Page 124 – LIFE

Rare Photos From the Set of ‘Porgy and Bess’

February 1, 2022February 7, 2013 by

Not too many musical classics have experienced the sort of polar-opposite reactions from audiences and critics that Porgy and Bess has elicited ever since it debuted on Broadway in 1935. The opera, which features some of the most recognizable songs in all of American music, has been praised as a bold attempt to exalt African-American vernacular in the operatic canon, and pilloried as a patronizing, if not outright racist, caricature of black life in the South in the early 20th century. Even some of the black performers who have most ably filled principal roles in the opera through the years have voiced their reservations about the work.

The great St. Louis-born mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry, for example, said of her own experience playing and singing the part of Bess: “I thought it beneath me. I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”

Bumbry’s attitude is, arguably, the same that most people have chosen to take to the work. The opera might be filled with racial stereotypes; the songs might glorify the basest (quasi-mythical) aspects of Black culture; the characters might be emblematic of African American “types” anchored not so much in history as in the dominant culture’s notion of that history all that might be true, but the opera also, all these decades later, somehow endures. It has seen several revivals on Broadway (most recently in 2011) and musicians and singers as diverse as Miles Davis, Jascha Heifetz and Christina Aguilera have performed or recorded their own variations on the opera’s famous tunes.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos made on the set of the earliest film version of the opera Otto Preminger’s 1959 Porgy and Bess, starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr. as the drug-dealing pimp, Sportin’ Life, and Pearl Bailey. LIFE magazine evidently loved it (see below), but the years have not been kind to the production, and one would be hard-pressed to find a critic today who doesn’t find the film an unsettling combination of strident and cartoonish.

It’s also worth noting of this production that Davis and Bailey recorded their singing parts; Poitier’s and Dandrdige’s songs were dubbed by two classical singers: Robert McFerrin (Bobby McFerrin’s dad) and Adele Addison.

This, meanwhile, is how LIFE introduced the movie to its readers in the June 15, 1959, issue of the magazine, in a multi-page spread featuring Gjon Mili’s vibrant color photos. (Only one of Mili’s pictures from that assignment is in this gallery; none of the other photos here ran in LIFE.)

The folk opera, Porgy and Bess, is a story of life, death and faithlessness in a Negro tenement called Catfish Row. It has come a long way since composer George Gershwin and author DuBose Heyward launched it hopefully on Broadway in 1935 and sadly closed it after 124 money-losing performances. Gershwin and Heyward were dead when success finally came through some fine U.S. revivals and a triumphant State Department-sponsored tour of Europe. Today Porgy and Bess is a national treasure and a beloved classic and comes finally to the movie screen.

Samuel Goldwyn had his troubles casting the film, but he wound up with some of the finest Negro actors and singers in the land — Sidney Poitier as Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, Pearl Bailey as Maria, Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life. The glory of the opera, its unforgettable songs, comes resplendently from the stereophonic soundtrack. All the favorites are there Summertime, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, It Ain’t necessarily So, Bess, Yo Is My Woman Now. The plot, taken from the play by Heyward and his wife Dorothy, is unchanged in the movie as are the brilliant lyrics, written by Heyward and Gershwin’s brother Ira.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Dandridge (Bess) and Brock Peters (Crown) on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. in character as Sportin’ Life on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pearl Bailey (Maria) in a scene from Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959: At annual church picnic, the people of Catfish Row hear Sportin’ Life (Sammy Davis Jr.) sing his song of skeptical wickedness.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene from the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock.

Porgy and Bess

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brock Peters (Crown) on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess

Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brock Peters and Sidney Poitier act out violent scene from Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Zsa Zsa Gabor: Rare Photos, 1951

August 12, 2021February 5, 2013 by

Anyone who has lived to be almost 100 likely has a few outlandish tales to tell. At least, one hopes they have tales to tell; it’s simply too awful to think of someone living through ten decades without one adventure, one great passion, one scandal worthy of relating over and over again. What’s the point of living a long life, after all, if one can’t look back with some complacency and pleasure at the glorious, memorable mistakes one made along the way?

With that in mind, we turn our attention to the one and only Zsa Zsa Gabor. Born Sári Gábor on Feb. 6, 1917, in Budapest, the middle sister of a middle-class Hungarian family between younger sister Eva (1919 – 1995) and older sister Magda (1915 – 1997) Zsa Zsa lived in the public eye for more than six decades, before her death at 99 in 2016.

