The assignment in 1978 was simply to illustrate The City Observed: New York, a guidebook to Manhattan by Paul Goldberger, who was then the architecture critic for The New York Times. (He is now the architecture critic for The New Yorker.) Paul instructed me to keep the pictures straightforward, documentary and as free of optical distortion as possible. He handed me a carbon copy of his manuscript as my guide, and off I went, with my Nikons and Plus-X film.
Because I can still remember what the weather was like on the days I took these pictures, what the city sounded and smelled like, I was startled to look through my contact sheets recently and realize how much Manhattan had changed. New York did not just crawl out of its near-collapse in the mid-70s, it had boomed almost without interruption. Towers were inserted. Landmarks were deleted. And even in cityscapes that looked unchanged, I knew that far wealthier occupants -- residential and commercial -- could now be found behind familiar old facades.
My editors and I thought that pairing photos from then and now would be a graphic way to examine the phenomenon of urban churn that so defines this city. The series will visit a dozen or so neighborhoods, uptown and downtown, before the end of 2008. Each diptych tells its own tale, but the overall story is clear: It doesn't take much longer than a generation for New York to regenerate itself completely. DAVID W. DUNLAP
As Richard Goldstein writes in Helluva Town, his new history of New York in World War II, the port owed its safety not least to a canny and highly unlikely calculation. In 1942, the Navy and the district attorney swallowed hard and asked the help of the real authority in the harbor: the Mafia. Lucky Luciano, then doing 30 to 50 years for running a prostitution ring, consented. It sounds like a plot from The Sopranos, but the payoff was real: with mobsters keeping an eye out for saboteurs, and Navy intelligence officers posing as longshoremen, the harbor suffered zero acts of sabotage during the war.
