Text and photographs by Stephen Harmon
Remember when subway cars were covered with graffiti and the Dakota was not yet cleaned? Here’s another look around the Upper West Side in those vanished days of the 1970s and 80s.
I hope you find something to enjoy.
Stephen Harmon is a longtime Upper West Sider, a retired lawyer, and a world-class photographer whose work is on display in many of the city’s museums, including The Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York Historical, and The New York Public Library.
Check out our audio interview with Stephen Harmon on Rag Radio — HERE.
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I love these so much. I wish there was a way to click on the pictures to enlarge them, so we could see all the details.
These photos are historic. I remember being a young child seeing all of those Chevy Caprice Yellow Cabs and RTS buses.
Today we have yellow taxis that use Toyota Sienna Minivans, Ford Escapes, Toyota Rav4s and even a few Tesla Model 3s
Does anyone remember Joe Testagrosse? He had an extensive photo collection of NYC trains and subways throughout the 1980s. I always marvel over his photos!!
Thank you so much!
Don’t know if this will give you what you’re looking for, but you can right-click on the image and select ‘Open image in new tab’ option. Then you can zoom in from the browser. Though I still couldn’t make out what book the woman on the subway was reading!
I tried to do the same thing XD
That’s exactly what I was going to recommend — and what I did myself for exactly the same reason and to exactly the same result! Something involving alchemy, possibly?
I wonder what she’s reading today….
Today she’s looking at her phone.
Take a screenshot and enlarge that.
I’d advise against this technique because you’d be limited to your device’s screen resolution as the starting point for magnification, which might be substantially less than that of the image file itself. If you’d like to use external software for the enlargement, just save the image first.
Always something to enjoy in your pics
Kind Words!! Thanks.
Oh, Steve, you make every Thursday such a treat! I am wondering whether you have any pictures of The Broadway Nut Shop on the east side of Broadway around 81st Street, run for years by Frieda and her brother Seymour?
Also there was a WONDERFUL store on Columbus Ave. between 78th and 77th, sort of like Star Magic but better–I bought my Gladys the Goose lamp there and have been going CRAZY trying to remember the name! In any case thank you so much for all your photos. Remember,Faulkner said “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even the past.” YOU understand. So grateful to you.
Oh, you mean Mythology Unlimited at 370 Columbus Avenue? That’d be my educated guess.
Say, speaking of 77th … if you can tell me the name of the restaurant at the NW corner of 77th & Amsterdam in 1980, before The Cottage arrived, I will sacrifice a Space Food Stick in your name and be eternally in your debt. It was Spanish or Mexican or something not too far removed.
Thank you for the photo of the infamous Towers Nursing Home on CPW between 105th and 106th. Now landmarked and developed, but it was not until 2000 that anything happened. A series of would be:developers, starting with Lew Futterman failed. We lived on this block, still do, since 1976.. A tragic eyesore, full of rats, drug dealers, squatters, sidewalks never swept, shoveled or otherwise maintained.
I’ve always found it real eye-catcher. The former New York Cancer Hospital was America’s first devoted exclusively to treating cancer patients, and its founding was inspired in large part by New Yorker Ulysses S. Grant’s having developed throat cancer in 1884.
According to some sources, we owe its lovely rounded towers to a theory of hygiene popular in the 1880s, according to which dirt and germs tended to accumulate and fester in sharp corners, promoting disease; hence, eliminate the sharp corners and you thwart cancer.
Across CPW from it one finds the Strangers’ Gate, which is really not so strange if one knows the back-story.
Place is supposed to be VERY haunted!
It has the looks for it, anyhow.
Initially New York Cancer Hospital. Then Memorial Hospital.
Yes, know this history well. Fought to block the initial development proposal for a 39 story tower behind the landmarked building. New tower justv23cstories and Columbia U owns the first 15 floors. The rest is very luxury market rate condos. Rabbi Bergman was the nursing home operator, criminally convicted for Medicaid fraud, neglect and abuse in the nursing scandals of the early and mid 70s.
Thanks Elizabeth. Anyone knows what Columbia U does with its floors?
I forgot how many abandoned buildings there were above 96th street
Unless I’m mistaken, it looks like Carnegie Tower is looming over 57th Street in the third photo from the top. I think it opened in 1990–decades before it was dwarfed by the current line-up of supertalls!
It looks like the Carnegie Hall Tower (1990, 757′) to me as well.
Completed the same year was the nearby, still taller CitySpire (814′); and three years earlier yet another neighbor, Metropolitan Tower, opened at 716′.
Yes, the invasion of the supertall superskinnies of Billionaires’ Row began in 2014 with One57, soon followed by 532 Park Ave. and the other protrusives.
The third photo is looking north. Carnegie Tower is above Carnegie Hall on 57th at 7th Avenue. I don’t know what you are looking at.
The fourth photo, actually … unless we count the one above the byline as the 0th, as software folks would be wont to do.
Wow, a bronze subway plaque.
You have an amazing eye for the ‘in progress’ stuff! it’s wild to see the old cancer hospital all boarded up and behind razor wire, when now it’s one of the great beauties of the neighborhood
Thank you for continuing to post these wonderful photos.
thank you!
So many individually owned stores! Now we are littered with empty storefronts and corporate mega businesses! Thanks to the real estate industry in this city commercial rents are impossible for a small business owner. AND: we have NO leadership to undertake this issue; at least, for the present.
Hopefully, Mamdani will fulfill some of his campaign promises.
In case you haven’t noticed the economy has changed just a tad since the 1970s and 1980s.
The rise of online shopping and big box stores has made many businesses obsolete. The increase in the minimum wage and the rise of homeless on the streets hasn’t exactly helped small businesses. Many of these storefronts are empty because they are worthless at any price.
