New York - The Wonder City!

New York on the verge of World War 2. 5th Avenue positively heaves with traffic in this view from 1940.  Taken from the steps of the New York Public Library, the third largest public library in the World behind the Library of Congress  and largest, the British Library.

The bus in the foreground from the Fifth Avenue Coach Company extolls visitors to "See New York - The Wonder City". Three of the companies' vehicles are in view with the next vehicle (possibly a 1931 model, as the company built their own coaches as well as running the routes) on route 2 from Washington Heights to Madison Square. The company went through various sales of parts of the business from 1954 and following a labour and financial troubles the company itself was absorbed into the cities transport system in 1962.

The three banks mentioned on the poster, The Union Dime, the Emigrant Industrial and the Bowery savings banks had various chequered historys. The Union Dime being taken over in the late 1970s, the Bowery is now part of Capital One and the Emigrant Industrial is now the pargest privately owned bank in the USA.

If you look closely at the building in the middle of the picture you can see a branch of the  Gypsy Tea Kettle resturant chain (air-cooled, definitely required in the heat of a New York summer), where you could get your fortune told. This branch opened in 1931. After you had drunk your tea the tea leaves would be read. The chain finally closed around the turn of the millenium.

New York in the Summer of 1940. With just over a year to go before World War 2 this would be the penultimate summer of peace.

Elm Hill Norwich 1957

Elm Hill, Norwich. Partly threatened with demolition in the 1920s it is now one of the more picturesque areas of the City with buildings dating back as far as the early 16th Century. The area dates back much further, possibly to the 1200s, but a fire in 1507 devastated the area and almost nothing survives from before the fire. The Britons Arms, the pink building in the foreground may predate the fire as it stands a little away from other buildings. The Britons Arms Coffee House (open for Morning Coffee, Light Lunches and Afternoon Teas) is still trading. The vehicles and fashions may have changed, but tourists still like their morning coffee and afternoon tea.

At the Circus 1957

Piccadilly Circus, one of the "must have" photo opportunities for tourists in London. Seen here in 1957 with a very well dressed American tourist posing for the camera. Something outwith the shot seems to have grabbed her attention, but not her approbation judging by the severe look on her face! 

The Pavillion, is no longer festooned with advertising as seen here. Piccadilly Circus only has one building covered with adverts now, and these are electronic with light emitting diodes now rather than neon filled glass tubes and it is all rather clinical. In 1957 it was a blaze of lights and one of the sights of London at night when it was a riot of colour.

Some of the adverts here are still household names and some have long gone. 

British Petroleum is still one of the largest oil companies but Ekco - the television and radio manufacturer - has gone and is now merged as part of Phillips Electrical Industries. You can no longer buy Pal Injecto-matic Razors, a product of the American Razor Company, nor can you purchase Miraglo lighting window cleaner which perhaps was not as good as its adverising led one to believe.

Colibri lighters are still manufactured, although the monopol is no longer in the range available today.

Wrigley's is still one of the leading brands of chewing gum, although originally the company made baking powder and chewing gum was offered initially free with each packet. However the gum became more popular than the powder and Wrigley's then concentrated on gum manufacture.

Lemon Hart Rum, now billed as "100% Demerara -The World's Most Flavourful Rum" has been around as a blend since 1804 and the company can trace its origins back even further to 1720. 

Jeypine is still used for hospital disinfecting and is available in the Far East but does not appear to be available in Britain although the Jeyes group still sells Jeyes fluid here.  

At the Pavillion, a cinema which closed in 1986, Eleanor Parker stars in Lizzie, a drama filmed in black and white. The film is shown as a continuous performance, so that if you walked in half way through one showing you could stay and watch the first half after you had watched the second half - confusing when it was a drama or a mystery film!

 

The cinema was gutted after closure and has undergone several metamorphoses since and is now the Trocadero entertainment centre with, ironically a seven screen cinema as part of the complex. The facade of the Trocadero is now bereft of illuminated adverts.

The scene below is of Piccadilly Circus from Regent Street at night around 1961 with the Regent Street Christmas decorations adding to the light show.

Changes at the Bar

Micklegate Bar in York is seen here in 1951. The old southern entrance to the City of York is still today one of the main entrances into the centre of the city although the main road skirts round the old town by the railway station to avoid too much congestion through the narrow arches of the gatehouse.

Although the gate itself survives, some of the buildings seen here do not. The three story Georgian house with the first floor bay windows has gone (despite York's assertion today to be a city that cares for its past, I suspect this building was demolished in the late 1950s or 1960s when heritage was not top of the agenda!) along with the rest of the buildings on the left hand side nearer the camera. The right hand side seems to have fared little better with, again those buildings nearest the camera now gone and the replacements seeming to be faux Georgian replacements.

Now, one can no longer stay at Armatages bed and breakfast, nor indeed park your bike, unlocked propped up by its pedals on the kerb. The Coach and Horses (Tetley brewery, tied house) is no longer welcoming with its brown curtains, possibly once white but now stained with the tar from countless cigarettes. Possibly it never WAS welcoming, but you get the impression that they may have tried long ago. Pubs back then were largely the preserve of the working man, women rarely ventured alone inside. 