Beautiful, glamorous and disarmingly funny; married nine times, divorced seven (one marriage was annulled); friend and lover to the famous; accused traffic cop-slapper (remember that weirdness back in 1989?); Bernie Madoff victim to the tune of something like $10 million; best-selling author; actress with scores of movies and TV appearances to her name one could argue that Zsa Zsa was, in fact, the very last of those outrageous, celebrated Hollywood figures (like her late friend, Liz Taylor) who routinely and unrepentantly provided scandal sheets and gossip columnists with fodder in the middle part of the last century.

Quotations attributed to her through the years, meanwhile, suggest a lively intelligence and a savvy, off-hand and charming worldliness behind her seemingly soft facade:

“A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.”

“Macho does not prove mucho.”

“I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”

“Husbands are like fires. They go out if unattended.”

“To a smart girl men are no problem. They’re the answer.”

Time, alas, was not kind to Gabor. Late in her life, she suffered strokes, was confined to a wheelchair and had her right leg amputated above the knee to combat an aggressive infection. Her obituary was written and prepped and then shelved several times in the past few years by media outlets, as she fought on against mounting odds, diminished but far from forgotten.

Here, LIFE.com recalls the younger Zsa Zsa with a series of photos by Ed Clark many of which never ran in LIFE from 1951, when she was barely known outside of California, but was quickly becoming as famous as her sister, Eva (who, incidentally, only married five times).

In its October 15, 1951, issue LIFE magazine introduced the 34-year-old Zsa Zsa to its millions of readers thus:

To television fans in most of the country, the only Gabor is blonde Eva, whose Hungarian beauty is a frequent, familiar and satisfying sight on their screens. But lately another Gabor, Eva’s sister Zsa Zsa, has begun to establish herself on the West Coast as a TV performer and wit of sorts. The show on which she appears is called Bachelor’s Haven and specializes in romantic counsel to men, a field in which Zsa Zsa feels herself highly qualified, from personal experience.

Her experience began about 15 years ago when, as a teenager in her native Budapest, she proposed to a Turkish diplomat over his teacups and became Mrs. Burhan Belge. But, says Zsa Zsa, “I was still a little girl playing with dolls,” and so in 1941 they were divorced. Zsa Zsa, whose given name is Sari, made her way to the U.S. and married hotel-man Conrad Hilton. After five hectic years of marriage, which were enlivened by a jewel robbery and Zsa Zsa’s tales of being mysteriously drugged and held captive in a Hollywood hotel, she and Mr. Hilton were divorced. In 1949 she married actor George Sanders. When he left for a movie role in England three months ago Zsa Zsa took a television job to fill her idle time. She now has signed a movie contract herself and is rated as the biggest new hit on West Coast TV, a rating she has earned by her beauty, ripe Continental accent and the Hungarian savoir-faire with which she tosses off her advice to the lovelorn.

“Men have always liked me and I have always liked men,” says Gabor, “but I like a mannish man, a man who knows how to talk to and treat a woman not just a man with muscles.” On Bachelor’s Haven, where she is a permanent panel member, Zsa Zsa is often peremptory. When she senses that a man does not meet her rigid standards, she dismisses the offender with a curt: “Him I would shoot.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor 1951

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At the Oscars: A Star-Studded Rehearsal, 1958

December 30, 2019February 1, 2013 by

Back in the day, being a genuine Hollywood star entailed more than just acting (or looking good while sort of acting). Leading men and women had to sing, dance, play it straight, play the clown—in short, they had to know how to entertain.

Little wonder, then, that in 1958, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences planned its 30th Oscars ceremony—the fifth ever to be televised—it called upon the town’s multi-talented screen icons to put on a barn-burner of a show.

LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe was a fly on the wall that year as stars such as Paul Newman, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kirk Douglas and Mae West rehearsed for the big event. Only a handful of McCombe’s marvelous photos were published. Here, decades later, are the pictures that ran in LIFE, and many more that didn’t.

Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster with choreographer Jack Cole, practicing a mock-bitter song-and-dance number called “It’s Great Not to Be Nominated”; the tune ribbed many of the year’s Oscar contenders.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside Los Angeles’ RKO Pantages theater, home of the Academy Awards from 1949 through 1959, Janet Leigh and Shirley MacLaine practiced a tune.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Zsa Zsa Gabor arrived at the 1958 Oscar rehearsals in pearls and a fur stole.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Paul Newman appeared to wait for a cue, as fellow Oscar presenter Doris Day consulted with a director (gesturing toward the audience). On the big night itself, Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward won Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve .

