Before it was swept clean and purified with Disney goodness, you could enjoy New York’s 42nd street in all its noisy, colorful, rude, and vivid glory. Mitch O’Connell shares his treasure trove of late 20th century photos.

As an aspiring teenaged artist I would travel to NY every once in a while to show my illustrations. This was before websites, emails and electricity, so you had to get your work seen the old fashioned way, by pestering. I’d crash at friends’/relatives’ apartments and spend the day cold-calling and pleading. If I was lucky I’d get an actual face-to-face with an art director at a magazine or comic publisher, but more often than not I’d be asked to drop off my portfolio at 10am and pick it up after lunch. I had only one portfolio (didn’t think to have multiples), which left me with plenty of free time to stroll the city, and what was more eye catching than 42nd Street? I wish I’d taken 1000 more photos (and gone back at night) of the amazing buildings and people that could be found only there, but at least I got a handful of snapshots of the long-gone cool decaying seediness of that bustling stretch of real estate!