Photos of New York City Through the Decades
The first known inhabitants of what is now New York City were the Lenape (aka Delaware), an Indigenous people native to the northeastern U.S. Their villages were groupings of round-shaped wigwams constructed from bark, some of which were large enough to function as communal housing. The name “Manhattan” comes from the Lenape “Manahatta,” their word for a hilly, forested area, which roughly translates to “the place for gathering wood to make bows.” But when Dutch colonists acquired the land around New York Harbor in 1626, they named it New Amsterdam.
1600s and 1700s
The Dutch constructed modest red tile-roofed brick and stone buildings, warehouses to support the fur trade, a church, and thatch-roofed wooden homes, in the style of a small European village. They also built a series of walls bordering the settlement in order to protect it against attacks — the street that was originally adjacent to one of the walls is known today as Wall Street.
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On September 8, 1664, the British navy took New Amsterdam and renamed the settlement New York. In 1698, the British built the square-steepled First Trinity Church out of brownstone and brick in the English style, as well as a Georgian-style mayor’s mansion. Larger buildings began to appear, too — many as high as six stories and constructed of red-and-yellow Flemish brick with gable roofs, a design that complemented the existing Dutch-style buildings. In the early 18th century, New York was still distinctly rural — much of the area was farmland, rolling hills, and wetlands — but its population was increasing. By the time the Revolutionary War began in 1775, there were about 20,000 residents in the city.
1800s
In 1811, New York City’s commissioners developed a master plan for urbanization, to order and expand the streets of Manhattan: the now-famous city grid. The plan called for streets to be numbered from 1 to 155, and the commissioners assumed that it would take centuries for the grid to be filled in with development. But between 1810 and 1820, New York City’s population grew by 50% due in large part to immigration. By 1860, the population had surged to 813,669 — up from 33,131 near the turn of the 19th century. Development boomed along with the population growth and approached the end of the grid at 155th street in just 50 years as New York became a preeminent shipping, immigration, and manufacturing hub. Graceful row houses were built along Washington Square in what is now Greenwich Village, making it a desirable destination for the city’s elite. The Upper West Side remained rural, with green pastures, rail fences, and farmhouses. Construction began on Central Park in 1858, and its first section opened that same year.
The 19th century was marked by a growing division of wealth, however, and in poor areas of the city, tenement housing proliferated in order to meet increased housing needs, numbering more than 15,000 by the end of the Civil War in 1865. Tenements were largely centered in immigrant areas such as the Five Points in Lower Manhattan, near modern-day Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Living conditions in these overcrowded dwellings were often incredibly poor and dangerous, and became a major social issue toward the turn of the 20th century.
1900s and 1910s
In 1898, the “Greater New-York” bill took effect and united New York City, Brooklyn, Long Island City, and the then-sparsely populated Queens and Staten Island (the area that became the Bronx had already been annexed by New York in 1895). In 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit opened the first line of the electric subway system that would connect the five boroughs. The Industrial Revolution brought a massive amount of wealth to New York City, and industries such as publishing, textiles, advertising, and other manufacturing thrived.
The cityscape began to reflect the influx of wealth, as increasingly opulent structures were built toward the end of the 19th century — America’s “gilded age.” The Washington Square Arch was built in 1895, and skyscrapers became a prominent part of the city, starting with the Tower Building in 1889, and then the Home Life Insurance Building in 1894. At the turn of the century, skyscraper construction increased in both frequency and magnitude, spurred by the City Beautiful movement that cast them as sources of civic pride. The Flatiron Building was built in 1902, followed by the 395-foot original New York Times Building in 1904. When the Singer Building was completed in 1908, it was the tallest building in the world at 612 feet. Just one year later, the 700-foot Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower took the tallest building mantle until 1913, when the Woolworth Building towered over it by nearly 100 feet. The marble or terracotta cladding and ornate neo-Gothic or beaux-arts designs of these buildings gave a cathedral-like sensibility to the emerging NYC skyline.