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West and Rock Hudson rehearsed the flirty pop standard, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as Academy president George Seaton looked on.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Clark Gable, 1958.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley MacLaine, 1958.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Doris Day and Clark Gable prepared to present the winners of the writing awards, 1958.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bob Hope, who hosted (or co-hosted) the Academy Awards 19 times over his long career, appears to pick something off Betty Grable’s sweater; standing above them on the steps are Shirley Jones —then famous for the movie musicals Oklahoma! and Carousel—and MGM idol Van Johnson.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Debbie Reynolds, 1958

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Russ Tamblyn (center, in dark jacket and shirt with huge lapels), 23-year-old Best Supporting Actor nominee for Peyton Place, stands in a group with other unidentified young actors; to the lower right of the frame are Rock Hudson and Mae West.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster checked out the scene from the seats. On March 27, 1958—the day after the Oscars ceremony—their war film, Run Silent, Run Deep, was released.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley MacLaine checked in with the orchestra, 1958 Oscars rehearsal.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Just a few months away from the release the Hitchcock classic, Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart (a co-host in 1958) popped up at rehearsals.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Top row, from left: Shirley Jones, Van Johnson, Mae West, Rock Hudson, and husband-and-wife dancing team Marge and Gower Champion. Bottom: Janet Leigh, Rhonda Fleming, Bob Hope, and Shirley MacLaine.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bob Hope during the rehearsals for the 1958 Academy Awards.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE on Both Sides of the Camera: Eisenstaedt’s Surprising Self-Portraits

August 12, 2021January 31, 2013 by

The great Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photographic vision wasn’t limited to the intimate portraits he produced of some of the 20th century’s most famous faces, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright to Mia Farrow and J. Robert Oppenheimer. After researching seemingly endless negatives, contact sheets, and Eisenstaedt prints, LIFE.com’s Liz Ronk rediscovered that the long-time LIFE photographer very often crowned his assignments with one last shot: creating captivating self-portraits, posing and frequently clowning with his subjects.

The realization that “Eisie” (as he was known by those lucky enough to call him a colleague or a friend) often turned the lens on himself in this way is likely to astonish photography aficionados and casual fans alike. Throughout his six-decade career, Eisenstaedt made some of the most immediately recognizable and most frequently reproduced images of the 20th century; that he also clearly enjoyed “playing tourist” and posing with the rich, the famous and the powerful as well as men and women whose names and occupations have been lost to history somehow brings the masterful photojournalist that much closer.

This legendary man, these self-portraits suggest, is actually more like many of us than we might have thought.

Eisenstaedt also famously carried with him an autograph book that, by the end of his life, was filled with page after page of signatures from long-forgotten artists, fellow photographers, legendary athletes, powerful world leaders in short, from anyone and everyone he happened to shoot.

The man’s habit of photographing himself with his subjects, and even asking for their autographs for his ever-growing collection, was not only well-known among by his colleagues at LIFE and elsewhere, but in at least one instance the seemingly whimsical tradition appears to have had a lasting influence on one of his younger peers. The celebrated sports photographer Neil Leifer recently told LIFE.com that early in his career, the notion of asking someone to pose for a picture after a shoot, or requesting an autograph of someone he had just finished shooting, struck him as vaguely unprofessional. It just was not something that a credible photojournalist did. Or so he thought.

“In the early 1980s I had an office next to Eisie’s in the Time-Life Building,” Leifer recalls, “and I saw that in his office he had framed photos of himself with JFK, Sophia Loren all these pictures where he was posing with people he had photographed on assignments for LIFE, and I thought, If Alfred Eisenstaedt, of all people, takes self-portraits with his subjects, and asks them for autographs, how unprofessional can it really be?“

Here, then, in tribute to the endearing penchant of one of the 20th century’s indispensable photographers a penchant to add a quiet, personal, visual coda to so much of his life’s work LIFE.com offers a selection of some of the most revealing and unexpected of Alfred Eisensteadt’s singularly charming self-portraits.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Marilyn Monroe and Alfred Eisenstaedt at Monroe’s Beverly Hills home, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & LIfe Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt and Wataru Narahashi, Japanese cabinet minister, Tokyo, March 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt and LIFE’s National Affairs Editor, Hugh Moffett, on assignment in Kenya, 1966.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt and Walt Disney, California, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt with Jackie Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, 1960.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt and former sumo wrestling champion Tomojiro Sakata, Tokyo, 1946.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John F. Kennedy signs Alfred Eisenstaedt’s autograph book after a portrait session in the oval office, 1962.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt poses with “beauty culturist” and the first woman to star in her own daily exercise TV show, Debbie Drake, 1962.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt with student-artist Afewerk Tekle, 22, in Ethiopia, 1955. Tekle went on to become one of Ethiopia’s most celebrated painters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt and Haile Selassie

