I'm airport blogging from DFW! Yeehaw!

I love looking at pictures of old New York - the beautiful and the not so beautiful.




Before Public Housing, a City Life Cleared Away

Riis's photographs of slum life were primitive, but they seared New York's conscience. Many of the worst slums were razed. Stricter safety and health standards were imposed. But slum clearance, by itself, also reduced the supply of affordable housing. And raising standards meant higher rents. So 70 years ago, New York City initiated another alternative: the nation's first public housing program. First Houses opened on the Lower East Side in 1935.

Now, a collection of 35,000 to 40,000 before-and-after photos, taken mostly by staff photographers for the New York City Housing Authority and recently discovered in a city warehouse, chronicles the grim living conditions in the slums, the destruction of their tenements and the birth of the public housing developments that replaced them.

"It's an image of the city we never thought we had," said Richard K. Lieberman, director of the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at La Guardia Community College in Queens. The archive, which is the repository for Housing Authority records, has organized the photos and made them available on its Web site, www.LaGuardiaWagnerArchive.lagcc.cuny.edu.