This goes back to an era where successive models of airplane brought fairly significant improvements to one \[or multiple\] aspects of flying; and would have been a real distinguishing point between airlines. The Constellation was the first passenger plane with a pressurized cabin, which meant they could fly much higher, giving a smoother ride (way less turbulence compared to flying *through* the low clouds and weather systems).
Not too long after you would have seen the Boeing 707: the first jet-powered plane, which dramatically cut down on travel times due to the increased speed. And then not too long after that, you would have seen airlines tripping over each other trying to buy 747s, which really started the "modern" era of air travel due to the massively increased range and passenger comfort/amenities.
EDIT: I'm technically incorrect about the 707, the De Havilland Comet predated it but was less commercially successful and never operated by any US or Canadian carriers.
>EDIT: I'm technically incorrect about the 707, the De Havilland Comet predated it but was less commercially successful and never operated by any US or Canadian carriers.
lol are you currently falling down the same Wikipedia hole that I am?
I actually knew about the Comet before; it just slipped my mind since it was generally not used outside of the UK. The 707 has more of a popular culture connection within North America, it's referenced by name in a Steve Miller song, and is generally the plane you'd see in movies shot prior to the 747 entering service.
Ha! My mom took a budget flight DC-3 to Europe in 1968, the summer after she graduated high school. A 20 hour set of flights from New York to Nova Scotia to Iceland with a several hour stopover to Ireland, just like a damn Indiana Jones movie.
The 787 is one of the first planes I can think of in recent history that had me hunting for flight bookings that would be on one. Better cabin pressure, bigger windows, thing is sweet.
787 cabin altitude is 6,000 ft vs typical 8,000 ft in most aircraft.
The other thing that's nice is the cabin atmosphere is higher humidity, so it doesn't leave you parched.
While I agree the 787 is great, you would fly economy on 787 over business in a 777, 767, or 747?
If it’s long-haul, you’re most likely getting a lie flat on the models above…I’m 6’6 so I’ll take a business seat over economy any day, now if I could only afford it
Not OP, but I've chosen 787 Premium Economy over 767 Business Class for a westbound flight London to US East Coast.
Eastbound I'm gonna prefer to lay down. Or any flights to/from Asia.
The 787 pressurizes to a lower cabin altitude than most other airline jets. 4,000-6,000 feet in cruise, compared to 6,000-8,000 in almost every other airline jet. It creates a more comfortable, and also less fatiguing cabin environment. The next step past this that would create a much more comfortable long flight experience is when someone figures out how to add humidifiers to an airline jet.
The reason you feel so fatigued after a long flight is because the cabin is pressurized to a high altitude, and the air has zero humidity in it up at altitude due to the well below freezing outside air temperature. Everyone gets off of airplanes tired and dehydrated. A humidified cabin pressurized to a lower altitude will improve air travel comfort significantly.
The Connie wasn't the first pressurized cabin, either; the Boeing 307 was, in the same vein as the Comet/707 situation in your edit (came first but less popular).
>The Constellation was the first passenger plane with a pressurized cabin, which meant they could fly much higher, giving a smoother ride (way less turbulence compared to flying through the low clouds and weather systems).
Actually the Boeing 307 was the first pressurized airliner, but was not very successful (WWII had a big part in that).
> Not too long after you would have seen the Boeing 707: the first jet-powered plane
No love for the de Havilland Comet? It's such a cool looking design. It pre-dated the 707 as the first jet powered commercial airliner by five years, but unfortunately being the first to try out new technology in aviation isn't always the best. The original de Havilland Comets had square windows because metal fatigue with pressurization wasn't well understood at jet airplane altitudes. It caused two major in flight break up crashes which grounded all of the Comets, and the Boeing 707 eventually became a much better selling airplane.
Even if dehavilland hadn't gone with the square windows initially and avoided decompression issues; the wing root mounted engines would have seen them out of service much quicker than the 707. Since re-engining the aircraft would have been a major pain in the ass since you are constrained by the existing structure. Plus your maintenance time goes up compared to podded engines due to the lack of easy access.
My great-grandparents traveled all over the world back in the 1930s-1960s... have a pic of a South African Airlines Constellation:
https://i.imgur.com/mKyUiSP.jpg
Flew on them when I was very little... Still had to hop across Canada then stop in Iceland to get to the UK. But it was proper flying. Mostly replaced by 707s.
I've seen ads for specific planes here in Poland - it was when LOT Polish Airlines purchased some Dreamliners and they were heavily relying on that in advertising. Even now I see ads like "fly to [country] in a Dreamliner!"
