I am always amazed at images like this - the absence of traffic, the wide sidewalks, the clean buildings, the absence of traffic, the absence of traffic...
And not that long ago (the year my father was born).
Via Shorpy, where the image can be enlarged much much bigger.
Addendum: the same view in 2006 (which I desaturated to black and white for comparison):
Wow.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I notice is ... No Wires
This photo seems like there must be some backstory to explain why the street is empty of the ubiquitous heaps of horse manure that littered roads then -- of course, it helps that it's in a ritzy area (Fifth Avenue), with houses built for Vanderbilts! According to some of the comments here: https://www.shorpy.com/node/12300 the sidewalks were, very soon after this photo, reduced dramatically in size.
ReplyDeleteI figured it was a Shorpy image, but the via didn't credit the source. Thanks, Elagie - I've added the Shorpy link to the body of the text.
DeleteThat picture merely shows how much better the super rich had it.
ReplyDeleteHere are some Shorpy images from the same era. Different neighborhoods:
https://www.shorpy.com/files/images/4a08193a.preview.jpg
https://www.shorpy.com/files/images/4a18581u.preview.jpg
This would be atypical of a city street with horses on it for that period. The amount of manure/waste would have been much higher. Interesting nonetheless to compare.
ReplyDeleteNote that the side-walk has not changed in width. However, it is factually narrower because the side-walk often functions as the place where road furniture ends up. Traffic lights, street lights, road signs, trash cans, news paper boxes (for a long as they'll last), they all end up on the wide-walk taking space from pedestrians.
ReplyDeleteYou see this a lot in Boston as well, where the city archives frequently tweet old pictures to see if residents can identify them. You can tell that no one's thought to worry about the traffic situation for about 100 years now. There are many, many streets designated as two-way, that absolutely cannot function that way with parking on both sides. Even the Big Dig didn't really solve much in that sense, because it happens most in residential neighborhoods.
ReplyDeleteSame thing in Salem, where I work - which also brings tour buses and people dressed as witches running around in the streets - which for some reason you don't see in old, black and white photos...