Topic: Because I love old pictures of NYC, and urban decay

[Indofunk]

Camilo José Vergara's photos of New York from the 1970s

http://mashable.com/2015/12/09/new-york-1970s-vergaras

[Francois]

Camilo José Vergara's photos of New York from the 1970s

Boy was the city in dire need of some urban renewal!
It's funny because it's a time before the modern graffiti was born... just 10 years later and the same places probably were covered with bloos and 'pieces.

Is it just me or the place looked like a sleazy 70's movie?

[Bryan]

That's how I remember it when I used to visit my grandparents there in the 70's.  My wife wanted to go there for our honeymoon in the 90's.  I hadn't been there for some time so I said why would you want to go to that dirty old city.  We went to Hawaii instead.  It's a very different city today. 

[ManuelL]

Nice find!
The village I grew up in during the 70s looked quite nice back then, but is probably falling apart today.

[02Pilot]

Ah, the New York I remember. Obviously not a state of affairs to return to, but the trend toward sterile and shiny has gone too far IMO. If we could just get a couple of sleazy porno theaters back in Times Square it would do a lot to achieve some sort of balance....

[Francois]

The village I grew up in during the 70s looked quite nice back then, but is probably falling apart today.

That's the way cities usually work... in cycles.
There's gentrification, then a more hip place is built elsewhere, people start moving out, property gets damaged, rents fall, and when the place is crumbling, poor people move in, then artist and gays (simply because they are usually not concerned by risk... there's nothing sex related in the process, it just happens to be that way) find that there's something to do with the place and start fixing it up, once it gets nice and there are cool small cafés and boutiques, the rich start taking notice and begin to move in, demand grows, rents go up, the poor can't afford to stay there anymore and are forced out, and the cycle keeps on going.

And then, the artist get tired of it all and move to Portland

[Sandeha Lynch]

Encapsulated in a graphic (from The Guardian) ...

[Late Developer]

Although I'm not drawing any real parallels between New York and my home town of Stockport (6 miles south of Manchester in the NW of England for those unfamiliar), some of the scenes portrayed remind me of some of the semi-cleared slums and bombed-out sites that hadn't been redeveloped by the mid-late sixties.

I had no idea that parts of New York looked like that.  I grew up believing that New York was all like Manhattan.  A real eye-opener.  Thanks for posting.

[Francois]

I think these photos were taken during the years that NYC was in bankruptcy... Or close to it.

These days, the closest thing to these pictures that I can think of is Detroit.
I went for a bit of streetview on Google earth the other day and it's pretty incredible.

[Indofunk]

Encapsulated in a graphic (from The Guardian) ...

Ok, that's the greatest. Proving again that a picture is worth 1,000 words

[Aksel]

Many thanks for sharing! This is just so cool