And no, Mamdani will not help the situation. In fact, his proposals will make matters worse.
These photographs always make Thursdays special. Thank you.
Very kind of you!! Thanks.
The Towers Nursing Home at 106 and CPW, in its pre-restoration state as shown in one of the above photos, is famous among certain circles as the location of the final scene of Larry Cohen’s 1982 cult monster classic Q — The Winged Serpent. Here’s the ending of the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RrrkoVHczI
Quetzalcōātl is MY kind of Q! (Along with John de Lancie, of course.)
That was great
I’d love to see your photo of the Dakota next to one of the clean building, shot from the same location and angle.
What year was the Dakota cleaned?
I wrote this poem, CLEANING THE DAKOTA, which was published in Metropolitan Diary in January of ‘94: “When counting the wonders of the world,/Seven, I know, is the quota,/But couldn’t we make an exception for/The cleaning of the Dakota?/It was scaled by Lilliputian folk/Who scrubbed away, and lo!/The blackened lair of the devil’s child/Is a yellow-brick chateau.”
Haha. Very nice poem:)
1992, I believe, a year after the Flatiron Building underwent an even more dramatic soot-scrubbing. Grand Central Terminal’s heavenly ceiling got the treatment 1996–98. The ’90s in NYC was the great era of cleaning — sometimes in excess.
Early 1990s
Thanks! Any shots of Hanratty’s? That was a bar for the ages. NY Phil players, drug king pins, actors, actresses, writers, artists, politicians, lawyers, brilliant long time locals…all partying together. From Mitchell Lamar to West End and everywhere in between. All while sticking it to Brad Sweat.
These are great!
I appreciate that! Thanks.
Wonderful!
Those who suspect Joseph Pharmacy of having been around forever might care to scrutinize Steve’s final image: there, to the immediate right of The Upper Cut, is 216 West 72nd Street, currently home to the pharmacy, which according to its Facebook page “first opened [its] doors in 1992”. Before that, however, the building housed Uncle’s Stereo (AKA Uncle Steve), present at least as early as 1988 and lasting to at least 2000 — thus rendering Joseph’s claim of having opened in 1992 somewhat confusing! (Did they share the same address?) In any case, before that was the Broadway TV Center you see in the photo; it was there in 1979–80, but beyond that I couldn’t say.
Anyone else ever shop at Uncle’s, either here or at their original Canal St. location?
These are fabulous as always. Its too bad you can’t see the full Woolworth name on the one of Broadway looking north to 80th St.
When did Woolworth’s close?
THIS one closed 1989/90. The site was later home to (in chronological order) Lionel Kiddie City Toys, Toys R’ Us, Filene’s Basement, DSW, and P.C. Richard & Son.
thank you!!
Wow,
Not a very clear view, but F. W. WOOLWORTH on West 79th St is shown. Right on top was my favorite Pool Billard 🎱 room.
Oh, Woolworth, where I could afford everything! I spent so many happy hours there as a kid and early teen. They had one of those little photo booths and I still have photos of my friends and I making silly faces and loving life. They had a bar where you could get milkshakes and ice cream sundaes. And right next door was Food City, where the fruit man, Al, knew everyone’s name.
I had similarly enchanted times in this and other Woolworth stores. In fact, I still have a picture of my own, taken from the same photo booth, a click away on my desktop. (Digitized, obviously; if the aspect ratio weren’t so elongated it would even be my desktop wallpaper.) The plethora of affordable merchandise of all sorts, the lunch counter, the soda fountain, the scent of freshly scrubbed linoleum, the Rubber Uglies….
Such a great feature. Thanks so much!!!
I remember being a young child seeing all of those RTS buses and Chevrolet Caprice yellow taxis!!
Thanks for another stellar collection. I particularly love the third photo, with the crowd being drawn inexorably into the maw of the subway station as though magnetized. It has an ET vibe about it.
Are any of these available for purchase as prints?
yes – I think the WSR will give you my contact information.
The book is Barthes Mythologies
Dang, I thought it looked familiar!
https://annas-archive.org/md5/62634a75aa93df1bc4a688da21a55ed8
After a half-century, “Writing Degree Zero” remains my favorite of his works.
Steve, the photos are brilliant capturing the memories in a real and beautiful way
Time for a coffee table book of these!
Sign me up for an autographed copy. All my best
“I hope you find something to enjoy.” Yes, I did, immensely. Thank you.
I’m not the only one who has been saving these Thursday issues of WSR, just to keep these wonderful pictures!
In the 9th photo, note The Alexandria apartments on the rise, dating the image to c. 1990-91. To those of you who have brought up the Embassy 72nd Street Twin 1 and 2: this is what happened to it. From 1990 to Nov. 1999, the corner was home to HMV, a good place to pick up a laserdisc. (Uncle’s Stereo is perhaps where you’d have bought your laserdisc player; I did.)
Excellent, beautiful pictures, I’d love to see more. I just wish they’d been dated. Any way to find out the year they’re from?
It’s sometimes possible to pin down the year fairly accurately, depending on a few factors; see for example my comment on The Alexandria, above. Being well-versed in automotive makes and models would probably be a great help, though it lets me out.
These photos are so fabulous — thank you for sharing them! I love the glimpse of the Rug Warehouse that you’d enter on W. 80th Street (such a wonderful store).
the woman reading Roland Barthes’ MYTHOLOGIES with the bespoke graffiti behind her!
Those were my days. Some of it captured in the movie “Parting Glances,” which was nearly filmed in my apartment. I saw Keith Haring spreading his graffiti filth on the tile walls of my subway station. I yelled at him, but he didn’t stop his display of pure egotism. It remained there for a very long time.