A Day In 1920's New York- In Color Walking Down Fifth Avenue 1929

In the past, every day is cosplay

Nowadays it's men in joggers and sportswear and women with their boobs out for all and sundry to see

Question: does the person just guess the colors as I assume there was no colour footage to work from?

The Boston Terrier at the beginning was a dollface.

The colouring seems to have been done by an AI.

There wouldn't have been colour footage, but there are two possible options by which the algorithm could know the correct colours. (1) If the women are wearing designer clothes and the designs remain, or (2) if there were also photographs of the main people in the video, on the day, it's possible they were colourised at the time and could be used as a reference. My mother used to do that in the early 1960s: you get a matte black and white image and apply special oil paints, with a very tiny brush, and you gradually come up with something that is softly but convincingly colourised. The people doing that knew the colours the women had been wearing.

Otherwise, the AI has to be guessing from the depth of the monochrome. I don't know whether you could really tell whether a certain depth of monochrome was green rather than, say, brown or magenta.

I'm with you, r4. I'm not such a fan of the trend to colourise photos and videos of 100 years ago. There's absolutely no way people today can know what the colours used were back then.

R4 thanks so much

I love the way these give the past new life. When everything is in B&W it makes the past so distant, but color says, "Hey, this wasn't all that long ago" The added sound helps as well

Colorization, no matter how flawed, correcting film speed and adding sound really do make these films and the people in them more relatable. It is strange, though, knowing all of them are dead.

So civilized.

Yes, I do agree somewhat r8. The colourising brings the images alive for us today in that we can see that these were people just like us, living in the same world as us. But we should also bear in mind that the colour may be wildly inaccurate.

Here's the original black-and-white clip.

The clip is of the Easter Day Parade, not just a normal 1920s day.

Where are the elaborate ladies hats?

Couldn’t they use illustrations from magazines and catalogs plus paintings from the time as a reference. It would give them an idea of color that were popular at the time. Men mostly wore back, brown and blue so that’s easier to guess.

Didn’t our ancestors know how to strut! An Anglo-Saxon passegietta! How wonderfully slim the men are. The women appear bulkier but I think it’s the clothing. Lots of fur pieces and cloche hats.

When I was 4 or 5 I asked my mother when color was invented. I really believed the world was black and white and people saw black in white until we invented color. I'll never forget her face, which I later realized was an expression something along the lines of: I gave birth to an imbecile.

You weren't an imbecile, r15. That's the sort of thing 4 and 5 year olds ask.

I had just moved to New York..

@r14, " How wonderfully slim the men are."

Before fast food and online shopping people were a lot slimmer 😏

related thread

They found themselves in a rotogravure!

Why is everyone so dressed up? Are they all going to a funeral?

^ Nah, people used to dress up to go "to town". It was the only way to determine status and class since most everyone took public transportation

R21, the video is from Easter Sunday

No, it isn’t. The Easter Parade featured elaborate hats.

Easter Parade

R25- It's amazing how much fashions changed from ca. 1909 when your photo was taken to 1929 when my short film was made.

I once read that the 20th century did not begin until the 1920's- I agree.

I wonder how clean they were as daily bathing wasn't a thing.

I'm guessing the sound is also AI generated based on what was most likely?

Love it and agree it brings the old Clio to life

R27- This isn't Alabama with a lot of hillbillies- it's NYC where almost everyone had access to indoor plumbing except for the poorest people so daily bathing WAS a thing.

It looks at though they’re on their way/lining up for a funeral.

It’s 1929.

Part of me wants to scream through the screen: Bitches, run to the bank now, withdraw all your savings and divest from the market!

People were so fancy!

Did everyone have BO back then?

R24 - it is Easter Sunday - the original archival film that is colorized here is titled “Fifth Avenue attracts Easter paraders--outtakes” Fox News Story C9386

More weirdly, I swear the woman in bright blue, frame left, waiting on line to get into St Patrick’s Cathedral is my grandmother.

