Times Square, Then and Now

I like the “then and now” conceit. Simple yet revealing, one takes a picture or a description of a person or a place from some time ago and holds it up for comparison to that person or place today. This seemingly simple assignment can be challenging, especially when images of a place are decades apart.

I did something like this a couple of years ago when I re-traced the steps of the funeral scene from The Godfather. I did it again on Wednesday , when I found myself standing in Times Square, holding in front of me a black and white printout of this amazing picture, trying to find the spot at which it was taken. This picture is from my collection of slides. It was taken by a Coloradoan visiting Manhattan’s Times Square in 1942.

The following picture comes close to the spot at which the above was taken, but I will try again because I want to get this right.

The frames of reference here are the white building in the lower left and the tan brick building on the right, seen in my picture behind the modern-day T.G.I. Friday’s sign and in the 1942 picture behind an empty billboard. The exact placement of the first picture would be more to the right, though if memory serves that would have put me right out in the middle of 7th Avenue, dodging vehicular traffic and — more perilously — invective-spewing bicyclists.

There are, obviously, a lot more buildings now, and a lot more taller buildings at that. Times Square looks so small in 1942. The signage where the Ruppert Beer sign used to be now climbs virtually to the sky. Samsung and HSBC appear to have called PEnnsylvania 6-5300 to buy that previously empty billboard and the air space above.

What I find eye-popping about the 1942 Kodachrome slide is its color. Pictures from the 1940s are usually in black and white, and I would think that a certain segment of the American mind assumes that life itself was in black and white up until television and print media were in color.

The venerable Shorpy.com shows this picture of Times Square in 1943, all in black and white and, by certain modern standards, not a little bit dreary because of it. Black and white does sap the superficial out of a subject as gaudy as Times Square, but I prefer black and white story-telling in film and photography. It signifies a departure from reality and asserts that what you see is, in fact, only a story — a work of art distinct from your ordinary life.

My acquisition of the 1942 Times Square photo also coincides with my recent pre-occupation with Telephone Exchange Names. I originally posted a single story with a series of exchange name sightings but the page got too big to deal with. I broke it up into a picture essay to which I will add more exchange names as I spot them. I collected most of the pictures I already have of exchange name sightings around New York, and in place of some of the less usable old pictures I got new shots of the same places while occasionally spotting new (to me) exchange names on the sides of warehouses and manufacturing plants in Queens and Manhattan.

The PEnnsylvania Exchange Name seen in this 1942 picture is, of course, long gone. The number today goes to a law firm by the name of Block, O’Toole, & Murphy. Their number is 212-736-5300, but would formerly have been PEnn6-5300. I think it would be pretty cool to discover that a primitive version of my phone number once stood over the so-called Crossroads of the World.