June 2014 - LIFE

Jewel of Manhattan: Scenes from Central Park, 1961

December 9, 2019June 30, 2014 by

New York’s Central Park has been around, in various incarnations, since the mid-1800s. In that time it has been hailed as a masterpiece of landscape design; served as a punchline in jokes about muggings and violent crime; provided the setting for key scenes in books, plays and movies; and remains, for New Yorkers and for countless visitors to Gotham, one of the world’s urban wonders 840 acres of tree-lined paths, public plazas, open fields, gardens, ponds, lakes, bridges, arches, performance spaces, a castle on a hill, a quite charming zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Here, LIFE.com celebrates Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s best-loved and most-frequented creation with a series of photos from 1961.

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

Dancers in Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Unicyclist in Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Warming up before a soccer match, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Central Park 1961

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A painter in a secluded spot, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rowers on the Lake in Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fishing in Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sunbathers cooling their feet, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene near the Boat House, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Model sailboats in Conservatory Pond, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A memorable boat launching.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dogs in a fountain, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chess players, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Water fountain, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a wonderland for climbers a bronze Alice got cluttered by children who’d scrambled over the Mad Hatter and other Lewis Carroll creatures.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Newly graduated students strolling past folks dancing ring-around-a-rosy.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Out for a morning ride.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Central Park 1961

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elephants in Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Seals in Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kodiak bears, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Couple on a bench, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coming down from a horse-drawn carriage, Central Park, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Central Park 1961

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Haute Couture and the Cold War: Dior in Moscow, 1959

November 2, 2020June 28, 2014 by

Muscovites who wandered into GUM, the USSR’s premier department store, one weekend in June 1959 were treated to an extraordinary scene: a trio of willowy French models, dressed in vibrantly colored suits, greeting shoppers and posing for commissioned photographers LIFE’s Howard Sochurek among them.

The models parading through Moscow that day were in the Russian capital ahead of a five-night Christian Dior fashion show. Yves Saint Laurent had recently taken over the brand’s Parisian atelier and reimagined the seductive “New Look” for which the House of Dior had been known. Gone were the corseted jackets, crinolined ballerina skirts and towering stilettos, replaced instead with practical blazers, loose skirts and shorter kitten heels.

While Dior was undergoing its transformation, so too was the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier who envisioned a more liberal, dynamic future for his country. The world of Soviet fashion would not be exempt from “Khrushchev’s Thaw,” as the government brokered person-to-person exchanges with Western design houses to help revitalize the Soviet fashion industry, and French couturiers like Dior were especially coveted as guests.

Of all the designers to pierce the Iron Curtain during the 1950s, Saint Laurent’s Dior paired most harmoniously with Soviet reality. After all, the newly refashioned “New Look,” with its functionalist philosophy, embodied the socialist-realist trope that form should follow function, that art should accommodate reality, and that the masses rather than the elites should determine what it meant to be “cultured.”

Yana Skorobogatov is a doctoral student studying history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dior Fashion Models in Moscow, 1959

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Paris Unadorned: Portraits of the City of Light, 1946

January 17, 2020June 27, 2014 by

In early 1946, photographer Ed Clark journeyed to Paris (“the grand courtesan of all cities,” LIFE called the ancient town) to record the look and the feel of the French capital less than a year after the end of World War II. The pictures he made there chronicle not the cheerful, bawdy Paris of the popular imagination, but a place that, as LIFE told its readers, was a “grim and depressing disappointment” for any visitors expecting the Paris of Maxim’s, the Ritz, the Folies Bergère, the Moulin Rouge and the city’s other legendary, libidinous diversions.

The Parisians themselves, meanwhile, were “cold, hungry, confused and tired above all, tired too busy keeping themselves alive to bother much about entertaining. . . . [The typical American GI in Paris at the time] felt cheated. Where was the Paris he had heard about?”

The Paris [of Clark’s photos] is the Paris of the Parisians and of anyone else who will take her. She is unadorned, somber and beautiful. Most of the pictures were taken in mist or rain, when the sharp, clean lines of the city’s spires and the bridges pierce through a curtain of gray. This is the Paris that neither Germans nor GIs could change. Even in the age of the atom bomb, she is as indestructible as the river.

For his part, like countless travelers before him through the centuries, Ed Clark fell under the spell cast by the great, gorgeous city. In fact, the Tennessee native once claimed that, at the time he got the assignment, “I didn’t know where France was, let alone Paris.”

But when he came upon a young painter in Montmartre (slide #6 in this gallery, and Clark’s personal favorite photo from his entire career), he found it “so beautiful that I just started shooting.”

View along Quai du Louvre (today Quai François Mitterrand) down the Seine toward Ponte Des Arts with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, 1946.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Arc de Triomphe

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Churning up the Seine, past Notre Dame, on a gray winter day.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Exiting the Metro

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Arc de Triomphe

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Painting Sacre-Coeur from the ancient Rue Norvins in Montmartre, Paris.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Moulin de la Galette, Paris

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The famous stalls along the Seine

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

View across the Pont Alexandre III bridge toward the Grand Palace

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A small sister of the Statue of Liberty beside the Seine, 1946.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Street scene

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Near the Pont Neuf steps

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene on the Seine

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Selling flowers on the banks of the Seine

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pont Alexandre III bridge

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Conciergerie, on the Ile de la Cité

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rowboats on the banks of the Seine

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

View of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris, commonly known as Sacré-Coeur

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Montmartre cemetery, winter 1946.

