Wonderful Photos Of Postwar New York City In 1946 By Todd Webb
View from Empire State Building
Todd Webb (1905-2000) was discharged from the US Navy in 1945. Before fighting in the war, Todd had worked as a stockbroker, a field in which he’d enjoyed notable success til losing all his money in the 1920s crash, prospected for gold in California and Panama, and worked as a forest ranger.
In the 1930s whilst working for Chrysler in his native Detroit he joined the Chrysler Camera Club. A workshop class with Ansel Adams stoked his interest in photography. And so it was that after the war he picked up his camera and in search of anew life headed to New York City.
There he “nurtured a friendship with Alfred Stieglitz”, whom he met in 1942, and his wife, the hymned artist Georgia O’Keeffe. She introduced Tood to Beaumont Newhall – in 1946 Newhall curated an exhibition of Todd’s photographs for The Museum of The City of New York: I See A City.
“Life goes on about me, and I am a living breathing part of it. I feel things, the people, the buildings, the streets, and I have something to say about them and my medium is photography,” he said.
125th Street, Harlem
3rd Avenue El looking south from Fulton Street Station
East 7th Street
Fulton Fish Market wharf
Watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
Tenements and Graveyard from Chatham Square El Station
125th Street, Harlem. Whisk broom salesman
The Battery, New York
3rd Avenue from 42nd Street El Station
Maise, Queen of the Bowery
125th Street and Broadway, Harlem
10th Street, NYC
Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets
Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets
Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets
Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets
Suffolk and Hester Streets
Third Avenue and Bowery
Times Square sign painter
Greenwich Village
Mott Street
Third Avenue
Orchard Street
Amsterdam Avenue near 125th Street
37th Street
Sixth Avenue
La Salle Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Harlem
A Park Avenue storefront church in Harlem
Near Fulton Fish Market
Mr. Perkins’ Pierce Arrow, Harlem
A whisk broom salesman on 125th Street
Third Avenue billboards
Looking southeast from the Empire State Building
“Welcome home” signs on Third Avenue
Amsterdam Avenue, near 125th Street
A soldier getting a shoe shine on 125th Street
A Third Avenue corset shop
Tenements flattened for new housing projects on 113th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues
