Watch This Footage of Crowded Delancey Street in the 1970s [VIDEO]
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Looking east on Delancey with Moscot in the background
Last week, the venerable British Pathé news agency uploaded an entire collection of 85,000+ newsreels to its dedicated YouTube channel. Naturally, we honed in on some classic New York footage dated simply to 1970-1979.
The clip shown below, “New York (1970-1979),” offers a great snapshot of the neighborhood, from Chinatown through the Lower East Side. Fast-forward to 3:52 for a sold four minutes dedicated to Delancey Street. We see some familiar storefronts (Moscot, Cohen’s Optical) alongside those buried by the soot of NYC time (Bunnies, Florsheim), as well as the Williamsburg Bridge, and the old Second Avenue El bathhouse still standing in the Allen Street Mall.
If for nothing else, this snippet of newsreel shows that traffic on Delancey was just as horrendous back then.
British Pathé was founded in 1910 by Charles Pathé, a pioneer of “moving pictures” in the silent era of films. The company itself has somewhat of a convoluted ownership history which is summarized here.
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