It certainly looks like grandma from photos of that era, and even though it most likely isn’t her, it also actually could be. I’m sure she was at the Cathedral and the parade on Easter Sunday 1929. She lived just a few blocks west, on 46th and Ninth, and loved St Pat’s; so much so that she and my grandpa got married there in June 1931. Not because she was “a society bride,” as she would put it, but because she had the gumption to go to the rectory and ask.

She certainly would have gone to 5th Ave to be a part of things that day. One of the stories we loved as kids was her description of being in the crowd outside of Campbell’s waiting to view Valentino’s body in 1926 - she was no shrinking violet.

The group of men wearing top hats weren’t wealthy Captains of Industry, but “woke” protesters:

“Rivaling the "well dressed", came a group of unemployed led by the famous "Mr. Zero", Urbain Ledoux. He leads a group of older men wearing hats and wooden shoes.”

I don’t care what the label says. Those ladies are not wearing Easter Parade hats.

Handsome doesn't change much, does it.

[quote]Did everyone have BO back then?

Probably not everyone. Deodorant was first developed in the 1880s.

R33 what became of your Grandma?

The women in that clip were hideously ugly. Not a fine-featured woman amongst the bunch.

What is funny is that some of the people who 'dressed up' would be wearing really outdated fashions from 5-10 years previously (especially the older women) but we wouldn't know because we lump those times together.

They were dressed for church, r39, so their dress was appropriate.

I already posted the link to the original black-and-white film, but just in case you are interested and missed it, here it is again.

R35 - A century ago, everyone wore a hat every day, and “dressed up” to go to a department store, much less church. The average person didn’t have many clothes, but usually got something new for Easter.

Back then an Easter Bonnet wasn’t the elaborate, jokey stunt-hat it is today, but simply a new, stylish hat; and the Easter Parade was everyone dressed up in their new, spring outfit and strolling along Fifth Avenue after a long winter spent indoors. Things change even if they stay the same - 50 years ago Halloween was a day for school age children to wear a costume, but adults generally didn’t dress up like sexy cops & maids and hit the bars as well.

@r38, She's fine for 130 🙄

R43 I wasn't asking how she was, I was asking what kind of person she was, what she did with her life

My grandmother who died in 2007 would have been a 120 today and probably looked much like the women in this film. Happy Cinco de Mayo and Birthday, Grandma! 🙂

[quote]I wonder how clean they were as daily bathing wasn't a thing.

I'll have you know my man draws me a bath at 9 am sharp every morning! He reads me the ticker while I soak.

I think I spotted Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in there.

Thanks OP, R4, and R10.

I live for threads like this.

Love the late 1920s' fashions on all, but I also love the top hats and coats on the older men.

This is just months before the Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Would love to see the same scene a year later.

R48- Some of the men in the film looked quite dated for 1929 with their beards/mustaches and their very tall hats 🎩.

Those looks belong not in 1929 but 1899.

R48 good point, I'm guessing lots of the more wealthy people were badly hit in the crash

I'm never impressed by colorization. A few years ago, they did some Lucy episodes, and people were saying how impressive they were. They were NOT! To my eye, they looked no better than what Ted Turner was doing to It's a Wonderful Life in 1983. Why doesn't that colorization technology improve?

Has anyone ever taken black and white footage, and made it look REALISTICALLY color? I've never seen it done convincingly. What Jimmy Stewart said in the '80s still holds true. "It looks like some one poured sugar water all over the film stock."

^ I agree with this point. Tv/movies are an art form and shouldn't be screwed with, but the above is just a street scene where the color and sound give it new life

R51- I agree about tv shows and movies that were originally shown in black and white should not be colorized but this is just a short film of real people going about their business and adding color and some sound makes it more relatable and enjoyable to watch.

Why not colorize if the original is still there for comparison? I'm a fashion historian and feel the color choices here are totally appropriate. Even if the colors on the ladies' clothes are guesses, they completely jive with vintage clothing I've seen from the 1920s.

I don't think they should corloize, say, Citizen Kane. But, if the technology were better, I'd have no issue with Lucy or Jack Benny being colorized.

