Tag: throwback thursday

Remember when subway cars were covered with graffiti and the Dakota was not yet cleaned?

I hope you find something to enjoy.

May you find something to enjoy.

I have an Old Negs file I call "Strictly UWS," which has images that I think come close.

I was fascinated by the way they lit them, held them, or let them dangle from their lips.

Women in fur coats socializing with neighbors on the Broadway medians.

As I photographed, I knew those vehicles would look so different from whatever would be in existence 40 or 50 years later.

Nothing lasts forever.

Some things have vanished, some are restored and remain.

Of the 150,000-or-so frames I have shot, the first image is my favorite.

I tried to capture it all, from Riverside Drive to Central Park West, in images from those vanished days.

A sense of place is the essence and character of a location and the emotional bonds individuals form with it.

Throwback Thursday's Steve Harmon took his favorite photo on a rainy November night in 1978 at Broadway and 72nd Street.

A few Thursdays ago, a reader commented that the photos had “so many hats!” "A theme!" I thought.

This week, Throwback Thursday shifts its focus from people to places that once lined the avenues of the Upper West Side.

I don’t know if it was their clothes, their expessions, their gestures, their postures, but I was impelled to photograph them.

This was life! There was a wonderful diversity and humanity and everyone seemed to belong.

I simply walked the streets, wherever and whenever I could, and photographed what attracted me, which was almost everything and everyone.

The stores for me were the heart, indeed, the soul of the neighborhood.

Handlebar mustaches, phone booths, and fur...things sure have changed on the Upper West Side since the 1970s and 80s.