NYC in the 40's - in color! - by Charles Cushman

Bowling Green 1942

Our friend, NYCD, over at This Ain't the Summer of Love, was kind enough to share a link today of this incredible set of photos of New York, especially downtown, during the 1940's, with a few from the early 60's thrown in for good measure. Whats really amazing is that they're color! Its rare to see such beautiful color shots from this time period. Looking through them, another striking fact is that, in some cases not much has changed, if at all, in 70 years. See them all here.

And this just in, thanks to my dad...available now for pre-order is a book which will include many of these fantastic images: The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America
From the description on Amazon: "The Day in Its Color introduces readers to Cushman's extraordinary work, a recently unearthed archive of photographs that is the largest known body of early color photographs by a single photographer, 14,500 in all, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock. From 1938-1969, Cushman--a sometime businessman and amateur photographer with an uncanny eye for everyday detail--travelled constantly, shooting everything he encountered as he ventured from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco, and everywhere in between. His photos include portraits, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets and media events, children playing, laborers working, and thousands of street scenes, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen, or even envisioned, in color."

Battery Park 1941

Clinton Street 1941

Broome Street & Baruch Place, 1941