(Lisette Blumenfeld Georges)
Believe your eyes — that’s Mulberry Street, on the Lower East Side, teeming with immigrant New Yorkers. In 1900. In color. It’s part of a new coffee-table collection, “New York in Color” (Abrams), cultivated by photo historian Bob Shamis.
This particular shot comes from the Detroit Photographic Co., which took black-and-white pictures and hand-painted them as postcards. But the book also includes actual color shots from the beginnings of the technology, after the Autochrome process was made available to the public in 1907.
Even pictures taken in later years offer a rare glimpse of colorful city life, as this 1955 collage of Times Square signage — including Bond department store (now a restaurant) and the long-gone movie houses (including one showing “East of Eden”).
Flipping through the book shows that New York City life was never gray.