The Great Depression In New York City: 55 Harrowing Photos

The Great Depression hit few cities harder than New York — but the city's darkest hour was also the crucible in which today's New York was forged.

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With the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression, at least nominally, began in New York City. The economic cataclysm would hit the nation's largest city particularly hard.

An unemployed man reads a newspaper in his shanty, 1933.FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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An unemployed man lies down on the city docks, circa 1935.Lewis Hine/National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons

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Much of Central Park became Hooverville, a shanty town for the newly impoverished (named for President Herbert Hoover, in office during the market crash and widely blamed for it) -- pictured above, 1933.Bettmann/Getty Images

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An old woman receives her Thanksgiving ration of food as other hungry people wait in line for the same, 1930.Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Yet amid all this poverty and desperation, certain aspects of New York thrived during the Great Depression. Throughout those ten or so years, it in many ways became the city we know today.

Pictured: The most famous image of the many high-profile New York construction projects of the Great Depression depicts laborers taking their lunch break on a steel beam atop the 70-story RCA building in Rockefeller Center, more than 800 feet above the street, on September 20, 1932.Bettmann/Getty Images

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While the true roots of the Great Depression in America are varied and complex, the simplified version of the story begins on "Black Thursday," October 24, 1929. At this point, fears of dangerously rampant speculation saw stockholders dump their assets at record numbers, with the market losing a whopping 11 percent of its value on that one day.

Pictured: Traders work on Wall Street in October 1929.OFF/AFP/Getty Images

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Just four days after "Black Thursday" came "Black Monday" and "Black Tuesday," when the market lost a further 13 and 12 percent, respectively, of its value. It was, all things considered, the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States.

Pictured: Upset crowds gather outside the New York Stock Exchange soon after the crash.Library of Congress

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Soon after the crash, tens of millions across the country sank into poverty. And in New York, by 1932, "half of [the city's] manufacturing plants were closed, one in every three New Yorkers was unemployed, and roughly 1.6 million were on some form of relief," according to the New York Tenement Museum.

Unemployed men sit outside their makeshift homes in lower Manhattan, 1935.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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Within six months of the crash, more than 50 breadlines served meals to approximately 50,000 hungry people each day in the Lower East Side alone.

Pictured: A long line of unemployed and homeless men wait outside to get free dinner at a municipal lodging house, circa 1930.Fotosearch/Getty Images

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A woman pulls her baggage as she pushes her baby in a pram, circa early 1930s.Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

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Talman Street in northwest Brooklyn, 1936.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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Children play in the gutter in the southern section of the Bronx, 1936.Russell Lee/Library of Congress

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The Manhattan Bridge as seen from Pike and Henry Streets, littered with trash, 1936.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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A child sits on the fire escape of the tenement in which she lives, circa mid-1930s.Consuelo Kanaga/Brooklyn Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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A large group of people wait on a food line, 1932.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons

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A man stands beside his traveling tin shop in Brooklyn, 1936.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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A vacant lot in the southern section of the Bronx, 1936.Russell Lee/New York Public Library

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Unemployed men smoke cigarettes amid their shantytown in lower Manhattan, 1935.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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However, while poverty plunged New York to new depths, the city's ambitious construction projects pushed it to new heights. During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and more were all completed.

Pictured: A laborer works on the frame of the Empire State Building, 1930.Lewis Hine via Wikimedia Commons

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A worker on the Empire State Building hangs by a steel beam, 1931.Lewis Hine/New York Public Library

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A laborer during construction of the Empire State Building, 1931.Lewis Hine/New York Public Library

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The soon-to-be-completed Empire State Building, 1931.Irving Underhill/Library of Congress

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Construction on the Empire State Building, 1931.Lewis Hine/New York Public Library

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The recently completed Chrysler Building, circa 1930.Detroit Publishing Co./Library of Congress

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A workman rides a crane hook during construction of the Empire State Building, 1931.Lewis Hine/New York Public Library

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The recently opened Radio City Music Hall, 1934.Wurts Brothers/New York Public Library

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A laborer sits on the frame of an unfinished building overlooking Manhattan, 1935.Wikimedia Commons

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The recently completed 30 Rockefeller Center, 1933.Samuel Herman Gottscho/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

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Unemployed men sit at the docks, 1934.Lewis Hine/National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons

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Men wait on a breadline, 1932.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons

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Clotheslines rest over the court of a crowded Upper East Side tenement, 1936.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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World War I veterans board a bus in lower Manhattan bound for upstate New York's Fort Slocum, where a government relief program offered dollar-a-day reforestation jobs, 1933.Library of Congress

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Women talk while one of their children plays in the gutter in the southern section of the Bronx, 1936.Russell Lee/Library of Congress

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Two waiters serve lunch to steel workers on a girder of the famous, soon-to-be-completed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 1930.Keystone/Getty Images

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Unemployed, single women march to demand jobs, 1933.Library of Congress

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The hungry wait to be fed outside St. Peter's Mission, circa 1932.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons

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Woolworth's employees on strike for a 40-hour work week, 1937.Library of Congress

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Construction in progress on the Empire State Building with the Chrysler Building in the background, 1931.Lewis Hine/New York Public Library

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Children's protest parade for better housing conditions, circa 1930-1933.Library of Congress

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A bootblack at work outside the New York Savings Bank, 1937.Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress

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Men on the street outside a chicken shop at an unspecified location, 1938.Jack Allison/Library of Congress

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The first session of the Communist National Convention, at the Manhattan Opera House on June 24, 1936.