R49, the men in the top hats are the unemployed, led by the apparently famous Urbain Ledoux. Supposedly they were there to "rival" the well-dressed Easter celebrants. They were even wearing wooden shoes. As the film archive description says:

[quote]Crowds gather at the entrance of St. Patricks Cathedral. People dress in their finest clothes. Rivaling the "well dressed", came a group of unemployed led by the famous "Mr. Zero", Urbain Ledoux. He leads a group of older men wearing hats and wooden shoes. People in their Sunday best stroll along 5th Avenue.

You can see more of them at the link in r41.

Urbain Ledoux was an interesting figure - an anti-poverty campaigner and follower of the Baháʼí Faith who organised soup kitchens for the poor.

Here is Urbain Ledoux just a few months later, in November 1929, serving the poor at his Bowery soup kitchen.

[quote]they completely jive

Oh dear

That's All!

Hey R38 / R44. Thanks for asking! Grandma grew up in a Hell’s Kitchen railroad flat with 3 brothers & 2 sisters, her parents were Italian immigrants. I’m not sure if she graduated high school, but she worked as a seamstress. She said she worked on an inaugural gown for Eleanor Roosevelt, but by 1933 she had had my father, so perhaps it was for one of Franklin’s terms as Governor. My grandfather also grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, they met when her brother’s dog bit my grandpa and Uncle Al brought him upstairs for a bandage. I have several elaborate Valentines he gave her while they were dating (they were both light hoarders and saved all sorts of stuff.) They married at St Pats in 1931, and had what was called a “football reception” - platters of premade, wrapped sandwiches that guests would toss to each other. They moved from Manhattan to Astoria Queens and by 1935 were in the two bedroom apartment they would live in for the rest of their lives (he died in 1985, she died in 1992). Grandpa was a barber and worked most of his life in a shop down in the Rockefeller Center Concourse, with many well know customers in broadcasting, politics and sports. Grandma wasn’t much of a cook or a housekeeper, the family would go into Manhattan every weekend to have dinner at her mother’s apartment and see movies. She was an excellent knitter - I still have the sweaters she made me. I knew her as a rather boisterous lady with dyed red hair - she liked kibitzing with “the ladies” sitting on folding chairs in front of her building, or going to the senior center. She would bring us blocks of 70s government cheese she got there. Grandma never learned how to drive. She always wore dresses, and kept her money in a fabric pouch inside her bra so she wouldn’t get mugged. Every time we saw them we always each got a dollar “for college,” and grandma would say “first I have to go to the bank” and pat her chest with a laugh as she went into the bathroom. She was a character, and a lot of fun. She also had her difficult side as well, but when I was a young kid she was my favorite relative.

^^ I forgot to skip lines between paragraphs - sorry for the bad formatting.

One didn't wear a parade hat to church. They wore an appropriate hat for church and then went home to dress for the parade.

Technicolor is the only color film I’ll watch. I am unanimous in that!

R61 Nice family history write-up.

Fashion historians and AI technicians didn't scour vast archives and databases to create accurate colour for this clip. Get real, people.

r66, are you stating that because you don't think the colors look historically accurate? Or because you think vast research wasn't necessary? Or what?

[quote]One of the stories we loved as kids was her description of being in the crowd outside of Campbell’s waiting to view Valentino’s body in 1926

My paternal grandmother was also there! She was 18 at the time. 60 years later, she could still describe the scene as if it happened yesterday.

R67 I'm say no great academic effort went into whatever we are seeing.

I agree with R69 - the bus colors would be easy to look up, the buildings are common sense - most of the clothes are just guesswork.

These colorized films never look realistic because B&W film converts everything to varying densities of grey and color film works off a completely differently mechanism to create density - adding color on top of a black & white image doesn’t get anything close to the same result - the colors look too flat - shadows don’t have the variation of value that they do in a color film. You get a different, but conceptually similar result if you print B&W off a color neg, or just remove the chroma from a color video image - it doesn’t look like something shot with B&W stock.

^^ - I think I made a mistake up above - I don’t know if it’s even possible to make a B&W print from a color neg - but a B&W neg printed to color stock does not give a B&W print that looks as good as it would if you print that same neg on B&W stock.

Makes me wonder whether we’ll as unrecognizable a century from now.

Imagine if all of those people could see us walking around in public in our sweatpants and t shirts today. They would probably think of us as barbarians.

