Wendy Brandes Jewelry Blog

Never Is the Next New Thing

Have a Horrifying Audio/Visual Halloween

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For audio frights, check out my recently promised murderous playlist at 33 avenue Miquelon.

CLICK HERE FOR MY PLAYLIST POST.

For visual terror, yesterday’s New York Times had a feature called “When the City Was a House of Horrors.” It’s about John Conn, who photographed the New York City subway system in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was a very scary time in New York. I’m not sure if my favorite historian, Barbara Tuchman, was referring to New York in particular when she wrote the foreword to her 1978 book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, but her words are as good a description of that period of the city’s history as any (the bold emphasis is mine):

“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening — on a lucky day — without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.”

It was during that era that I decided I wanted to live in New York City. While you ponder the perversity of that, I’m going to John Conn’s website to buy a print of his photo of a knife being dangled out of the window of the No. 6 train.

Photo by John Conn via the New York Times. Click to go to Conn's website.

The Times said Conn was at the last stop on the No. 6, in the Bronx, “when he heard a laugh, followed by, ‘Hey — yo, this be a good photo!’ Then he saw a hand clutching a blade through the window.” This is the kind of image that will be a treat to look at every day. I’m not tricking you.

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Comments

  1. That is going to be one interesting ice-breaker the next time someone visits your home! And thank you for posting your selections on my blog. Cross-promotion is awesome, if a bit bloody at times. 😉

  2. You know, I just was in NYC last weekend for like 2 days which is short enough to do nothing, but I was REALLY scared of going. And I think it was because I had images like this stuck in my head, glad to find out it was nothing like it. Now I have to figure out how and when to come back for a longer period of time. Gosh is that photo of the hand out the window scary! Although, we did have a stop at the Bowery station and you could see another terminal that seems to be abandoned on the other side riddled with graffiti and random stuff that looked pretty scary (I’m going to blame the movie Kids and the Warriors for scaring me)

  3. Oh my this brought up some gruesome memories as I did live in the city during that time period. Single women walked as much as possible because the subways were so dangerous. And walking could be just as bad! The city is so tame now in comparison. Loved the playlist too!
    XXX
    Suzanne

  4. Thank you so much Wendy for visiting my blog and leaving such nice comments. I appreciate it so much. I love your jewelry!

    • That’s where I was thinking of putting it! I have to move a nude lady to some other wall. But I figure I’m going to be the only one who wants to look at this image, so it better go where only I can see it. I really do think it’s beautiful.

  6. I spent a lot of time in NYC during that era. We even brought our kids and pushed them around in strollers. It was a little bit difficult negotiating all of the drug dealers at practically every entrance to Central Park, we were like “people, we’re just trying to get the playground.” At the end of every visit we were amazed to find our car not broken into, the windows not smashed. Those were some fun times!

    Love the photo by the way.