It is strange how things work out – my last post involved rummaging around some old 35mm negatives which just happened to be filed next to a set from a trip to New York in 1983. I was so unimpressed by this image that I hadn’t even bothered to make a contact print. With the passage of time it has developed some merit – the type of yellow cab and the cars place it squarely in the eighties but maybe the background also defines a precise moment in history. Are the multitude of cranes on a building site or are they being stored? It is somewhere in Lower Manhattan but where precisely? (click on image to enlarge)
Perhaps most poignantly, the road sign points to the World Trade Center where the Towers still stood, tall and proud.
northumbrian : light 
Funny how the very things one tries to keep out of tourist shots – passers by, traffic – are what makes them interesting years later.
That’s right Paddy – also, don’t you think the suspension on that yellow cab looks particularly 1980s sedan car sloppy – he can’t have been doing more than 10mph otherwise I would have been run over 🙂
Interesting how an image captures our attention decades later. I wonder what this one would look like if you converted it to color…
Unfortunately I did the whole trip in B&W with my much loved Olympus OM1; it was a business trip so I was supposed to be working :-). I remember NY being fairly drab and a lot more threatening than it is now.