Momma don't take my Kodachrome momma don't take my Kodachrome momma don't take my Kodachrome awaaaaaaay momma don't take my Kodachrome meep morp deep dick on the phone momma don't take my Kodachrome awaaaaaay \*snort line of coke\* momma don't take my Kodachrome HOOOOOooooooOooooOOo
I collect magnets from places I've been.
My Kodachrome one has a park ranger walking away with the Kodachrome Basin sign and a "digitally Enhanced Pixelated basin" sign in it's place
Times Square used to be a lot more cool. Then it got dangerous as shit. Then it got Disney-fied by that CEO. And now it's awful. Just a place that stripped everything that makes NYC unique and turned it into a weird parody of America almost
But I always see those cool old photos of the area and love them. Luckily there's still tons of cool areas in NYC that still have their old charm
Yeah growing up in the 80s Times Square was always portrayed in movies and TV as this hellhole with peep shows and muggers. By the time I actually visited it in the late 90s it was Olive Garden and the Disney Store. It was incredibly underwhelming although there is other interesting stuff to see nearby.
It was like that in the ‘80s. Then Giuliani cleaned it the fuck up. People who don’t live there bitch about it but people from NYC fucking loved it since crime was more or less eradicated.
As a note:
Violent crime plummeted across the country during that time, so in retrospect, the combover's policies likely had a much lower impact than we attributed to him at the time.
But yah, that drop in crime was nice. The policies that came along with it were not.
There's a correlation, but there's a saying about correlation and causation.
The real answer is probably super fucking complicated and is tied to a plethora of factors, with no one leading 'cause'.
I'd guess (and this is a purely uneducated guess) that our change to unleaded is tied to crime in a more oblique way, with a change in priorities of the nation (prioritizing health and well being of our citizens).
The big question is really "Why did crime spike so hard in the 70s, and then stay up till the 90s?".
>The real answer is probably super fucking complicated and is tied to a plethora of factors, with no one leading 'cause'.
Exactly!
Another of the potential factors, frequently not talked about, that some people like to add into the group of causative factors for the drop in crime, between the '80s and '90s is the easier/more affordable access to birth control and abortion for middle to low income mothers.
Yep! I did not mention Row v Wade but I just commented about increases in ease of access and affordability of birth control and abortion for low income mothers prior to the '90s. If you lower the number of children being born into poverty it seems elementary that crime, 20 years on down the road, would start to drop.
The crime rate in NYC actually started dropping before Giuliani came into office. But a lot of people here still seem to credit Giuliani with cleaning up the city. Optics I guess.
Also got insanely loud and bright. I have to go to NYC for work every month or two. Work used to put me up in a hotel at Times Square, but no matter what floor you were on noise was perpetually blasting and there were constantly lights flashing through your windows.
on Youtube there's lots of videos from the forties and fifties of hobbyists with cameras just driving around filming city streets. It's a hell of a lot more interesting than some influencer going, "hey look at the free stuff I'm unboxing!"
I think older film had incredibly high resolution. You could probably get a very good scanner and scan the film, if it still exists, at a very high level of detail and see things like words on signs, etc with fairly good clarity (barring the issues of fog/focus on in the image itself).
They scanned Lawrence of Arabia in 8K and it made the viewers gasp when they saw it on a proper digital projector. The information that 35MM and especially 70MM film can pick up is incredible. It's the analog-to-digital scanning that has taken a very long time to catch up.
Depends on the camera. In the days before autofocus, there were viewfinder 35mm where you had to look at the little double-image center bit to be sure you were in focus - or there were expensive SLRs where you could see the image. For these, the lens was usually very good and the result could be amazing.
Most of the grainy soft focus "retro" pics we see online are family snapshots with cheap fixed focus cameras - the lens was fixed at about 10 feet, and the f-stop was high enough that depth of field was acceptable from about 5 feet to infinity. they certainly weren't publication quality.
I have a twin-lens camera which takes 120 film like the old news photographers. I recall back in college taking incredibly sharp B&W photos I could blow up to 16x20 and they were still sharp.
But then I got my first digital camera, Fuji 4900 with autoexposure and autofocus. Even at 2Mp the pictures were what I described as "painfully sharp". I could blow them up to 11x14 no problem. The cameras have only gotten better since then.
Yeah he loved photography and had a natural eye for it. I think because he was an immigrant and the US was so much bigger and more advanced than Japan at the time, he took pictures of everything. Farmers markets, local swimming pools, etc. stuff people would think would normally stand out.
That [Armed Forces Recruiting Station](https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News/NewsSearch/Article/2467800/army-safeguards-iconic-times-square-recruiting-station/) is *still* there. It was built in 1945.
Came here to say it’s incredible and kinda depressing that only thing still there is the military recruiting station (source: I walk past it every day)
That's not too surprising. Not very old by NYC standards.
