Home Posts tagged "Broadway NYC"

Tag: Broadway NYC

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….

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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…

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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…

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Picture Postcards Provide Colorful Glimpse into Past and Present Histories

Much has been written about the history of postcards and there are a plethora of websites, collector’s clubs, blogs, and books on the subject. The earliest known picture postcard dates back to 1840. It was a hand-painted design on a card, sent in London to the writer Theodore Hook with a penny black stamp. A rather eclectic postcard collection is among the many treasures I have accumulated over the years. Easy to store in one large shoe box, I take these out on occasion as inspiration for my collages. I have yet to sell any of this collection, but really have no attachment except for a few postcards that evoke long-lost personal memories. Some of these postcards date back to my youth – a few are vintage late 1890s-early 1900s. I have fond memories of riding my bike as a young teenager to Archie’s Coins in Edgebrook and buying a few really cool antique postcards for pennies. I also have an attachment to beautiful, early handcolored photographic postcards bought in 1979 at the Porte de Clignancourt in Paris – my first trip to Europe.

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