There is a garage lurking behind the red and white frontage just beyond the Georgian house with the bay windows. The clock hanging outside is JUST unreadable as to the name of the premises apart from declaring it is a garage.

Among the plethora of enamel signs outside the garage there are two that possibly indicate a newsagents, Players Please and Wills Gold Flake. And on the corner is another Tetley pub, perhaps the Coach and Horses really wasn't all that welcoming after all......

The road sweepers barrow is parked outside the coach and horses but no sign of him - breathalysers are well in the future here and a council bin lorry seems to be parked outside the other pub. It must have been thirsty work!

And presiding over it all is the Micklegate Bar, standing sentinel and strong, for it was built as defence, for the past 800 years or so. 

Inhabited since 1196 it (and the heads of traitors and rebels until 1794) has over the centuries gazed silently over the streets of York.

The ghost of Christmas past.......

Simpsons department store in Piccadily is decorated for Christmas 1965. Simpsons may not be a familiar name to many now - it closed in 1999 and the art deco building is now the flagship store of the Waterstones chain of bookshops. However it was the inspiration for a series on British Television that IS familiar to far more people than Simpsons ever was. 

In the early 1950s, scriptwriter Jeremy Lloyd was employed as an assistant at Simpsons. Twenty or so years later he used his experiences to co-write Are You Being Served?

London at Christmas half a century ago. This is Oxford Street in 1962. Not all night shots on slow film are successful but this one works. You can almost feel the chill in the air as the shops count down the days and their money into the tills. Some of the department stores that fulfilled Christmas wishes for thousands of small and not so small children are still with us but others have gone. 

Whiteley's, Robinson and Cleaver, Derry and Toms, and others have all passed into history. Only memories remain from the cold Christmas trips up to London all those years ago now...

....mostly Westward Ho!

Grand Central Terminal (NOT Station or Depot!) in New York is one of the great indoor spaces in Manhattan. Seen here in 1949 in a time exposure, it is still one of the main transport hubs in the city.

Here seen at an unidentified location, 4451 powers what looks to be the Afternoon Daylight along the Californian coast. 4451 has long been scrapped and 4449 is the only member of the class to be preserved and was retired from service in 1957. Restored in 1974-76 it has been largely operational since then, with its 15 year overhaul scheduled to start in 2013.

An unidentified location is seen here in a Kodachrome transparency. There are clues to the general location in the shot. The car dates it to the late 1930s/early 40s (I am not an expert on American automobiles, 1930s British are my thing!) The lack of ANY other traffic marks it as c1930/40s too (although that is not by any means a certainty as suburban streets such as this would be quiet most of the time). The palms suggest it is hot and the architecture of the houses again suggest a Spanish influence. The lake at the bottom of the road looks to be a reservoir, again suggesting a hot, dry climate. A best guess is California c1941

Although it is hot in the image above, it is not always so in California, the mountains can be treacherous. 

Donner Pass is one such place, named after a group of California bound emigrants who had to overwinter there in 1846 due to their route being blocked by snow, of the 45 survivors of the group (originally 81 strong) some resorted to cannibalism to survive. Bleak is probably the best way to describe the high Sierra Nevadas in the winter, and even as late as 1952 the train the City of San Francisco was slowed in a blizzard and eventually stuck in a snowdrift there for three days.

The Mountains are unforgiving as can be seen in the image of the car below. That is a brave driver!

After our American interlude we will travel back to Europe on the 1938 built Nieuw Amsterdam, of the Holland-America line seen here mid Atlantic in 1950.

1939 -The World comes to New York

The 1939 World's Fair. Held at Flushing Meadows - Corona Park, which sounds idyllic but was actually the cleaned up Corona Ash Dump, New York's dumping ground for coal furnace ash, horse manure and garbage. This was the second biggest World's Fair ever held - only the 1904 St Louis Fair was bigger - and over the two seasons it was open 44 million people passed through the gates.

The British Pavilion is seen in the image above. Visited in June by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth it held exhibits such as the Magna Carta, the first time that it had left Britain. with the outbreak of WW2 it was deemed safer to keep it in the USA and it was stored at Fort Knox until 1947 alongside the Declaration of Independence.

The Fair celebrated the 150th anniversary of George Washington's first inauguration as President of the United States whilst looking forward to the future. In the distance in the image above can be seen the sixty feet high statue of George Washington which stood facing the future in the shape of the two symbols of the fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere.

But this was a fair for the masses and colour photography which had been available since 1907 in the form of Autochrome plates was now easily available with the introduction only four years previously of the iconic Kodachrome slide film. 

This was perhaps the first fair that the public photographed fairly extensively IN COLOUR. The Eastman Kodak exhibit had a background, painted by Salvador Dali, seen above and despite the perception today that colour photography was a product of the 1960s and 70s, colour photography was here to stay, even if prohibitively expensive - and that is why perhaps that it is seen as a recent invention. 

A roll of colour transparency film cost $5 - the equivalent of £50/$81 in today's currency! To put that into some context, the admission price for the Fair was 75 cents!!