New York 1915

This is a fascinating picture of everyday life in New York, around 1915. Notice the large crowds of people and the very few vehicles, the chaotic street life. People are walking about in all directions, mingling with street vendors with their horse drawn carts. In a few years the horses will all be gone. The demographics of neighborhoods will have changed forever. The stores and vendors they shopped at will be gone. Nothing will remain the same. It is the end of an era, but the people in this photograph probably do not realize it as they go about their usual routines.

If we magnify sections of this photograph, we can catch a better glimpse of this bygone era; like using a time machine to focus on a frozen moment in time. Notice how dirty the unpaved streets are. And how the street vendors each seem to specialize in one or two types of goods, so that doing your weekly shopping must have been exhausting, going from one vendor to another, haggling the price of every item.

The fashion is uniform and conservative. The men wear hats, and the women wear very long skirts, and often a head dress. The scene appears to have been shot during the fall or early spring; it looks like there is a chill in the air.

It's also interesting that even though the crowd probably contains a large number of recent European immigrants, from places such as Italy and Eastern Europe, the store signs are all in English. Is it because of a different attitude towards assimilation, a melting pot rather than separate ethnic identities?

Looking at these people one realizes that most of them were strangers to one another, and never met. Yet they are caught like an insect in amber in this frozen image, shopping forever on a New York street in 1915.