As the Great Depression put more and more people out of work and plunged them into poverty, communism became an increasingly attractive ideology.AFP/AFP/Getty Images

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The Empire State Building under construction, 1931.Lewis Hine/New York Public Library

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Leading New York gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano in his 1931 mugshot following an arrest on charges of leading a prostitution ring.

After the Prohibition of the 1920s allowed organized crime to thrive behind illegal alcohol sales, gangsters entered the 1930s with a new level of wealth and power. It was during this time that Luciano and several other key crime figures, including Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, helped establish the Five Families and bring the New York mafia into its modern form.New York Police Department via Wikimedia Commons

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Angry crowds gather outside lower Manhattan's Bank of United States following its devastating collapse, 1931.Library of Congress

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The Williamsburg Bridge as seen from the Brooklyn side, 1937.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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A woman on strike stands on Manhattan's 7th Avenue, 1936.Russell Lee/Library of Congress

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Weighing the catch at the Fulton Market in lower Manhattan, 1934.Library of Congress

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Pushcart market in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, 1939.Alan Fisher/Library of Congress

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Inside McSorley's Old Ale House -- which opened its doors in the mid-19th century and remains one of New York's oldest operating pubs today -- in the East Village, 1937. Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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A family gathers on their stoop on Jay Street in Brooklyn, 1936.Berenice Abbott/New York Public Library

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Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, an area popular with federal subsistence homesteaders coming in from New Jersey, 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress

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Young men gather in front of re-election signs for President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- whose federal relief programs helped the city through the Great Depression to a great extent -- in Midtown Manhattan, 1936.Russell Lee/Library of Congress

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Elected in 1933, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia helped New York weather the Great Depression as best it could. The city's first ever mayor of either southern or eastern European descent, he unified the city's poor immigrant populations (most of which came from that region). Given his close association with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he also enacted scores of social and economic relief programs.

Pictured: LaGuardia giving a radio broadcast, 1940.Fred Palumbo/Library of Congress

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Ultimately, the Great Depression exposed just how bad poverty in much of the city had already been for decades. In response, LaGuardia's initiatives saw thousands of slums and tenements fixed, torn down, or rebuilt, making way for a newer, better New York that would see extraordinary economic growth in the coming decades.

Pictured: Lower Manhattan, circa 1931.U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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55 Harrowing Photos Of The Great Depression In New York City

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Today, we simply can't truly appreciate the magnitude of the Great Depression.

Just nine years ago, the United States fell to its knees as the housing market went bust, Detroit collapsed, and Wall Street crumbled, marking the start of the Great Recession. Within just two years, the U.S. unemployment rate more than doubled, reaching a whopping ten percent in 2009.

The crisis went worldwide and ultimately became the worst global recession since World War II. But none of it held a candle to the Great Depression.

During the Great Recession, the worldwide GDP fell by less than one percent. During the Great Depression, that fall was 15 times worse. And in the U.S. in particular, unemployment during the Great Depression increased not by a mere factor of two, but by a factor of six, ultimately hitting historic highs of about 25 percent in 1933.

The trouble began in earnest four years earlier with the Wall Street crashes of September and October 1929. Fueled by excessive stock speculation and shaky banking standards unequipped to handle those investments, the crash plunged the U.S. and the rest of the Western industrialized world into the worst economic cataclysm in modern history.

And perhaps no place in America felt the effects of the Great Depression worse than the place where it at least nominally started: New York City.

For decades before the crash, both European immigrants and domestic rural migrants had been flooding into New York, causing the city's population to double between 1900 and 1930. With so many new people — many of them impoverished to begin with — pouring in, New York's housing and job prospects were shaky to say the least even before the crash.

And when the crash came, the results were devastating. In the words of the New York Tenement Museum:

"By 1932, half of New York's manufacturing plants were closed, one in every three New Yorkers was unemployed, and roughly 1.6 million were on some form of relief. The city was unprepared to deal with this crisis."

Yet the city, under the leadership of Mayor Fiorello Laguardia, ultimately proved well prepared to respond to the crisis. To say nothing of his administration's work relief programs, LaGuardia's housing initiatives shut down 10,000 decrepit tenements (more than half of which lacked central heating and toilets) and forced landlords to upgrade another 30,000.

In the end, the Great Depression served to expose the relatively hidden wounds that had been festering in New York for years — or at least force the powers that be to do something about them. And with those wounds cleaned out, the city was able to rebuild into something stronger and become, in many ways, the New York we know today.

Next, see how the Great Depression crippled the entire nation and African-Americans in particular. Then, have a look at the other hard times that New York City has faced in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.