New York City in the 1970s was a far cry from the gleaming skyline tourists flock to today. The air was thick with soot. Waterways were choked with industrial runoff. Entire city blocks sat abandoned, stripped of life and structure. This was not a city in transition — it was a city in crisis, and the evidence was everywhere you looked.
The air quality problem was severe enough to kill people. By the 1960s, pulmonary emphysema had become the fastest-growing cause of death in New York City. The culprits were well-known: coal-burning power plants, heavy-grade fuel oil burned by factories and heating systems, and the widespread practice of burning garbage in open incinerators. Those incinerators scattered ash and fine particles of waste across neighborhoods, coating surfaces and filling lungs. The sky over New York was not just gray — it was dangerous.
When the Environmental Protection Agency was established, one of its early priorities was documentation. Before any clean-up effort could take shape, the agency needed a clear visual record of the damage. To do that, the EPA commissioned freelance photographers to fan out across the country and capture environmental decay as it actually existed. That initiative became known as the Documerica project. In New York City, the photographers found no shortage of material.
The streets themselves told a bleak story. Pavement crumbled and peeled. Cars — many of them battered relics from the previous decade — shared roads that had barely been maintained. Canal Street, once a commercial artery, showed its age clearly by 1973, its asphalt splitting open while traffic rolled on.
Abandoned vehicles were a signature image of the era. Cars were dumped on beaches, in vacant lots, and along roadsides with no expectation that anyone would remove them. At Plum Beach near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, the rusted remains of a Triumph Spitfire lay scattered across the ground. These weren’t isolated incidents — they were routine.
Breezy Point, a neighborhood at the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, became one of the most striking locations the Documerica photographers captured. The area was dotted with the skeletal frames of apartment buildings that had never been finished, left to rot by developers who abandoned their projects. Alongside these concrete husks sat burned-out cars, broken refrigerators, and other discarded debris.
Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s presented its own version of urban decay. The West Side Highway, an elevated expressway running along the Hudson River, had partially collapsed in 1973 and was closed to traffic. Rather than being torn down quickly, it sat abandoned for years, a rusting overhead structure that shadowed the streets below. Beneath it, cobblestone roads carried what traffic remained.
While some parts of the city crumbled, others were in the early and messy stages of construction. Independence Plaza North, a large residential development in what is now Tribeca, was rising from the ground in 1973. The contrast was sharp — construction cranes and fresh concrete stood just blocks away from pier ruins and cracked streets.
Back in Breezy Point, the scale of abandonment was staggering. A half-buried Dodge Polara station wagon sat on the oceanside beach. A burned-out 1965 Ford Mustang rested near an unfinished apartment building skeleton. Discarded refrigerators lined the area. The scene looked less like a neighborhood and more like a dump site that had been dropped beside the Atlantic.
Underground, New York’s subway system was in equally rough shape. By March 1973, graffiti covered virtually every surface inside the cars. Tags and murals sprawled across windows, doors, walls, and ceilings. The graffiti wasn’t just cosmetic — it was a symptom of the broader breakdown in city services. Maintenance had been cut, oversight had failed, and the subway had become a symbol of municipal dysfunction.
One of the most unusual construction projects of the era was Battery Park City. The land it sits on today didn’t exist in nature — it was created using soil and fill excavated from the World Trade Center construction site. Throughout the early-to-mid 1970s, Documerica photographers captured the slow transformation of that stretch of the Hudson shoreline from raw landfill and mud into something resembling usable ground. It was a massive, slow, and unglamorous process.
The streets of Lower Manhattan away from the waterfront were not much tidier. Theatre Alley, running off Ann Street and recognized as the narrowest street in Manhattan, was filled with litter and trash in March 1974. Nearby on Reade Street, cardboard boxes and commercial debris lined the sidewalks. These weren’t alleyways behind restaurants — they were public streets in the heart of the financial district.
By 1975, the abandoned West Side Highway had become a landmark of neglect. Photographers documented it from multiple angles — from street level, from Pier A’s fire escape, and from the 58th floor of the World Trade Center. The views showed the highway cutting through a landscape of landfill, mud, and fog. A Marlboro billboard planted beneath the elevated structure at 150th Street carried a grim irony: ‘Welcome to Marlboro Country,’ it read, positioned in one of the most polluted corridors in the city.
Despite the decay that surrounded them, New York’s residents continued their daily lives. The Documerica project didn’t only photograph pollution and ruin — it also captured people going about their summers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. At the Kosciusko public swimming pool in Bedford-Stuyvesant, crowds packed in on the July 4th holiday. East River Park drew families on hot summer afternoons. Children played at the beach in Reis Park. These images sit alongside the decay photos in the same archive, and together they paint a fuller picture of what city life actually looked like.
Brooklyn’s neighborhoods showed the full range of what the city had become. Some blocks, like those in Park Slope, retained their handsome brownstone rows. Others, like industrial stretches in Bushwick, were defined by elevated train tracks, cracked pavement, and storefronts barely hanging on. The Bedford-Stuyvesant district had its own community energy — boy scout leaders recruited among local youth, kids played softball in Hiland Park — but the physical environment around them was hard-worn.
Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s west side was another neighborhood the photographers spent time in. It was a dense, working-class district where residents made the most of tight spaces. Men worked on their cars in the street. Kids played on sidewalks. The neighborhood had a gritty, lived-in character that the photos captured without any attempt to glamorize it. What you see in those images is exactly what was there.
The Documerica archive holds thousands of images from across the United States, but the New York photographs carry a particular weight. They document a city that was fiscally strained, environmentally battered, and physically neglected — yet still very much alive. The photographers recorded it all without flinching: the soot, the rust, the mud, the graffiti, and the people living through all of it.
Very cool, thanks!