Let’s see if You can still move YOUR face muscles like this? Lol!!!!!”

While the stars wacky looks are hilarious, sure, even more impressed are their ageless faces. Hard to believe almost 30 years have passed!

Photos of Madonna Taken by Her Boyfriend Dan Gilroy in New York in 1979

Dan Gilroy met Madonna, then an aspiring dancer, at a party in 1979. They became romantically involved and she moved into the synagogue where Gilroy lived with his brother Ed Gilroy in Corona, Queens. It also served as a studio for the brothers, who at times worked as musicians or comics under the name Bil and Gil.

While Gilroy and his brother were waiting tables during the day and performing their comedy routines at night, Madonna was at the synagogue practicing drums. She also began writing songs, Gilroy taught her how to play guitar and they formed the band Breakfast Club.

Madonna convinced Gilroy to let her perform her own songs, which he reluctantly agreed. She promoted the band and they performed local gigs. In 1980, Madonna left Breakfast Club to form the band Emmy and the Emmys.

These photo taken on the bus by Dan Gilroy, whom she was dating and visiting at the time, in New York in 1979.

See more»

Rare Photographs of New York City’s Parade at the End of World War I

On March 25, 1919, 20,000 men of the New York National Guard’s 27th Division owned the streets of Manhattan. Two million people turned out to see the division march five miles up Fifth Avenue after they came home from World War I.

City officials estimated Manhattan’s population grew by 500,000 as people came from upstate New York and surrounding states to see the parade. There were 10,000 policemen on duty—6,000 regular cops and 4,000 reserves—to control the crowds. Five hundred plainclothes detectives were scattered throughout the crowd to watch for trouble.

There was a special grandstand for 500 Civil War veterans and another for 1,000 Spanish-American War Soldiers. And 6,820 wounded Soldiers and Sailors who had been convalescing in New York City hospitals lined the parade route.

The parade route’s official start at Washington Square featured a massive white victory arch that featured four balloons floating above the road and white pillars lining the route. An arch at 60th Street was covered with crystal glass. Searchlights illuminated the structures at night.

Horses pull a carriage filled with flowers while large crowds look on.

Looking down Fifth Avenue, from 61st Street. That is the Arch of Jewels in the distance.

Late in the parade, as the sun was low in the sky. That might be, at top left, the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza, outside the Plaza Hotel.

Soldiers on parade, marching north on Fifth Avenue. Note the street sign on the light pole: 59th Street and 5th Avenue. A part of the Arch of Jewels is visible at top right.

An artillery gun. This one may have been captured from the Germans.

See more»

Amazing Photographs of the Silver Apples Performing in New York City, 1968

Silver Apples jammed with Jimi Hendrix, counted John Lennon as a fan, and produced extraordinary electronic music — with nothing but a drum kit and a pile of electrical junk.

The band, electronics wizard Simeon Coxe and ace drummer Danny Taylor, deserve to be remembered as one of the handful of generally groundbreaking acts in late 1960s American rock. The New York-based duo’s June 1968 debut was perhaps the earliest album to incorporate breakbeats, found sounds and atonal noise into (more-or-less) conventional song structures, and at its best their beat-heavy electronic music still sounds dazzling and other-worldly.

Their achievement is all the more impressive when one considers the sheer logistical complications (and frequent electric shocks) involved in mobilizing their battery of oscillators, generators and synthesizers. Their two albums—Silver Apples (1968) and Contact (1969)— are uneven, but both contain astounding music, with flourishes that may be mainstream now, but must have sounded completely out-there at the time. As with most visionaries, they were little appreciated while in business, and not much original press concerning them exists.

These amazing photos of electronic duo Silver Apples, taken by Syeus Mottel, come from two performances in New York City in the spring of 1968: a rooftop music industry gathering, and a public performance in Washington Square.

See more»

The Story Behind the Photo of Brooke Shields Doing Goofy Face on the Street of New York City, 1981

At 7 o’clock in the morning, on the day of her Sweet Sixteen party, Christa Brooke Camille Shields pokes the world’s most perfect face out from her bedroom in a New York City apartment and yells: "MOM, do I have to wear my CALVINS today because I'm doing an interview?"

“Brooke was the world’s most famous teenage model when I took this picture, and I had never been around anyone so naturally beautiful,” photographer Tom Zito said of the image. “I was working on a cover story for Rolling Stone about child actors, and Brooke was simultaneously the busiest and the most gracious of the group I met.”

“I first glimpsed her at seven am on the morning of her Sweet Sixteen party. Her mother had made coffee for me in the kitchen of the East Side apartment they shared, and Brooke poked that oh-so-perfect face out of her bedroom door and yelled, ‘Mom, do I have to wear my Calvins today because I’m doing an interview?’