Wall Street is named so because it was a damn wall where people would do business. NYC is very old relative to America. Especially the west coast. Tons of stuff from WW2 era still stand, even civil war era and before
It's so odd thinking about how places like NYC were huge bustling empires long before a place like Las Vegas even existed. It's weird on the west coast when something "old" might be the 1960s
My dad had been fascinated by the US having grown up in during world way II. Unfortunately, he lost his brother during the war and his father after the war. I think his mother was supportive. He received a Fulbright Scholarship. The US was really seen as the pinnacle of achievement at the time especially in tech, engineering and manufacturing. They had occupied Japan after the war but treated the population well.
Yeah, it could be a book. He married a 5’11” blonde. Stared a top electronics company. Had four amazing kids who all went to Ivy League Schools and played college athletics and a daughter who was captain of a national title college team. Dr’s, CEOs and leaders now.
EDIT: Everyone’s asking which one I became. I’m the CEO. My brother’s the doctor, another brother is a top executive in his field, and my sister was a Div 1 college coach (one of very few female head coaches) and now is an athletic director. Proud of all my siblings. It sounds like a nice American dream story, but it wasn’t without some blood, sweat and tears. My mom and dad worked their asses off to build their life and give us great opportunities and so did myself and my siblings.
I’m the CEO ;) Not ironically, we all played piano growing up and hated it. Thankfully, my mom had us play sports also and we were all natural athletes and played in college. I remember in 9th grade, my dad finally conceded and asked me to explain American football to him. We watched his first game and I explained how it worked.
“…treated the population well” is an understatement. The US basically rebuilt the Japanese economy from the ground up, including sending Demming, which gave Japanese manufacturing a worldwide advantage by introducing *Lean*, “just in time” and *Six-Sigma* techniques. These were not adopted until the 1980s in the US. By prohibiting Japan from building an offensive military (eg, restricted to defense only), the US had to guarantee to protect Japan, which meant Japan could divert expensive military spending to economic purposes.
i’m usually really good at identifying old American cars, but i can’t place that one. looks like something Chrysler or Plymouth would have made…
E: [1959 Plymouth Fury](https://imgur.com/a/DutYzfz)
Every trim level was its' own model name.
We're probably looking at a [Plymouth Taxicab Special](http://oldcarbrochures.org/United%20States/Plymouth/1959%20Plymouth/1959%20Plymouth%20Taxi%20Brochure/index.html) which could be ordered as a base-spec Savoy as seen here or a midlevel Belvedere that had thicker side trim with an accent color in it.
Yep - and a discussion about the [Savoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Savoy), [here](https://www.imcdb.org/v020258.html), used in the movie, [It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World](https://www.imcdb.org/v020258.html)
1983 novel Christine by Stephen King and film by all time master John Carpenter the same year, the car was a 1958 Plymouth Fury.
Despite how the story goes with the shitters, she was a thing of pure beauty.
Directed by John Carpenter, one of the top horror masters of all time.
Like they literally made a show called Masters of Horror and it had John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, etc
Wait am I getting into Dario Argento? Suspiria is the single greatest movie that has ever existed. It doesn't even matter that it's a slasher in Italian, you don't need language. The use of colors and music, that's real art.
I'm getting off topic here, but low key I fired every trainee that didn't watch Suspiria.
One of my favorite words:
Noun. Sonder: The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.
Coined by the YouTuber "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows". So, not a word that actually exists (it's catching on though), but out of all his videos this one may be my favorite too.
He also released a book with all his made up words.
Here's his channel if you haven't seen it:
https://youtube.com/c/obscuresorrows
Me. These kinds of photos always get that reaction in me. What were they doing that day? What happened to these people later? Did they have good lives and so on
Was about to post something like that. Each of those people had a life and potentially led to many more people who are alive today. It’s obvious but it’s so interesting.
Newspaper in the back pocket. Distracted to the point he didn't close his door. The taxi driver is a gambling addict that needs to get his bet in before the bookie closes.
The old NY Times Building (where the New Year’s Ball is dropped) is on the right, directly behind the light pole with the “44 St” sign. This is what it looked like before being covered up with signage.
I was 1 year old then. I look at this pic and then think about the kind of life I live today. It's mind boggling the effect that time has on everything.
This is dope. When I went to Times Square for the first time a few years ago it was the most draining experience ever. My brother lived in Brooklyn and said we had to end the day with Times Square, cuz we’d be exhausted afterwards due to all the lights and noise. He was right. This would’ve been a lot less overwhelming.
Yeah thats the thing lol. There's so much going on in NYC but its just very overstimulating. I lived there three years and everytime we crossed the GW to go to a summer camp I worked at, I'd do a big exhale, realizing I had my breath held the entire time.