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren and Alfred Eisenstaedt in the bedroom of her Italian villa, 1969.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt pushes photographer Alice Austen in a wheelchair, Staten Island, New York, in 1951, one year before Austen died.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Alfred Eisenstaedt poses with two unidentified local men while on assignment for LIFE in India in 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In a photograph taken by LIFE colleague Bill Shrout, Alfred Eisenstaedt kisses an unidentified woman reporter in Times Square on VJ Day, August 14, 1945 a powerful visual echo (in retrospect) of the now-iconic, era-defining “sailor kissing a nurse” picture that Eisenstaedt himself shot that very same day.

William C. Shrout Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Civil Rights: Preparation and Protest, 1960

January 11, 2021January 31, 2013 by

Very few non-violent civil disobedience tactics of the late 1950s and early 1960s were as brilliantly simple in conception and as effective in execution as the sit-ins that rocked cities and towns from Texas and Oklahoma to Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and beyond. Some sit-ins at lunch counters, state houses and other public and private venues were more confrontational than others; some lasted longer than others; some were more high-profile than others. But all required a certain kind of courage and a communal willingness to sacrifice that were hallmarks of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of photos—many of which never ran in LIFE magazine—from a planning conference sponsored by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian leadership Council at Atlanta University and the series of protests and sit-ins that followed in May 1960. The pictures, by LIFE’s Howard Sochurek capture one small but significant exemplar of the sit-in phenomenon, as well as some of the unusual training methods that potential sitters-in endured before taking to the streets and to the seats.

In notes sent to LIFE’s editors in New York from the magazine’s Washington, DC, bureau in May 1960, the sit-in movement’s activities in Virginia were dubbed the “Second Siege of Petersburg” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous siege of the town and nearby Richmond between June 1864 and April 1865 during the Civil War.

The “siege” metaphor, meanwhile, takes on a peculiar resonance in those notes for example, in a quote from a newspaper publisher in Petersburg, George Lewis, who told LIFE: “I’m against integration. The mood of Petersburg definitely is for segregation. The Negroes are pushing too hard and the whole pace is too fast. Petersburg is not ready for integrated lunch counters. If they integrate them, the whites will boycott. But things are changing slowly. Ten years ago we couldn’t have printed a Negro picture in the paper. The whites wouldn’t have stood for it. Now we print them when they’re in the news.”

Describing a key element of that “explosive situation” the sit-ins by activists at various lunch counters in town LIFE wrote in its September 19, 1960, issue (published a full four months after the events described):

The key to the sit-in is non-violence, but it takes a tough inner fiber neither to flinch nor retaliate when, occasionally, hooligans pick on the sitters-in to discourage them or provoke them into some violent act. Fearing the stress on sensibilities and temper to which a sit-in could be subjected, the high school and college students of Petersburg, Va. studied at a unique but punishing extracurricular school before they attempted sitting-in.

In the course, which they ironically call “social drama,” student are subjected to a full repertory of humiliation and minor abuse. These include smoke-blowing, hair-pulling, chair-jostling, coffee-spilling, hitting with wadded newspaper, along with epithets…Anyone who gets mad flunks. So far in Petersburg effective police action and the calm attitude of the townspeople have averted trouble.

Except for a few adult leaders … the sitters-in are youngsters like Virginius Bray Thornton … In a real sense they are the South’s “new” Negro. They are educated, filled with a fierce idealism, chafing impatience and bitterness against the remaining shackles. “This is not a student struggle, it is a Negro struggle,” says Virginius.

As LIFE’s editors noted elsewhere in the piece, “Slowly, too often seemingly against its own perverse will, the nation was winning toward the constitutional ideal of civil equality.” We have these, and many other trailblazers, to thank for that progress.

