I didn’t move to New York until 1968, but I’d been imagining what it would be like to live here for as long as I can remember. Movies fueled my fantasies, of course, and nearly all of the novels I read (Salinger, Capote, Kerouac, The Great Gatsby, Auntie Mame), but it was magazines that really enticed me. Because all but a few of the major U.S. magazines were based in New York, the city dominated their coverage of culture and commerce. Every museum, restaurant, art gallery, theater, publisher, bookstore, hairdresser, performance space, dive bar, nightclub, discotheque, and art-house cinema, it seemed, was here somewhere.
To anyone reading Esquire, Town & Country, or Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s and ’60s, New York was apparently the center of the known world: the place to be. I came as soon as I could, lugging a stack of those magazines along with me. I’ve since accumulated many more, including a number that don’t just touch on New York in passing but make the city their primary focus.
The five New York issues presented here, from the July 1939 issue of to the February 22 and March 1,, are hardly the only magazines to make the city their subject in those sixty years, but when it comes to photography, they’re among the best. For much of that period, U.S. magazines were big, nervy, ambitious, and flush with advertising; even after television took off in the ’50s, they continued to define mass media. If a publication had a sense of mission, it usually involved some combination of intelligent writing, sophisticated design, and fine photography—the sort of images that museums were just beginning to collect. Even before brought Walker Evans on as a staff photographer in 1945, the magazine had that formula down. Its July 1939 issue took its peg from that year’s world’s fair, which had opened out in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in April. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called the city “one exhibit I hope all visitors will note,” and supported his appeal with a series of unsigned articles on everything from Penn Station to Abercrombie Fitch, Broadway chorus girls to a taxi driver named Harry Farber, nearly all accompanied by photographs.