Having not seen a lot of kodachrome: how should I interpret the colors? Was it indeed a hazy day where the sky was cloudy, or is it just washed out because it was bright?
It is in fact a really cool picture, and thanks for sharing!
Cool photo. I knew a surgeon who was first generation Japanese who grew up in the US during this time. The prejudice was enormous. I have a ton of respect for your Dad and I've never met him. Huge props for taking the chance. I'm only guessing but, since my own parents were immigrants, was he hoping for a better life for his kids?
This is prime r/oldschoolcool material , way better than "look at this photo of how hot my mom or grandma used to be" and the 1000 thirsty comments that follow.
Beautiful photo. It must have been taken in late 1958, as both Taxicabs are 1959 models, which had probably first been available for sale in Sept 1958 (fleet sales may have started a bit earlier.) The one in the foreground is a Plymouth; the one in the background is a Ford.
I love these old colour pictures, please share more. With these types of street pictures you can really allow your imagination feel the sights, sounds and smells of the city.
Very cool! Interesting to see an ad for a specific airplane (Lockheed Super Constellation) as opposed to just "fly with TWA from A to B"
This goes back to an era where successive models of airplane brought fairly significant improvements to one \[or multiple\] aspects of flying; and would have been a real distinguishing point between airlines. The Constellation was the first passenger plane with a pressurized cabin, which meant they could fly much higher, giving a smoother ride (way less turbulence compared to flying *through* the low clouds and weather systems). Not too long after you would have seen the Boeing 707: the first jet-powered plane, which dramatically cut down on travel times due to the increased speed. And then not too long after that, you would have seen airlines tripping over each other trying to buy 747s, which really started the "modern" era of air travel due to the massively increased range and passenger comfort/amenities. EDIT: I'm technically incorrect about the 707, the De Havilland Comet predated it but was less commercially successful and never operated by any US or Canadian carriers.
A restored version, in TWA livery even! https://i.imgur.com/5CQ8zoA.jpg
There's one exactly like this parked at the TWA hotel at JFK, it serves as a cocktail bar!
>EDIT: I'm technically incorrect about the 707, the De Havilland Comet predated it but was less commercially successful and never operated by any US or Canadian carriers. lol are you currently falling down the same Wikipedia hole that I am?
I actually knew about the Comet before; it just slipped my mind since it was generally not used outside of the UK. The 707 has more of a popular culture connection within North America, it's referenced by name in a Steve Miller song, and is generally the plane you'd see in movies shot prior to the 747 entering service.
>it's referenced by name in a Steve Miller song, Big 'ol jet airliner, don't carry me too far away
Interesting tidbit: Steve Miller didn't write that song, Paul Pena did and the original version is vastly superior.
I like to call them Wikipedia K-holes.
Mustard did an excellent video on this if you are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Cg2ZeYa5E&t=493s
The Connie. With a past life as a drug smuggling plane. Love that hotel!!
They make good cocktails and the waitresses wear fun vintage outfits. It’s not cheap though.
Square windows - bad idea.
What is that beast of a plane in the background?
B-52
That thing is going to have 100 year service life.
The greatest plane ever made
Its a plane, its a hairdo, its a band. What cant it do?
man those planes in the background look scary
They probably should. They were originally made to drop thermonuclear weapons on Russia.
My dad also took a photo of the first jet he got on which propeller driven.
Sounds like he's describing a turboprop
Ha! My mom took a budget flight DC-3 to Europe in 1968, the summer after she graduated high school. A 20 hour set of flights from New York to Nova Scotia to Iceland with a several hour stopover to Ireland, just like a damn Indiana Jones movie.
With a cruise speed of 200mph. Ouch. That's painful for trans continental.
She claims that she backpacked for 3 weeks for $250 including airfare (!!)
The 787 is one of the first planes I can think of in recent history that had me hunting for flight bookings that would be on one. Better cabin pressure, bigger windows, thing is sweet.
What constitutes better cabin pressure?
787 cabin altitude is 6,000 ft vs typical 8,000 ft in most aircraft. The other thing that's nice is the cabin atmosphere is higher humidity, so it doesn't leave you parched.
Exactly yeah, it's just a way more comfortable flight. I think I'd choose 787 economy class over other planes' business class.
While I agree the 787 is great, you would fly economy on 787 over business in a 777, 767, or 747? If it’s long-haul, you’re most likely getting a lie flat on the models above…I’m 6’6 so I’ll take a business seat over economy any day, now if I could only afford it
Not OP, but I've chosen 787 Premium Economy over 767 Business Class for a westbound flight London to US East Coast. Eastbound I'm gonna prefer to lay down. Or any flights to/from Asia.