1920s and 1930s
The 1920s in New York City were marked by the Harlem Renaissance, an era in which Black-owned arts and cultural centers were the hub of American culture at large. Jazz and blues nightclubs, cabarets, and theaters added to the city’s nightlife, especially in the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. The prosperity at the turn of the century also resulted in a skyscraper height arms race. The vertical city we know today began to take shape, with the appearance of the street wall — the narrow blocks of Manhattan lined with sky-high buildings. The “jazz moderne” architectural style that became known as art deco emerged spectacularly in two iconic buildings constructed at the beginning of the 1930s: the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, which were both the tallest in the world at the time they were completed. The first neon sign in the city was installed in Times Square in 1924, and proliferation of neon signs proliferation throughout the 1930s added a colorful glow to nighttime in New York.
1940s and 1950s
The postwar era was a new peak for New York City. In 1947, the British writer J.B. Priestley commented, "The New York (of) 40 years ago was an American city, but today's glittering cosmopolis belongs to the world, if the world does not belong to it." New York in the 1940s was a center of broadcasting and media, as well as the world’s largest manufacturing center, wholesale center, and port. It was a global financial pillar and an enormous corporate hub, with 27% of Fortune 500 companies headquartered there. Yet postwar NYC was also more affordable than it is today: Higher-market rents equated to about $2,500 in today’s dollars — nearly $1,000 less than the average market rent today.
1960s
While the 1950s largely continued the prosperity of 1940s New York City, the 1960s were an era of tumult. The decade began with the passing of the 1961 Zoning Resolution, which encouraged the design of plazas and other open spaces, in order to combat the “street wall” effect that had emerged in the city’s landscape. But construction in the early ’60s didn’t carry the same optimism it once did, and there was a more ominous development that same year: the demolition of Penn Station. The iconic transportation hub had been an architectural marvel, and its destruction (to make room for the latest iteration of Madison Square Garden) was an infamous wound to the civic psyche, so much that it inspired the city’s historic preservation movement. While midcentury New York was a hub for booming creative industries such as TV and pop music, storm clouds of decline were gathering. Socio-cultural and racial tensions rose, and an increasing number of middle-class and affluent families left the city for the ever-growing suburbs. Infrastructure problems such as garbage and transit strikes, as well as power grid failures, also began to cast an ominous shadow by the end of the decade, a product of the city running account deficits since 1961.
1970s and 1980s
In the 1970s, the financial deficits the city had been running throughout the previous decade reached a boiling point. In 1974, New York City was forced to borrow $2.2 billion for facilities projects and to cover debts. By the end of the year, municipal debt increased to $13.5 billion. The New York of this era reflected the financial strife: Debt meant cost-cutting, and cost-cutting meant a reduction in maintenance services. An estimated 441,963 people left the city between 1970 and 1976, a population loss of 5.6%. Transit and sanitation workers again organized strikes at the beginning of the 1980s. The city took on a dingy griminess that was depicted in such films as Taxi Driver and The Warriors. Graffiti began appearing throughout the boroughs, and though it was condemned by NYC Mayor John Lindsay, its distinctive urban patina was embraced by the city’s punk rock and hip-hop movements as art on its own terms.
1990s and 2000s
French photographer Gregoire Alessandrini likened 1990s New York to “waking up with a bad hangover from all the past parties and eccentricity.” Yet New York City was beginning to recover financially, and the first signs of gentrification began in the 1980s and ’90s as young professionals returned to the city and crime rates began to drop. The city also saw a cultural renaissance through the rise of hip-hop and other artistic movements, as well as activist movements such as LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice. In the new millennium, the tragic September 11 attacks inspired a widespread reaction of renewed pride in the quintessential American city. Extensive rezoning in the 2000s emphasized residential high-rises, bike lanes, and multipurpose buildings, especially in Brooklyn and Long Island City, spreading gentrification beyond the island of Manhattan.