“Like Brooke herself, the question was right in the buffer zone between innocence and pragmatism, with no mercenary overtones. Many people had criticized her stage-door mother Teri for allowing Brooke to deliver the infamous line, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” in a much seen series of six TV commercials, for which she was paid a half million dollars. Worse still, the critics railed, her mother had let her play a nineteenth century New Orleans prostitute in the film Pretty Baby when she was only twelve. The reality was that Brooke seemed unfazed, more like sixteen going on nine; the Calvins came between her and her horse, which she was much more interested in than boys, let alone sex.

“Franco Zeffirelli, who directed her in the film Endless Love, said to me, ‘Some women have so much experience that you begin to direct them and they cut you off. With Brooke, I say, ‘I want to see passion, and ecstasy on your face,’ and she shrugs her shoulders. And I want to say... But there is no way you can say that to her. She is too innocent, too sweet. I would be too embarrassed.’

“When I asked Brooke why she had declined the cover of a Sports Illustrated bathing suit issue, she matter-of-factly pulled out the front of the pink polo shirt she was wearing and said, ‘No way. Nothing up here.’ At the time of this encounter, Brooke had an allowance of ten dollars and was receiving about two thousand pieces of fan mail a week. ‘Most of them are very nice, photo requests,’ Teri told me. ‘There are some crazy ones. If it’s a really rotten one from a kid, I’ll call the mother. The mother says, ‘I had nothing to do with that letter.’ And I say, ‘My daughter is a very nice girl,’ and then I put Brookie on. The apology usually shows up in three days.’

“When I suggested to Brooke that we have lunch at my father’s social club, she demonstrated that, at 16, she already understood what made for good copy. ‘That’s kind of boring, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you come to a shoot.’ Brooke got started in the modeling business at the age of eleven months. Francesco Scavullo was sitting in his studio with 300 kids, casting for an Ivory Soap commercial, and called his friend Teri Shields. ‘You can’t imagine anything worse than Scavullo surrounded by screaming kids,’ she said. ‘So he asked me to bring Brooke over and we made thirty-five dollars.’

“Now Brooke and I were en route to a studio in downtown Manhattan, where Scavullo, who died in 2003, was once again going to shoot her, this time for a Cosmo cover. As we were walking down Fifth Avenue, I asked if I could take her picture. Immediately she started posing, then said, ‘I hate being serious.’ ‘Do anything you want,’ I told her.”

This is what happened!

(Photo by © Tom Zito)

Photos of Sterling St. Jacques and Bianca Jagger Dancing at Studio 54 in New York City, 1978

Born 1957 in Salt Lake City, Utah, American model, actor and dancer Sterling St. Jacques was the adopted son of actor Raymond St. Jacques. He had bit parts in films such as Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) with Faye Dunaway, Dinah East (1970) and the Italian movie Sistemo l’America e torno (1974).

Together, Sterling and model Pat Cleveland were regulars at Studio 54. Although they appeared in public as a couple, and were briefly engaged, Sterling was widely known to be gay.

In the 1980s, Sterling moved to Europe to try and become a nightclub DJ and advance his modeling career. Soon after, he claimed to the press he was broke and was thinking of opening a dance studio in Manhattan. This idea never came to fruition and instead he regularly appeared in both high-end and low-brow magazines and even performed Italo disco.

St. Jacques contracted AIDS and died in 1984 in New York City, not knowing who gave it to him.

Take a look at these vintage photos to see moments of Sterling St. Jacques and Bianca Jagger dancing at Studio 54 in New York City in 1978.

See more»

Early Photographs of Bob Dylan Taken by John Cohen in New York City, 1962

In 1962, shortly after a young Bob Dylan arrived in New York City, he met fellow musician John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers. Upon learning that Cohen was also a photographer, Dylan asked him to make photographs of him. They both went to Cohen’s East Village loft and rooftop for a few hours to make some photos in “a moment of invention… without planning, and with the freedom that comes from uncertainty.”

“These are pictures from a more innocent time at the beginning of Bob Dylan’s career,” Cohen recalled. “This is what he might have looked like when he first arrived in New York... the making of these photographs was quite naïve. We weren’t into creating a persona for Bob. I was more interested in documenting what was before the camera, and what I was seeing wasn’t so clear. The session was just a free-flowing pursuit of picture making and taking poses. We didn’t know what he was going to look like.”

See more»

25 Fascinating Vintage Photographs That Capture Everyday Life in Central Park in the Summer of 1961

Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the fifth-largest park in the city by area, covering 843 acres (341 ha). It is the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors annually as of 2016, and is the most filmed location in the world.

The park’s first areas were opened to the public in late 1858. Additional land at the northern end of Central Park was purchased in 1859, and the park was completed in 1876. After a period of decline in the early 20th century, New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses started a program to clean up Central Park in the 1930s. The Central Park Conservancy, created in 1980 to combat further deterioration in the late 20th century, refurbished many parts of the park starting in the 1980s.

The 1960s marked the beginning of an “Events Era” in Central Park that reflected the widespread cultural and political trends of the period. In the summer of 1961, LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe documented New Yorkers enjoying pastimes and pleasures in the park, about a century old at the time.

See more»