R73 you got that right. When I had my garçonnière in French Concession between the wars, most people in Shanghai were smartly dressed.

I'm pretty sure I saw Rich Uncle Pennybags in there.

That was great, r61! Super interesting. Francis Ford Coppola talked about those wrapped sandwiches that guests would toss to each other in a commentary about the Godfather, how he added them into the opening wedding scene along with tons of other authentic details, having come from a large Italian New York family himself.

Thanks R65 & R76. Since a few people liked her bio, I may as well share grandma. Her sister made the dress.

Thanks for the stories, R61; my grandmother also grew up in Hell's Kitchen, though it sounds like she was a half decade or so younger than your grandmother (and she only had one sister to share the bedroom with).

R77 Thanks for sharing. Your grandparents experienced many milestones over the years, it's good to remember them. Many people did make their own special occasion dresses make then. The photo reminds me a lot of my great uncle and aunt who came from Europe, met in NYC and got married in 1938 , and bit by bit brought many of their relatives to the US.

r77, beautiful wedding gown! Your grandma certainly could have made several pretty confirmation dresses for her daughters and nieces from that train.

I really like these. History seems so alive.

Grace Slicks said that everything in the 30s and 40s was gray and that's why she hated her childhood and liked the 60s and 70s.

So the AI got it wrong. It was greyer.

Grace is totally wrong, r82. Such a misnomer. Rich women's clothes have always been colorful.

@r77, Grandpa's got great hair 🙂

[quote]I'm not such a fan of the trend to colourise photos and videos of 100 years ago. There's absolutely no way people today can know what the colours used were back then.

What a strange, dim comment. I find these restored, colorized, sound-synced and upscaled films fascinating, and I'm sure those who work on them make no pretense that the colors of people's hair, clothing, etc. are accurate to what the actual colors were. The goal here is to make the images in these ancient, silent, black and white films come alive, and in that I think they succeed brilliantly.

R78 - with 8 people in 3 rooms + a kitchen, I believe some of them shared beds!

R80 - growing up, my sister wanted to get married in it - but grandma didn’t know where it was. Which is odd because they saved EVERYTHING - I have all the cards from my dad’s first birthday, and when cleaning out the apartment I found her wedding shoes.

R84 - he did, and he still had all of it at 80 - without much grey. I luckily inherited my head of hair from him, but at 60 I’m much grayer than he was at 80.

r77 your grandparents were a very good-looking couple.

[quote]I don’t care what the label says. Those ladies are not wearing Easter Parade hats.

In the late 20s 'cloche' hats were ubiquitous. they might be adorned with a ribbon or a feather or a few fake flowers (even a few fake cherries) but they were never very elaborate.

What's inaccurate about my comment, r85? I even made the same point about you at r10, that colourisation can bring old films and photos alive - yet there is still the risk of inaccuracy and people therefore getting the wrong impression. One example is with OP's video, where a number of people in the comments are getting all excited about how clean the New York sidewalks were in the 1920s. Except they very likely weren't - they just appear clean in this colourised video because the person who did it chose a solid light grey for the pavement and an only slightly darker grey for the street, despite the fact that the streets were filled with stinky, gas-guzzling vehicles.

That's why I like to compare with the original when it comes to these colourised images - see link at r10.

R77 wow thats La Bella Figura. Such elegance for a barber and a seamstress. Bravo.

Nothing on 5th Ave, West Side of Chicago.

Thank you, R77. She was beautiful, and the dress is gorgeous. There's nothing like white satin for a wedding dress, although the bride has to be quite slim, like your grandmother, to wear it.

R73, I think they would think some dreadful economic catastrophe or devastating war had struck us quite recently, resulting in a complete breakdown of morality (thus the women baring so much skin) and deep impoverishment, thus the ragged, shapeless, obviously cheap-as-dirt clothes. Our shoes would seem like children’s shoes to them.

Flip-flops, bare feet, tattoos and piercings – yes, I do agree they would see those as barbaric.

R39, there would be very few outdated outfits, except perhaps on elderly women. First of all, women bought new outfits for Easter, even women of modest means.