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Passerelle Debilly bridge on a foggy winter day with the Eiffel Tower in the background

Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Gateway to a New World: Rare Photos From Ellis Island

January 14, 2020June 24, 2014 by

There are few more lasting emblems of immigration to the U.S. than Ellis Island—the portal through which some 12 million immigrants entered America between 1892 and 1954. By some estimates, a third of the population of the United States more than 100 million people can trace their ancestry to immigrants who first arrived at Ellis Island

Near the end of that long run, in the fall of 1950, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt went out to the island in Upper New York Bay to make some pictures. The rough machinery of politics had brought confusion and delay to the processing of thousands of men, women and children looking to step on to American soil. But beyond chronicling the impact that political rivalries in Washington were having on real lives, Eisenstaedt’s pictures also encompass a more permanent truth about the immigrant’s journey, and these images mirror photographs made at Ellis Island decades before.

Many of the pictures in this gallery were never published in LIFE, but some appeared in the Nov. 13, 1950. The story explained the photos, and the situation on the island, this way:

The flat, 30-acre island in New York Bay is not what European Communists gleefully call it—”that well-known concentration camp.” But Ellis Island is today a gray and gloomy place suddenly full of bewildered people who have become victims of American politics.

The trouble began with an unfortunate law, the McCarran Communist control bill. The bill, designed to exclude subversives, was so loosely drawn that it excluded harmless and desirable aliens as well, people whose only crime may have been membership in the Hitler Youth at the age of 9 or enrollment in a Fascist labor union when joining was a prerequisite to eating. Last September, President Truman vetoed the bill. Congress re-passed it over his veto. [In the ensuing power struggle, would-be] immigrants were caught up in this political wrangle, and “delayed” beyond reason on the little island.

LIFE then went on the describe the “flood-tide activity” at Ellis that the great photographer Lewis Hine documented in the early 1900s activity that slowed to a trickle (1,300 a month vs. 3,000 a day in 1906) by the late 1940s and noted that for the first time in decades, the island was “again full of deeply human scenes.”

The new aliens, photographed here by LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt, look the same, have old-country clothes and the same wide-eyed, insistent children. The old buildings, with their huge, tiled rooms, and wire-mesh partitions, are still the same. But this time, because the inspectors must examine not only the bodies and finances of the aliens but their past political connections as well, the atmosphere is gloomier and there are long, inexplicable delays filled with anxiety. . . . [Some] are held for several days. Most of them wind up at a high pitch of exasperation, crying, “Why don’t you ask me now what I think of your beautiful country? Why don’t you ask me now?” Only a few, like Professor Arrigo Poppi, who came from the University of Bologna to study medicine at Harvard, retain their humor. “I came here to study the heart disease,” he said, “and instead I get the heart disease.”

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

Antonio Magnani coped with his children and fat briefcase holding his entry papers, Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Twenty-four-year-old Schulim Pewzner, a rabbinical student from Warsaw, Poland, at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaed; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Saturnia docked at at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaed; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaed; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rachel and Schulim Pewzner, from Warsaw, Poland, interviewed at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Maria Nadalin of Italy, seated at left of the table, was worked on by an inspector-stenographer-interpreter team.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Exhausted parents in recreation hall tried to keep their child amused and quiet. Most of them put up with endless piggyback riding, hair-pulling—anything—to get relief from the bewildered crying.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In the women’s dormitory, separated from husbands, wives sat silently on their beds. At right is Maria Palmerini of Italy, who came for a six-month visit. She received the same treatment as those who were staying.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rachel Pewzner, 20, and her 24-year-old husband, Schulim, at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A tired child is ready to go to sleep with his head on the dining-hall table. American food was sometimes too strange for aliens. There was a kosher kitchen for orthodox Jews.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Boarding a ferry at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rachel Pewzner, 20, and her 24-year-old husband, Schulim, at Ellis Island, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On a ferry in New York Harbor, looking at lower Manhattan, 1950.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, Nov. 13, 1950.

Coney Island: Classic Photos From America’s Original Playground

February 24, 2020June 24, 2014 by

Not many places in America have, for so long, been so dedicated to the pursuit of fun as the mile-long stretch along the southern edge of Brooklyn known as Coney Island. Luna Park, Astroland, the world-famous Cyclone roller coaster — for well over a century, these names helped define what amusement parks were, while their attractions and thrills still inform what summertime entertainment looks, feels and sounds like.

As the Cyclone advances further into its 10th decade of life — the wooden coaster opened for business on June 26, 1927 — LIFE.com presents a series of pictures that celebrate the unique, messy, vibrant energy of Coney Island. Even today, after so many years of, well, ups and downs, there’s no place else quite like it.

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

Coney Island, New York, 1944.

Marie Hansen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Coney Island Cyclone, 1944.

Marie Hansen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1943.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1949.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1943.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1949.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1943.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Gryro Globe ride, a metal monster which simultaneously spun and tilted its victims, Coney Island, 1949.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1949.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1943.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Parachute Jump along the boardwalk at Coney Island, 1951.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1942.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1943.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island 1949

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1942.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1949.

Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Coney Island, 1942.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Face of Freedom: Portraits of the Statue of Liberty

January 16, 2020June 16, 2014 by

The Statue of Liberty is one of the most recognizable pieces of public art, not only in America but around the world. At the time of its dedication on October 28, 1886, this gift from France was, at 305 feet and one inch, the tallest structure in New York City. While its status has been dwarfed in that one measure, its status as an icon has only deepened over time.

Here are photos of Lady Liberty as captured by LIFE photographers through the years.

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