A protestor practiced keeping his cool as smoke was blown in his face. His stand-in tormentors were David Gunter, an N.A.A.C.P.-student adviser (left), and Leroy Hill, a high school teacher.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kresge’s in Petersburg used a chain and a ‘Reserved’ sign setting off the white lunch counter to keep the African-Americans from sitting down.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lunch counter, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Training for sit-in harassment, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Preparing for non-violent civil disobedience.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Training for sit-in harassment, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Preparing for non-violent civil disobedience.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The picket polka provided moments of relief.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Preparing for non-violent civil disobedience, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Petersburg, Va., 1960

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rev. Martin Luther King, Virginia, 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A crowd attended a speech by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Virginia, 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (seated) during a gathering prior to non-violent civil disobedience, Virginia, 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Civil rights protest, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Civil rights protest, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Student leaders waved demonstrators on.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Civil rights protest, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Student leader Virginius Thornton spoke to a women’s group, the Colored Women’s Federation of Petersburg, at one of the member’s homes, Petersburg, Va., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists during a civil rights strategy and planning conference at Atlanta University in mid-May, 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and future Washington, DC, mayor Marion Barry during a civil rights strategy and planning conference at Atlanta University in mid-May, 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Atlanta University Conference, May 1960

Civil rights leaders called to the strategy and planning session by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including Bernard Lee (Alabama); Dave Forbes (North Carolina); Henry Thomas (Washington); Lonnie King (Georgia); James Lawson (Tennesee); Virginius Thornton (Virginia); Wyatt Lee Walker; Michael Penn (Tennessee); Clarence Mitchell (Maryland); and Marion Berry (Tennessee). (Photo by Howard Sochurek / The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 1960.

Howard Sochurek/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, September 19, 1960.

Love Letter to New York: Classic LIFE Photos of the Big Apple

August 12, 2021January 22, 2013 by

The monuments and the museums, the pulsing crowds on Fifth Avenue, opera at the Met and stickball in Spanish Harlem, sardines on the subway and the romantic urban vistas of Central Park: Over the years, LIFE’s photographers explored every corner of New York, the city the magazine always called its home.

From the countless images of the Big Apple stored away in the late, great magazine’s archives, LIFE.com presents a selection of black-and-white photos that show off the the spirit, the architecture, the culture (the high and the decidedly, thrillingly low) of Gotham visual testaments to a city that, in darkness and in light, remains one of a kind.

The silhouette of the Statue of Liberty in January 1943.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fifth Avenue teems with pre-Christmas holiday traffic near 34th street in November 1948.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Brooklyn Bridge, 1946.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Model Carol Lorell walks down 3rd avenue in the east ’60s of Manhattan in January 1940.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A view from New Jersey of the moon shining over Manhattan’s RCA and Chrysler buildings as its light shimmers on the waters of the Hudson River in September 1946.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A strolling blind musician played guitar and harmonica along Broadway at night in Times Square in 1944.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aerial view of the crowded beach and pier at Coney Island, including the Parachute Jump amusement park ride (the tall structure at left), Brooklyn, 1951.

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young boys in Spanish Harlem in January 1947.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A woman walks her poodles along the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue in October 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A view from the balcony at the opening of new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in January 1966.

John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Off-loaded freight boxes are hoisted up to loading platforms at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in October 1949.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

People race from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during an air raid drill in November 1951.

Yale Joel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A soldier says farewell at (the old, classic) Penn Station in December 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Central Park, 1951.

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New Yorkers crowd Broadway below a large billboard depicting actress Marlene Dietrich in October 1944.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sightseeing above New York, October 1949.

Bernard Hoffman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Commuters crowd a train during rush hour on Manhattan’s IRT subway in January 1970.

Ralph Crane Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Beautiful, ornate clock at Pennsylvania Station, December 1942

Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The new Metropolitan Life Insurance Company North Building, left, and the 1909 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower at night, Madison Square, New York City, May 1947.

Herbert Gehr Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A trio of sailors walk arm in arm down a dimly lit street near Times Square, searching vainly for fun in the curfew-quiet city, February 1945.

Herbert Gehr Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An aerial view of the entrance ramp leading to the top of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, New York City, 1950.

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Children participate in a bicycle safety program run by the New York City police in June 1954.

Yale Joel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Russian head Nikita S. Khrushchev and his wife, center, meet the press at the top of the Empire State building in September 1959.

Al Fenn Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Boys climb on rocks in Central Park, November 1972.

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A snowstorm hits New York City in February 1960.

Al Fenn Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Columbus Circle During a Heatwave, 1944

Marie Hansen Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fire boats greet the SS France as it enters New York Harbor on its maiden voyage in February 1962.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A father and son walk past the Globe Theater in 1971.

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A view of bustling, raucous New York City, looking straight down 42nd Street, January 1946.

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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Civil Rights: Preparation and Protest, 1960

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