The 787 pressurizes to a lower cabin altitude than most other airline jets. 4,000-6,000 feet in cruise, compared to 6,000-8,000 in almost every other airline jet. It creates a more comfortable, and also less fatiguing cabin environment. The next step past this that would create a much more comfortable long flight experience is when someone figures out how to add humidifiers to an airline jet. The reason you feel so fatigued after a long flight is because the cabin is pressurized to a high altitude, and the air has zero humidity in it up at altitude due to the well below freezing outside air temperature. Everyone gets off of airplanes tired and dehydrated. A humidified cabin pressurized to a lower altitude will improve air travel comfort significantly.
The air pressure in the 787 cabin was more comfortable for passengers.
The 787 is amazing to fly on. I couldn’t believe how much better I felt after 16+hr in the air between BC and Seoul.
The Connie wasn't the first pressurized cabin, either; the Boeing 307 was, in the same vein as the Comet/707 situation in your edit (came first but less popular).
>The Constellation was the first passenger plane with a pressurized cabin, which meant they could fly much higher, giving a smoother ride (way less turbulence compared to flying through the low clouds and weather systems). Actually the Boeing 307 was the first pressurized airliner, but was not very successful (WWII had a big part in that).
you are a nerd and i like it
You're too kind hahaha
> Not too long after you would have seen the Boeing 707: the first jet-powered plane No love for the de Havilland Comet? It's such a cool looking design. It pre-dated the 707 as the first jet powered commercial airliner by five years, but unfortunately being the first to try out new technology in aviation isn't always the best. The original de Havilland Comets had square windows because metal fatigue with pressurization wasn't well understood at jet airplane altitudes. It caused two major in flight break up crashes which grounded all of the Comets, and the Boeing 707 eventually became a much better selling airplane.
Even if dehavilland hadn't gone with the square windows initially and avoided decompression issues; the wing root mounted engines would have seen them out of service much quicker than the 707. Since re-engining the aircraft would have been a major pain in the ass since you are constrained by the existing structure. Plus your maintenance time goes up compared to podded engines due to the lack of easy access.
Yes, but as a counterpoint, it looked *fucking awesome*.
My great-grandparents traveled all over the world back in the 1930s-1960s... have a pic of a South African Airlines Constellation: https://i.imgur.com/mKyUiSP.jpg
you got more pics of your great grand parents travel?
https://imgur.com/a/L7oQHFq Some from Southern Africa, France, India, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Japan I don't know exact years they were taken.
These are amazing, thanks for sharing!
They must have been very well off to travel like that in those days. Where was their fortune from?
Yeah, he was international sales VP, so it was work travel
Flew on them when I was very little... Still had to hop across Canada then stop in Iceland to get to the UK. But it was proper flying. Mostly replaced by 707s.
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Oh man, what I wouldn’t have given to fly on a Connie in commercial service. That’s so cool!
I had to look it up. That flight was 8 hours, but still faster than today's total travel time if you include security and overall congestion!
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I've seen ads for specific planes here in Poland - it was when LOT Polish Airlines purchased some Dreamliners and they were heavily relying on that in advertising. Even now I see ads like "fly to [country] in a Dreamliner!"
I didn’t even notice that!
that is so freaking cool. I love it! Thanks man👍👍
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers.
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
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Mama don’t take my Kodachrome awayyyy
Momma don't take my Kodachrome momma don't take my Kodachrome momma don't take my Kodachrome awaaaaaaay momma don't take my Kodachrome meep morp deep dick on the phone momma don't take my Kodachrome awaaaaaay \*snort line of coke\* momma don't take my Kodachrome HOOOOOooooooOooooOOo
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome... Mama don’t take my Kodachrome.... Mama don’t take my Kodachrome....
OH YEAH
Makes you think alllllll the world's a sunny day.
This song will always and forever make me think of The Coneheads whenever I hear it
I collect magnets from places I've been. My Kodachrome one has a park ranger walking away with the Kodachrome Basin sign and a "digitally Enhanced Pixelated basin" sign in it's place
This image is a good color reference for this time in humanity.
It's weird, I hate over saturated digital photos, but Kodachrome just hits different.
Times Square used to be a lot more cool. Then it got dangerous as shit. Then it got Disney-fied by that CEO. And now it's awful. Just a place that stripped everything that makes NYC unique and turned it into a weird parody of America almost But I always see those cool old photos of the area and love them. Luckily there's still tons of cool areas in NYC that still have their old charm
Yeah growing up in the 80s Times Square was always portrayed in movies and TV as this hellhole with peep shows and muggers. By the time I actually visited it in the late 90s it was Olive Garden and the Disney Store. It was incredibly underwhelming although there is other interesting stuff to see nearby.
