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.

More: MCNY h/t: flashbak

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