Home Posts tagged "1970s NYC"

Tag: 1970s NYC

What Manhattan Looked Like in the 1970s Through My Eyes, Part 2

All photos copyright Betsy van Die and available in high resolution from original negatives. Permission needed to reproduce. By the time I was in my second year at RISD, I considered myself a veteran visitor of NYC. I was attracted to Times Square and all the sordid sights. I never would have dreamed of photographing the seedier side of Chicago’s strip clubs in the South Loop. Somehow I felt emboldened being away from home and photographing in NYC.  Times Square was a far cry from my ivory tower art school existence in Providence and even farther from my idyllic suburban Chicago upbringing. I found Times Square both fascinating and repulsive and completely different than anything I had ever seen. I was not a total rube, having spent a lot of time as a kid in the City of Chicago itself – but NYC was unique and I was smitten. I shot a lot of B & W photos in Times Square, and in retrospect, I was lucky that nobody bothered me. But I have so many regrets regarding photos I didn’t take back in the day, including 42nd Street and the interiors of diners and bars. Probably best that I didn’t venture into the latter, since I was an attractive young woman by myself. November 1977 Tiger Sign Company, Bowery and Delancey I couldn’t find out anything about this business, but still love the signage.   Pearl Paint and Canal Street Jeans Canal Street was one of my favorite hangouts thanks to Pearl Paint, all the cool job lot stores, Canal Jean Co., a dingy little antique mall, and street vendors selling vintage stuff. Pearl Paint’s NYC demise reflected the passage of time and loss of my youth. It was one more sign of gentrification that has nearly destroyed the…

Continue reading

What Manhattan Looked Like in the 1970s Through My Eyes, Part 1

All photos copyright Betsy van Die and available in high resolution from original negatives. Permission needed to reproduce. You might wonder why a Chicago native who has lived in the Windy City nearly all her life is so fond of the Big Apple and has an Instagram page dedicated to NYC in the 1970s. The answer can be traced back to my youth and coming of age when I was an art student at RISD. I took the Amtrak train from Providence to Penn Station many times during my four years at RISD, staying with my older sister in one of her many NYC apartments either in the Village or SoHo. I think the other reason I am enamored of NYC is that my dad was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn and while you can take the boy out of Brooklyn… Indeed, he adored NYC and made yearly trips there for many decades that combined work with pleasure. From the time I was a toddler until he was too old to travel, he would attend winter meetings of either the American Psychiatric Association or American Psychoanalytic Association in the Big Apple. My mom would hang out with the other wives during the day and my parents would go to art galleries, museums, and plays during his leisure time. He shared so many personal stories about NYC with me, both about his family and growing up in Brownsville, as well as about Manhattan, Coney Island, and the Catskills. And of course, he was a talented amateur photographer who taught me how to develop and print photos in our basement darkroom when I was just 12. It’s hard to forget my first NYC visit because my sister and I got our signals crossed and I waited in the wrong area of Penn Station….

Continue reading

Homage to Howard Clothes and Times Square – Photo Documentary

As regular Consumer Grouch readers know, Howard Clothes is near and dear to my heart because it played a starring role in my dad’s family. While I have written pretty much everything I can already about Howard Clothes in three previous articles, I have since discovered many new photos. When I posted my first Howard Clothes article in September 2015, my dad has just been released from a four-month stay in the hospital and rehab after nearly dying from double pneumonia. By the time I posted my second article in January 2016, I had read Elaine Winik’s 1996 book entitled Still Looking Forward, which filled in some important details, along with hearing from many relatives of the founders. Elaine was the last surviving daughter of Sam Kappel, who founded this men’s clothing store with Joseph Langerman and Henry Marks. A few weeks later, I had the pleasure of talking to Elaine on the phone, and she graciously sent me a few clippings and photos that I added. Elaine passed away in September 2017, so she never got a chance to read the final chapter, which I posted in January 2020. My dad did, although he was nearly blind from macular degeneration by then and couldn’t see the images.  In September 2020, I finally decided to start an Instagram page devoted to NYC. Although the original intent was to showcase photos I took of NYC during my RISD years (1976-1980), I realized fairly quickly that I simply didn’t have enough vintage photos of my own to sustain this. Before my Brooklyn-born dad died of COVID-19 in December 2020, I promised him that I would honor his legacy by digitizing and posting vintage photos he took of his beloved NYC. I also looked for great vintage photos of NYC and gravitated to…

Continue reading

Connecting the Past to Present in NYC Photographs

Over the last two years, I have scanned black and white negatives and a few color slides I shot in NYC between late 1976 and 1980 when I was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. My older sister lived in various apartments in SoHo and Greenwich Village and I visited every chance I got on school breaks. I enlarged and matted about 25 of these photos and took them with me when I moved to Rotterdam, the Netherlands in July 1980. I never printed any of the other photos, so scanning them provided an avenue of rediscovery of my own youth and a gritty NYC that no longer exists. This project summoned an array of emotions and memories about this “coming of age” period in my life and the inevitable passage of time.     In 1981, I showed these photos in Rotterdam and got some press, one of which was a little critical and missed the point of my photographs. The critic said that my photographs lacked the social commentary of Bruce Davidson’s work. Although I admire Davidson’s work, it was never my intention to emulate his socially conscious photography. A few select photographers informed my early photographic work – especially those who worked for the Farm Security Administration, such as Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, and the great photographer Berenice Abbott. Today, my photos have far more meaning than they did back then because they picture a NYC that no longer exists due to gentrification, over commercialization, and greed disguised as progress. NYC in the 1970s I was a little astonished that I ventured into areas that were considered dangerous back in the 1970s, as evidenced by many articles written on this dark and turbulent era in NYC history. Yes, the city was edgy and…

Continue reading