That’s a poster created by the Works Progress Administration, one of the main elements of the New Deal between 1935 and 1943. The WPA created a lot of jobs during the Great Depression, typically through creating projects for people to work on. Because the WPA employed a lot of artists and writers – sometimes directly, sometimes …
Another picture from the state archives: an aerial view of Manhattan, looking south, from July 6, 1951. The 50s were arguably the peak of air pollution in New York, as environmental controls hadn’t been established yet and coal was still being used rather than oil for building boilers. The big building-free area is, of course, …
The picture of a lock above, from the New York State archive, is titled “The opening of the first section of the Erie Canal” and is dated May 15, 1915. My memories of first learning US history in elementary school are pretty hazy, but the canal opened in 1825 and contributed greatly to New York …
This picture from Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York Project, “El, Sixth Avenue Line, 28th Street Station” doesn’t have any single big topic, but it has a bunch of small ones, all a little interesting. The el began in 1878 as a railroad pulled by coal-burning steam locomotives. It was converted to electric service in 1903 …
I recently came across the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection at the Library of Congress, and thought it was a new vein I could mine for blog posts. The criteria I use are (1) interesting views of buildings or other structures and (2) pictures that are in the public domain, and the G-S collection meets both. Unfortunately, as …
