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A primer into some of the picture postcards of New York of Yesteryear

Every now and then I’m finding a few particularly nice picture postcards, and such was the case with the below “series” from the 1940s and early 1950s.

I do recall my first time in New York.

It was late October 2006, and the weirdest thing happened when I exited the Subway on Broadway and W 72nd Street: upon getting upstairs, I looked around—and everything felt like…well, familiar.

Although I’ve never been to the US before that trip, my guesstimate is that certain areas of New York are familiar to virtually everyone on this planet by virtue of Hollywood and mass media exposure to a myriad of (always the same) images.

Did this happen to you, too, dear readers?

Since then, I’ve been back to NY a few times, and I must confess that after a few times in the area, this feeling kind of “wears off”, although the increasing discrepancy between the (nice) images seen online or on screens vs. the (not that nice) reality might have something to do with it, too.

Let’s leave this sentimental musing asides—today and tomorrow I’ll share a few picture postcards from the New York that once was, and I hope you’ll enjoy them, too.

So far, so conventional in terms of the expectable pictorial “canon”, but this particular series also comes with two specimen that are, well, quite “off the mark”:

The above picture is quite different, because NY serves as a kind of “background”—while the below picture postcard is…well, different yet again.

A few more, certainly also “different” images will be posted shortly.