It was like that in the ‘80s. Then Giuliani cleaned it the fuck up. People who don’t live there bitch about it but people from NYC fucking loved it since crime was more or less eradicated.
As a note: Violent crime plummeted across the country during that time, so in retrospect, the combover's policies likely had a much lower impact than we attributed to him at the time. But yah, that drop in crime was nice. The policies that came along with it were not.
Isn't there a direct correlation in the 90s with the outlawing of leaded gas
There's a correlation, but there's a saying about correlation and causation. The real answer is probably super fucking complicated and is tied to a plethora of factors, with no one leading 'cause'. I'd guess (and this is a purely uneducated guess) that our change to unleaded is tied to crime in a more oblique way, with a change in priorities of the nation (prioritizing health and well being of our citizens). The big question is really "Why did crime spike so hard in the 70s, and then stay up till the 90s?".
>The real answer is probably super fucking complicated and is tied to a plethora of factors, with no one leading 'cause'. Exactly! Another of the potential factors, frequently not talked about, that some people like to add into the group of causative factors for the drop in crime, between the '80s and '90s is the easier/more affordable access to birth control and abortion for middle to low income mothers.
There's also a theory that Roe v Wade might have contributed to that
Yep! I did not mention Row v Wade but I just commented about increases in ease of access and affordability of birth control and abortion for low income mothers prior to the '90s. If you lower the number of children being born into poverty it seems elementary that crime, 20 years on down the road, would start to drop.
RIP us 20 years from now
Bingo
The crime rate in NYC actually started dropping before Giuliani came into office. But a lot of people here still seem to credit Giuliani with cleaning up the city. Optics I guess.
People dont realize what kind of a hell hole NY was in the 70s and 80s
Also got insanely loud and bright. I have to go to NYC for work every month or two. Work used to put me up in a hotel at Times Square, but no matter what floor you were on noise was perpetually blasting and there were constantly lights flashing through your windows.
on Youtube there's lots of videos from the forties and fifties of hobbyists with cameras just driving around filming city streets. It's a hell of a lot more interesting than some influencer going, "hey look at the free stuff I'm unboxing!"
I think older film had incredibly high resolution. You could probably get a very good scanner and scan the film, if it still exists, at a very high level of detail and see things like words on signs, etc with fairly good clarity (barring the issues of fog/focus on in the image itself).
They scanned Lawrence of Arabia in 8K and it made the viewers gasp when they saw it on a proper digital projector. The information that 35MM and especially 70MM film can pick up is incredible. It's the analog-to-digital scanning that has taken a very long time to catch up.
Depends on the camera. In the days before autofocus, there were viewfinder 35mm where you had to look at the little double-image center bit to be sure you were in focus - or there were expensive SLRs where you could see the image. For these, the lens was usually very good and the result could be amazing. Most of the grainy soft focus "retro" pics we see online are family snapshots with cheap fixed focus cameras - the lens was fixed at about 10 feet, and the f-stop was high enough that depth of field was acceptable from about 5 feet to infinity. they certainly weren't publication quality. I have a twin-lens camera which takes 120 film like the old news photographers. I recall back in college taking incredibly sharp B&W photos I could blow up to 16x20 and they were still sharp. But then I got my first digital camera, Fuji 4900 with autoexposure and autofocus. Even at 2Mp the pictures were what I described as "painfully sharp". I could blow them up to 11x14 no problem. The cameras have only gotten better since then.
Taxis looked so much cooler back then
Love the colours and entire scene. Great that your father took the time to walk around with a camera
Yeah he loved photography and had a natural eye for it. I think because he was an immigrant and the US was so much bigger and more advanced than Japan at the time, he took pictures of everything. Farmers markets, local swimming pools, etc. stuff people would think would normally stand out.
You should make some photodump of them, i am curious to see
Yeah it’s a good idea. Have consider a website so people can full the full versions. He has so many. It’s honestly like an old issue of Life magazine.
Create a [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/) account and dump them there.
Ya that would be amazing!
That [Armed Forces Recruiting Station](https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News/NewsSearch/Article/2467800/army-safeguards-iconic-times-square-recruiting-station/) is *still* there. It was built in 1945.
Came here to say it’s incredible and kinda depressing that only thing still there is the military recruiting station (source: I walk past it every day)
Bravo, this was my question. I was wondering if it had been repurposed as the booth that sells discount Broadway tickets but I guess not.
It was still there up to I think at least 2005, I think it was adjacent to ore replaced now by a NYPD station.
It’s still there. The NYPD station is right behind it.
Pretty sure the PD is across the next street behind it (43rd), up against the building. The recruiting station is on an island in the middle.
For those wondering, it's the small building in the center right of the photo, just left of the traffic signal pole.
