By this stage of the proceedings, if you've spent any meaningful amount of time reading this weblog, you're invariably used to me waxing histrionic about some picture I've plucked off of someone's Flickr page. I'll routinely dole out some incredibly banal minutia about how a certain record store or live venue or dive bar or comic book shop or pizza parlor used to stand on the very corner of whatever street is depicted back in the 60s, 70s, 80's or 90s, and then I'll lapse into an embittered tirade about the jackbooted march of gentrification and how Dee Dee Ramone or Stiv Bators or Lux Interior or Johnny Thunders or (insert name of favorite deceased punk rocker here _________) wouldn't recognize it today if they came back, etc. etc. etc. It's becoming a bit of a Flaming Pablum standby.
But the photo I'm cherry picking today well pre-dates the arguably over-rhapsodized NYC era of my distant youth. No, the photo below captures the Lafayette Street of 1912. I don't know if they were calling that particular strip "Noho" back then, but I rather strenuously doubt it. This particular shot (1912: Lafayette Street, view N to E. 4th Street; Woman carries bundle of home-work [Lewis Hine]) was plucked from a truly amazing set of pictures on Flickr dubbed New York 1910's. The striking thing about this photo and many others like it in the set is how still very recognizable the locales remain. At first glance, for example, the below shot looks like the prototypical, sepia-toned photograph you spy hanging on a museum wall. But upon closer scrutiny, you can deduce that those horses & carriages are parked right in front what is today's Screaming Mimi's. Up the street on the left is the site of the old (by our standards) location of Tower Video. Across the way is the large warehouse that today plays host to Astor Wines. In the distance, you can spot the Wannamaker's building (today, the home of K-Mart & AOL). Give the set a perusal for more strangely familiar trips through the time machine.
It's a fitting reminder that these streets that some of us are so precious about for any number of reasons (some of them silly, some of them valid) were here long before us. And, God willing, they'll be here long after we're gone.
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