I've received a lot more mail about the time period of this video of old New York. You may remember that reader Peter Cunningham said that the footage had to be from different years because in one shot, the Empire State Building didn't have its giant broadcasting antenna and in another, it did. A number of folks — including Peter Cunningham — wrote to say that in one of those shots, he had mistaken the Chrysler Building for the Empire State.
Bill Lentz noted that the original film — before it was colorized and had faux audio added — was identified as being from 1948. And my longtime buddy Joe Brancatelli, who knows New York like nobody I know, noticed this…
I can add some more specificity. At the 13:18 mark, you have a shot of Times Square at night. You see the Astor Theater in the left foreground and right next to it a marquee advertising Berlin Express. That's the Victoria Theater. Berlin Express opened there on May 20, 1948, according to The New York Times review.
So I'm declaring the matter settled: The film was shot in mid-1948. End of discussion.
Turning to a topic that actually matters: Like all of you, I'm quietly — or maybe not so quietly — horrified by the latest in the never-ending series of Israeli-Palestinian wars. I have nothing to say about it that's worth even the low value of a blog post. If you forced me to say something, I'd probably say what Kevin Drum had to say about it…
Israel's enemies have launched war after war over the past 50 years and they've been crushed Every. Single. Time. The result has been uniformly disastrous: settlements, walls, blockades, checkpoints, and massive oppression of Israeli Arabs. You don't have to approve of any of this to recognize that it's the easily foreseeable response of a nation under siege. The same thing will happen this time. Thousands of Palestinians will die and Israeli retaliation will make the rest worse off than before.
And now I'll shut up about it because I have nothing to add.