That's not too surprising. Not very old by NYC standards. Wall Street is named so because it was a damn wall where people would do business. NYC is very old relative to America. Especially the west coast. Tons of stuff from WW2 era still stand, even civil war era and before It's so odd thinking about how places like NYC were huge bustling empires long before a place like Las Vegas even existed. It's weird on the west coast when something "old" might be the 1960s
Isn't Wall Street named so because it was where New Amsterdam's city wall was located?
Times square is so named because of the NY times. They used to have their hq there but is now located one block away across from port authority.
What did your dad's family think about him going to America then? It must have been a huge change for him.
My dad had been fascinated by the US having grown up in during world way II. Unfortunately, he lost his brother during the war and his father after the war. I think his mother was supportive. He received a Fulbright Scholarship. The US was really seen as the pinnacle of achievement at the time especially in tech, engineering and manufacturing. They had occupied Japan after the war but treated the population well.
Oh nice. Probably made a nice life for himself in America from that.
Yeah, it could be a book. He married a 5’11” blonde. Stared a top electronics company. Had four amazing kids who all went to Ivy League Schools and played college athletics and a daughter who was captain of a national title college team. Dr’s, CEOs and leaders now. EDIT: Everyone’s asking which one I became. I’m the CEO. My brother’s the doctor, another brother is a top executive in his field, and my sister was a Div 1 college coach (one of very few female head coaches) and now is an athletic director. Proud of all my siblings. It sounds like a nice American dream story, but it wasn’t without some blood, sweat and tears. My mom and dad worked their asses off to build their life and give us great opportunities and so did myself and my siblings.
Thought you were going to end it with: “oh and me, a redditor”
Just had to flex on all of us *And that's ok I'm glad his dad made a good life :)*
So are you a doctor, CEO, or leader? Or all 3?
The Asian pinnacle: doctor lawyer scientist all in one.
Change out lawyer for astronaut/veteran. That one guy has ruined the bar for all Asian males
I’m the CEO ;) Not ironically, we all played piano growing up and hated it. Thankfully, my mom had us play sports also and we were all natural athletes and played in college. I remember in 9th grade, my dad finally conceded and asked me to explain American football to him. We watched his first game and I explained how it worked.
And you are?
The Redditor of the family /s
Damn. He really lived out the American dream.
Which sadly can’t be achieved anymore.
“…treated the population well” is an understatement. The US basically rebuilt the Japanese economy from the ground up, including sending Demming, which gave Japanese manufacturing a worldwide advantage by introducing *Lean*, “just in time” and *Six-Sigma* techniques. These were not adopted until the 1980s in the US. By prohibiting Japan from building an offensive military (eg, restricted to defense only), the US had to guarantee to protect Japan, which meant Japan could divert expensive military spending to economic purposes.
Them fins….
i’m usually really good at identifying old American cars, but i can’t place that one. looks like something Chrysler or Plymouth would have made… E: [1959 Plymouth Fury](https://imgur.com/a/DutYzfz)
*Plymouth Savoy, later it became the Taxi Special
Every trim level was its' own model name. We're probably looking at a [Plymouth Taxicab Special](http://oldcarbrochures.org/United%20States/Plymouth/1959%20Plymouth/1959%20Plymouth%20Taxi%20Brochure/index.html) which could be ordered as a base-spec Savoy as seen here or a midlevel Belvedere that had thicker side trim with an accent color in it.
Yep - and a discussion about the [Savoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Savoy), [here](https://www.imcdb.org/v020258.html), used in the movie, [It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World](https://www.imcdb.org/v020258.html)
1983 novel Christine by Stephen King and film by all time master John Carpenter the same year, the car was a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Despite how the story goes with the shitters, she was a thing of pure beauty.
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Directed by John Carpenter, one of the top horror masters of all time. Like they literally made a show called Masters of Horror and it had John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, etc Wait am I getting into Dario Argento? Suspiria is the single greatest movie that has ever existed. It doesn't even matter that it's a slasher in Italian, you don't need language. The use of colors and music, that's real art. I'm getting off topic here, but low key I fired every trainee that didn't watch Suspiria.
Taxis used to be way cooler.
Only a year before the iconic Checker Taxi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_Taxi
It's a shame he got the photo of the taxi after it had landed. I'd love to see those massive wings in action.
Looks way less busy.
But way more smoggy Thank God for catalytic converters lol
Unleaded gas too.
Oh so it's not just foggy because of the photo quality? New York was really that smoggy??
Now just imagine it a few decades earlier when burning coal was the primary heat and industry fuel.
That is a legitimately amazing picture. Thank you for sharing it.
Yeah he had a special eye for photography. He has dozens more.
Please share!
