As City Limits celebrates its 45th year covering New York City, a look back at photos from the archives.
A photo from the September 1992 issue of City Limits. The oroginal caption: “After the riots in Washington Heights, local youth organizers worked to transform anger into community change.” (Photo by Linda Rosier)
City Limits celebrates its 45th anniversary this year. For the last four-and-a-half decades, our reporters, editors and photographers have devoted their talents to telling the stories of New York: stories of tenants fighting for better housing conditions, small businesses fighting to stay open, advocates fighting for a government that betters serves its people, and many, many more.
As part of our anniversary celebration, we’ll be rolling out stories each month revisiting some of City Limits’ extensive archives. Below is a collection of photographs and images that have graced our pages — both print and virtual — over the last 45 years.
June/July 1976
Members of the Manhattan Valley Development Corporation, a nonprofit founded in 1968 to tackle housing issues in the Upper West Side neighborhood, along Central Park between West 100th and 110th streets.
The lead photo from a story about a housing plan from Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to create a new agency, called he New York City Department of Housing and Neighborhood Preservation, focused on preserving and repairing the city’s existing housing stock.
A block on New Jersey Avenue in East New York, where homes were part of the city’s Small Home Improvement Program (SHIP), which rehabbed unoccupied buildings that were then made available for purchase by low- and moderate-income families.
“Scavenging for wire amid the rubble of Charlotte Street,” reads the caption from a story about the future of the South Bronx street, made famous by President Jimmy Carter’s visit two years earlier.
Beverly Skinner, a tenant at a building in East Flatbush where residents were forced to vacant the property after a year-long battle to reclaim the neglected building from their landlord. (Photo by Marc Jahr)
Members of a food service training class hosted by the Mutual Aid Project, which focused on organizing social services without governmental funding, “concentrating instead on developing leadership and teaching local residents to work cooperatively outside of governmental structures.” (Photo by George Cohen)
Children on a stoop in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Featured in a story about federal changes to welfare eligibility which made it harder for low-wage workers – like single parents – to qualify for supplemental benefits.
Demonstrators protest the closing of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem. (Photo by Laurie Peek). An op-ed from this issue slammed the Koch administration’s plan to convert the site to housing, despite community efforts to see it reopened as a medical facility. “Over one million dollars per year since 1980 has been spent to prevent viable health services from being placed in the building. It’s only use under this Koch-style detention has been the shooting of a Woody Allen movie inside it.”
The last day of business at Hall Place Books on East 7th Street on the Lower East Side, from “Open Season on Small Business Tenants.” (Photo by Val Orselli)
Members of East Harlem Youth Action, a program to put unemployed youth to work rehabilitating abandoned city-owned buildings. (Photo by Arlene Schulman)
Benny Didomenic, owner of the Michaelangelo Restaurant at 351 Jay Street, where the city was planning to develop the Brooklyn MetroTech campus. “I work 17 hours a day and it took me 11 years to build up my future. I don’t sleep at night anymore.”
The photo from a 1990 story on “Medicaid mills” which “earn their name by rushing vast numbers of patients through brief exams and prescribing unnecessary drugs, x-rays and lab tests in exchange for kickbacks from nearby pharmacies and testing centers.” (Photo by Adam Anik)
Original photo caption: Basketball courts in Washington Heights have been crowded out by school annexes. Among the only places to play are streets closed off to cars. (Photo by Suzanne Tobias)
Original caption: Flerida Ramirez (left) lives with three relatives in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment because her new Section Eight certificate had to be returned to the city before she could move into a renovated apartment. (Photo by Ana Aslan)
Original caption: ACT-UP protesters disrupted Mayor Giuliani’s town-hall meeting at All Soul’s Church on the Upper East Side last month. They were opposing proposed cutbacks to the Division of AIDS Services. (Photo by Gregory P. Mango)
Sister Patricia Moore of East Harlem Partnership for Change was cuffed by police during a civil disobedience action, where protestors sought to stop the installation of a 10-ton garbage compactor on East 110th Street. (Photo by China Jorrin)
Councilman Archie Spigner, who represented Southeast Queens and chaired the City Council’s housing committee, in his office. (Photo by Gregory P. Mango)
Original caption: The need for park space for some Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods is so great that Williamsburg residents have taken this abandoned site as their own – rotting piers and all. (Photo by Steve Mcauley)
The cover photo from a 2001 story about tenants in single room occupancy hotels (SROs) in Rockaway, Queens, and efforts to have such housing eliminated. “The tenants don’t pretend their rooms are perfect, but they’re not looking for luxury; they simply want an affordable, stable place to live,” the story reads. (Photo by Joshua Zuckerman)
Original caption: A few days after Mayor Bloomberg announced cuts to the city’s capital budget, Broadway performer Paula Larke joined religious leaders in praying for him, and to end the shortage of affordable housing in the five boroughs. (Photo by Jonathan Hubschman)
November 2004
A Thanksgiving Day wedding in Chinatown. The American holiday had become known as “Chinatown’s unofficial wedding day,” since it was a date that all immigrant workers “can all share a day off.” (Photo by Xiaoqing Rong)
Original photo caption Pierre Joseph making a delivery in Manhattan. Attempts to lessen trucks’ impact on traffic and pollution, like scheduling deliveries at night, require changes in how receiving businesses and consumers operate. (Photo by Adi Talwar)
Stacy Seecharan started B & S Iron Works in the Bronx in 2003. From our 2013 series on the city’s programs for minority- and women-owned businesses.
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January 2014
Original caption: Incoming Borough President Eric Adams will try to put his stamp on an office that predecessor Marty Markowitz managed to turn into an effective platform for boosting Brooklyn. (Photo by Pearl Gabel)
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January 2015
Adi Talwar
Natasha Creese relaxing with family and friends after a Sunday lunch in 2015. She was featured in an article that year about the 112 percent rent hike she was facing at her Crown Heights building.
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February 2016
Adi Talwar
The Beit El-Maqdis Islamic Center in Sunset Park, just north of Bay Ridge, a neighborhood with a heavy Arab presence where Syrians might be relocated if they came to New York City in any numbers.
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October 2017
Adi Talwar
Halloween in the Norwood section of the Bronx in 2017.
September 2018
Adi Talwar
Among the top points of origin for LLC donations in the state is 420 Lexington Ave., from where more than half a million in donations has flowed since 2015.
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August 2019
Adi Talwar
Fernando Torres (68, facing camera) speaking with an old friend in front of 885 Knickerbocker Ave. Torres lived in Bushwick from 1969 to 2018. He moved to East New York due to rising cost of living in Bushwick.
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November 2020
Melissa Lopez, 22, in front of Bronx Documentary Center’s memorial installation honouring people who have died due to COVID-19. Lopez’s grandfather Jose Antonio Acevedo (seen in the background) was 84 when he died earlier this year in April. (Photo Adi Talwar)
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February 2021
Adi Talwar
A person getting vaccinated at the South Bronx Educational Campus Vaccine Hubs located on St Ann’s Avenue.