Secondly, fashions changed rapidly and radically in those days. An outfit from 10 years earlier, or even 5 years earlier, would stand out from the crowd. The skirt would be much longer, the hat would be different (no cloche hats in 1919), and the costumes in general would be fussier and less tailored. The sleek look of the short dresses and coats was distinctly a late ‘20s style.

I don't mean to say that some women might not have recycled an outfit from the previous year or two, but fashions changed too radically over a short period in those days for women to wear clothes that were 10 or even 5 years old for a special occasion like this without completely remaking the outfit.

[r73] It would be the same if the people of 1834 saw these people. Women showing their legs? Walking in public without each having a male escort? Not wearing corsets?

Fashions did change rapidly back then. Just 3 years later, by 1932, those cloche hats would be terribly dated and replaced by little brimmed hats, worn tilted on the head, inspired by styles that Greta Garbo wore playing the Empress Eugenie in ROMANCE.

The cloche was never revived except as the knitted caps of the 1960s sported by Twiggy and Ali McGraw.

R89, my point is that no one should think the colors in these colorizations are accurate, and they're foolish if they do so. These processed films are not presented as documentaries. Also, I'm sorry, but to me, the streets and sidewalks also look very clean in the original black and white footage at R10.

^ They're just trying to capture a moment in time in a way the modern world can identify with color and sound. I don't think they're meant to be an accurate historical record

[quote]my point is that no one should think the colors in these colorizations are accurate, and they're foolish if they do so.

So what if they do? What does it matter? I love how these modernized films make me pay attention to details I never would have noticed in their original versions. It's entertainment, not an attempt to accurately convey the past.

Vintage clothing from the 1920s is still abundant in various collections and museums and costume rental houses. Researching the general color palette of clothes in this decade is not difficult. And there are also high fashion magazines, as well as working class catalogues like Sears and Montgomery Ward, all with color illustrations of clothing of all kinds that are available for research as well.

There's really no mystery about this.

[quote]They're just trying to capture a moment in time in a way the modern world can identify with color and sound. I don't think they're meant to be an accurate historical record.

Exactly.

[quote]My point is that no one should think the colors in these colorizations are accurate, and they're foolish if they do so.

[quote]So what if they do? What does it matter? I love how these modernized films make me pay attention to details I never would have noticed in their original versions. It's entertainment, not an attempt to accurately convey the past.

I'm saying exactly the same thing you are, so I don't know why you're arguing with me. Reading comprehension problems?

Perhaps I was misled by your smug tone, R101.

Or, 102, you simply didn't understand what I wrote. I was making THE SAME ARGUMENT YOU ARE, that anyone who criticizes these films because "the colors aren't accurate" is missing the point.

Thank you R87, R90 and R92. Grandma would have really gotten a kick out of all this attention.

R68 - the reaction to Valentino’s death was a true harbinger of the culture to come - where celebrity trumps all the older hierarchies. It must have been such a weird experience to be part of that crowd - it was like almost nothing that had ever happened before.

I bet none of them had a trimmed fanny!

R95 you don't think everyone was proper back then do you? The streets were rife with prostitution in back alleys, skirts pulled up for a quid.

r106, I was responding to r73 commenting on what the people of 1929 would think seeing people from today.

R106 - I was waking down Disney World’s Main Street with my family (it was a later trip when we kids were in our 20s) and my father looked around and said “Was life ever like this?” Mom immediately replied “No, there’s always been crime and back alley abortions.”

If I had been drinking I would have done a spit-take.

I CAN SEE THEIR ANKLES

R37. You're right. Some form of deodorant was around...talc too. My Mom who was born in 1932 said that you would notice the BO in church. Whenever we complained about someone's BO growing up, she would respond, "You don't know how bad it was."

She also remembered old people looking and dressing really old. People did not have a lot of money. There were the lingering effects of the Depression, and in the War years there wasn't a great deal of money spent on new clothes.

R110- But the clothes people wore even the clothes that poor people wore were far better made than anything today.

[quote]But the clothes people wore even the clothes that poor people wore were far better made than anything today.

Ennh. A schmata is still a shmata.