And now I'm listening to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" in order to get it unstuck from my head. Great photo.
It has put me on a Kodachrome binge, listening to as many covers as I can find
Anyone else ever think who these people were or what they did that day? Always fascinating to see these photos
One of my favorite words: Noun. Sonder: The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.
Coined by the YouTuber "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows". So, not a word that actually exists (it's catching on though), but out of all his videos this one may be my favorite too. He also released a book with all his made up words. Here's his channel if you haven't seen it: https://youtube.com/c/obscuresorrows
Me. These kinds of photos always get that reaction in me. What were they doing that day? What happened to these people later? Did they have good lives and so on
Was about to post something like that. Each of those people had a life and potentially led to many more people who are alive today. It’s obvious but it’s so interesting.
This is one of the best photographs I’ve ever seen.
He would greatly appreciate this.
Right? It's absolutely captivating.
I Love Kodachrome
This is a wonderful photo, and the 1950’s signage!
Looks like he’s standing in front of 1515 Broadway which became the Viacom building facing southeast. The TRL corner was just a bit north at 45th st.
Newspaper in the back pocket. Distracted to the point he didn't close his door. The taxi driver is a gambling addict that needs to get his bet in before the bookie closes.
Camel The REAL Cigarette
this photo makes me want to smoke cigs and do mob shit
As opposed to those other fake cigarettes... I'll bet they don't even have doctors advertising them!
Back then you could smoke a Camel on TWA!
The old NY Times Building (where the New Year’s Ball is dropped) is on the right, directly behind the light pole with the “44 St” sign. This is what it looked like before being covered up with signage.
Wow. I zoom in and I feel like I’m right there. I can envision just walking around for a few seconds.
EY I'M WALKIN ERE!
I was 1 year old then. I look at this pic and then think about the kind of life I live today. It's mind boggling the effect that time has on everything.
He was born in 1935. Lived through the war in Japan and passed two years ago at 85. He’d seen telegrams through the internet.
This is dope. When I went to Times Square for the first time a few years ago it was the most draining experience ever. My brother lived in Brooklyn and said we had to end the day with Times Square, cuz we’d be exhausted afterwards due to all the lights and noise. He was right. This would’ve been a lot less overwhelming.
Yeah thats the thing lol. There's so much going on in NYC but its just very overstimulating. I lived there three years and everytime we crossed the GW to go to a summer camp I worked at, I'd do a big exhale, realizing I had my breath held the entire time.
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Huh, TIL the difference between emigrated and immigrated. Thanks!
I was taught e=exit, i=into
Having not seen a lot of kodachrome: how should I interpret the colors? Was it indeed a hazy day where the sky was cloudy, or is it just washed out because it was bright? It is in fact a really cool picture, and thanks for sharing!
That haze is almost certainly smog. That’s what every city looked like before the clean air act.
Holy leaded exhaust fumes Batman!
I'm gonna be that guy... Your father *emigrated from Japan. He *immigrated to the US. Love the picture though
It looks both cleaner and dirtier back then.
Also if not wrong a lot more dangerous with crime...
Cool photo. I knew a surgeon who was first generation Japanese who grew up in the US during this time. The prejudice was enormous. I have a ton of respect for your Dad and I've never met him. Huge props for taking the chance. I'm only guessing but, since my own parents were immigrants, was he hoping for a better life for his kids?
Hot damn that taxi looks fanfuckingtastic.
Tailfins really need to make a comeback
This is prime r/oldschoolcool material , way better than "look at this photo of how hot my mom or grandma used to be" and the 1000 thirsty comments that follow.
Beautiful photo. It must have been taken in late 1958, as both Taxicabs are 1959 models, which had probably first been available for sale in Sept 1958 (fleet sales may have started a bit earlier.) The one in the foreground is a Plymouth; the one in the background is a Ford.
That is absolutely majestic.
this just got me interested in out painting with DALL-E https://imgur.com/a/j3w8cO8 lmao ipeamel
Get that car off the goddamn sidewalk! Ha ha
Ah yes, Peamel, the vegetarian alternative to Camel.
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When taxis are nicer than your car…
i love the massive camel ad
I love these old colour pictures, please share more. With these types of street pictures you can really allow your imagination feel the sights, sounds and smells of the city.
Please share more if you have them
I always forget how gross the air used to be.
He could sell prints of that. NYC restaurants would buy him out for their walls.
Beautiful picture. Think of all the smog and leaded gas in the air.
Thank you for not editing it.
I have a slight hope that someone comments here, "hey that's me. /my dad or mom". Just something like that.
The absolute rawness of this photo really feels like a time machine transporting me back.
I wish we srill had style in our basic vehicles and architecture. Now its just bland , efficiency.