This is a post about nostalgia for a time before my grandparents were born. It's a nostalgia based on a culture of nostalgia, a lifetime of listening to people reminiscing for the Good Old Days. This is a post where, for a moment, I forget my knowledge that the good old days were rotten, stinking cesspools of human waste, disease, corruption and ignorance. This post is about a time that never was, a history that is mere fantasy.

This post was brought about by the online gallery of panoramic photos at the Library of Congress. I wrote this assuming that I could link the images, but the LOC's system doesn't seem to like that much. So, go forth and search yourself. You'll find something worthwhile. I have linked to local copies in a pop-up, at half size. If you want full resolution, get thee to the LOC.

See that? That's New York's City Hall Park in 1911. Great big, broad streets with next to no traffic. Pedestrians everywhere. As my roommate said, it looks almost like Paris. That large over-street structure on the right is the Elevated terminal. By 1911, subway construction had reached a fever pitch. The first line opened in 1904, and seven years later new lines were being constructed all over. The large building rising behind the El station is the Municipal Building. The Muni was meant to be a shining example of Good Government Construction in the post-Tammany era. Steel construction without being a glass box. Modern architects could learn a thing or two here.

Columbus Circle in 1907, eighty years before Trump and Time Warner. The pillar of Columbus towers, instead of being towered over; municipal monuments inspired awe and respect, instead of being tucked away into back corners. The entire circle had just been dug up and re-seated three years earlier, when the original subway ran directly underneath it (you can see the old IRT station kiosks on the street corners in the center). The War Memorial which now guards the entrance to central park is nowhere to be seen. Also missing are the huge concrete barriers surrounding the once-stately promenade of islands up Broadway. The circle directly around Columbus isn't an abandoned concrete shell surrounded by traffic, but is instead populated by the people using it as a streetcar transfer.

The Ghetto on Hester St, 1902. Once upon a time, the lower east side was pretty much the largest center of Jewish immigrants in the United States. In the tenements of the lower east side, families were crammed into tiny apartments, with many different families sharing a few small, squalid bedrooms. Work was hard to find for immigrants at all, especially Jews, who took the lowest rung of the immigrant ladder along with the Irish. By the turn of the century, conditions had begun to improve, though things still had a long way to go.

I've probably got some relatives in this photo.

Look at the buildings in that shot. Each one holds within itself a teeming mass of humanity, in disgusting conditions. This is a slum. These same buildings would now house hipsters enchanted with exposed brick and hundred-year-old styling. That is, if any of them haven't been replaced with high-rise public housing projects by now.

Flash forward thirty years and move a few miles north: Midtown. The "skyscrapers" of the turn of the century have given way to the modernist stylings of the soaring Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. In the Depression Era, visions of the future merged with the city of the past, as WPA dollars funded a massive round of municipal construction. Note the Zeppelin dock on top of the Empire State; hadn't been replaced with the radio tower yet.

Look towards the bottom-right of the picture and you can see the doomed 2nd Avenue Elevated Elevated line. They tore it and its sister, the 3rd Ave El, down for scrap when the 2nd Avenue Subway was pending. The 2nd Ave Subway was never built, leaving the East Side with just one rapid transit line, down from three. Look down at the lower-left, and you'll see a curio: the 34th St shuttle. It ran from 3rd Avenue down to the East River, where it connected with a ferry dock. Bet ferry commuters from Queens and North Brooklyn wouldn't mind having that back. Well, as long as it came with 2nd and 3rd Ave transit to connect with.

The New York Skyline in its heyday. A towering forest of steel, masonry, and sweat. And not a single black glass box in sight.

Look at me, I'm rambling again. Well, it's two thirty in the morning and I'll do as I please.

Alright, fine: The past sucked. Racism, sexism, crippling disease and poverty ran rampant. You didn't have to smell car exhaust, but instead you had to watch your step for horse shit. Life was short, brutal, and not any more enlightened than it is now.

But that doesn't mean that it was all bad, or that we can't learn from it. I think that people today tend to dismiss the past out of hand, refusing to learn from it. People a hundred years ago might have gotten a lot of things wrong that we've corrected, but they also got a lot of things right, some of which we may have forgotten. Go have a look around. You tax dollars are archiving this stuff for a reason.