New York Then and Now (New York City) [Paperback]

Edward B. Watson (Author), Edmund V. Gillon Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Series: New York City | Publication Date: June 1, 1976

Watch New York change before your eyes: 83 early Manhattan sites are set against 83 modern photos taken from same position: Times Square, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, many more. Early photographs from 1875 to 1925 contrasted with 1976.

Product Details

• Paperback: 171 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications; 1ST edition (June 1, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486233618
• ISBN-13: 978-0486233611
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 9.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #376,380 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and Depressing, September 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: New York Then and Now (New York City) (Paperback)

Brilliant concept: the authors found 19th-century photos of Manhattan and returned there in the late 1970s to take photos from the exact same vantage points. The side-by-side results are horrifying--what a beautiful livable city New York used to be! Life was not better 100 years ago, of course, but architecture sure was.

Dover--bless them!--has a whole series of Then & Now books on Boston, Phila., Washington, and other cities. There should be more: where's San Francisco? London? Paris? Local photogs should get snapping and send proposals to Dover Press.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful photos, lovingly reproduced, bravo Dover!, January 16, 2005

By 

Mac in NYC (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: New York Then and Now (New York City) (Paperback)

Yes, the "now" photographs are 30 years old, But how great it is to be able to compare the same view in 1907, to 1974, to as you can see it in 2005! This book is a time capsule in itself, and in many ways even more interesting then when it was first published.

In the mid-seventies, New York City was not a particularly kind place. The city was going bankrupt, Central Park's lawns were mainly dirt with patches of crab grass, and the subways were covered in graffiti. This book takes me right back there. It's amazing to see how desolate Broadway north of Houston was in the mid seventies and then to experience it today as a boulevard of high-end shops. The same thing goes for the Ladies' Mile shopping district on Sixth Avenue: formerly thriving, forlorn in the seventies, restored and vital today.

The period photos are well chosen, with a ghostly, otherworldly quality. It's so hard to believe Manhattan could ever have been so bucolic, a city of horse-drawn carts in which church steeples were the tallest structures around.

If you want a book that focuses on today, check out "New York Changing" by Douglas Levere, in which he painstakingly "rephotographs" 81 of the scenes captured by the great Berenice Abbott in the thirties. It's an amazing work for New York buffs, a real treat. Using a period camera, Levere went to great lengths to recreate the same shots, aided in one instance by the driver of a double-decker bus who pretended to have mechanical difficulties so that Levere, perched on the top deck, had time to compose his shot. But even Levere's book is a time capsule in that he was working before and after September 11, and several photos show the World Trade Center in all its looming enormousness. Time doesn't stand still, and these books do what they can to document the all-too-fleeting moment.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The "Now" is not..., October 8, 2001

By 

Maria S. "mariajl" (Glen Burnie, MD United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: New York Then and Now (New York City) (Paperback)

Before I hit "one click" I could not remember why I had never bought this book before. After all... I love to see the photo comparisons of the city.
But... as soon as I opened the book, I remembered why.
The book was published in 1976.
All of the "now" pictures were taken no later than 1974.
So much has changed in Manhattan since 1974... that the "now" views are unfamiliar in many circumstances.
The old photos are facinating... and the commentary interesting... but I still feel the need to take my camera out to all those sites so I can get the perspective I truly wanted.