New York City enjoyed classic fall weather last week with cloudless skies and crisp temperatures. Depending on how high your office or apartment was located, you could see all the way down to New York Harbor, see Yankee Stadium in the Bronx or Citifield where the Mets play. On days like these, it is hard to remember how bad the environmental in New York was in the 1970s.
Fortunately, EPA had the foresight to hire freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems and everyday life in the between 1971-1977 in a project called Documerica. The National Archives has digitized much of this project and more than 15,000 images are available from the Archival Research Catalog (ARC). Visitors can search by location, media or type of pollution. Click Documerica to travel back in time to literally another world.
For my law school class, I cobbled together pictures showing the common environmental conditions we faced in New York City during the 1970s. NYC in 1970s. You can literally breathe a sigh of relief and appreciate how far we have come in the past 40 years.
The New York Times has recently discovered the Documerica Series