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What New York City looked like in the Roaring Twenties with Spectacular Historical Photos. The 1920s, often referred to as the Roaring Twenties, was a decade of significant transformation for New York City. It was a time of economic prosperity, cultural change, and architectural innovation. This period saw the city emerge as a global center of ...
- Shaye Weaver
- Editor, Time Out New York
- The city’s most iconic skyscrapers stem from this era. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building—the two gems in our world-famous skyline—started their construction in the 1920s.
- There were thousands of speakeasies in NYC during Prohibition. When we say “thousands” of speakeasies, we mean it. During Prohibition, when it was illegal to sell, transport and produce alcohol, there were anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 speakeasies in New York City alone, according to the New-York Historical Society.
- Black New Yorkers created one of the biggest artistic movements in the world. After the Great Migration, when Black Americans left the South and moved to cities in the North, Midwest and West, which started in 1910, they flooded New York City with dance, music, art, literature, fashion, theater and politics, especially in Harlem.
- About 35% of the city’s 5.6 million residents were foreign-born. New York City has long been a city of immigrants. In the 1920s, a large portion of the population was comprised of people who had been born in another country.
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- Population and Immigration
- The Great Migration
- The Harlem Renaissance
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In 1920, New York City was a polyglot mix, the result of more than a century of continuing, though fluctuating, immigration into the country. About 35 percent of the city’s 5.6 million residents were foreign-born. Russian Jews (480,000) made up the largest foreign-born group in New York, followed by Italian (319,000), Irish (203,450), and German (1...
Another notable group of arrivals to New York in the 1920s was African Americans. Between 1917 and 1925, 200,000 African Americans moved to New York. They were part of the river of humanity flowing northward from 1916 to 1970 now known as the Great Migration. The roots of the Great Migration took hold during World War I, which slowed overseas immig...
The river of the Great Migration watered the arts scene in Harlem in the 1920s that blossomed into the Harlem Renaissance. Fletcher Henderson arrived from Georgia to lead the most successful African American jazz band in the 1920s. Composer and bandleader “Duke” Ellington arrived from Washington, DC; and pianist “Jelly Roll” Morton and singer and t...
Live music from Harlem speakeasies wasn’t the only form of entertainment for New Yorkers at the time. In the 1920s, New Yorkers, along with the rest of the country, discovered they could enjoy music over the radio. For New Yorkers interested in visual entertainment, “The Jazz Singer,” the world’s first talking movie, had its debut on October 6, 192...
Nineteenth century innovations that brought fresh water into New York City and carted away its sewage and trash eliminated many of the epidemics that had threatened New Yorkers before the 1920s. The 1918 flu pandemic had killed 30,000 New Yorkers, but it had passed by the beginning of the new decade. As a result, most of the leading causes of death...
The Industrial Revolution that began in the 19th century and ended in the 1920s provided Americans with a panoply of new products to purchase and enjoy. At the same time the expansion of credit helped middle-class Americans buy consumer goods in unprecedented amounts. Between the end of World War I and the end of the 1920s, for example, more than a...
Many people today remember the Roaring 20s as an era of newfound prosperity, and New Yorkers, for the most part, shared in that bounty. Unemployment in New York City in the 1920s remained under 7 percent while income per person grew 30 percent over that time. By 1929, for instance, bricklayers and iron-workers in Manhattan earned $77 a week (~$1,20...
Many Americans have family connections to New York in the 1920s, either passing through on their way in to the United States or settling down before later generations moved westward. Login to Ancestry® or try Ancestry® for 14 days freeand rediscover the life your forebearers lived in New York City—and beyond—a century ago.
“1920s.” The Living City | New York City. Accessed May 7, 2021. http://www.livingcityarchive.org/htm/decades/1920.htm.Adelman, Melvin L. “Sports.” In The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, 1103–6. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.Aimone, Francesco. “The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New York City: A Review of the Public Health Response.” Public Health Reports 125, no. 3_suppl (2010): 71–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/003335491012...Barr, Jason. “The Manhattan Skyline during the Roaring Twenties.” Building the Skyline, July 10, 2018. https://buildingtheskyline.org/roaring-twenties/.- Madison Troyer
- A bird's-eye view. Taken in 1923, this aerial view of Lower Manhattan features Battery Park, the South Ferry Terminal, and, in the distance, the Woolworth building, which was the tallest building in New York throughout the 1920s.
- Times Square. Named after the New York Times building that was erected on its southern end in 1905, Times Square didn't become the hub it is today until the 1920s—when all of the subway lines, elevated railroad lines, and bus lines added stops along 42nd Street.
- The Palace Theater. Near the northern end of Times Square lies the Palace Theater, one of New York's oldest and most popular Broadway playhouses. Pictured here in the 1920s, the Palace would have been a thriving vaudeville theater, considered the flagship destination for the genre's performers.
- The El. By the 1920s, the elevated train—one of New York's first attempts at a borough-connecting public transit system—was on its way to extinction. With the development of the underground subway (which, by this decade, connected Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens), the slower-moving above-ground trains were quickly becoming relics of the past.
In the period of 1925-1930, New York City experienced an unprecedented wave of cultural and architectural evolution, marking it as a pivotal epoch in urban history. This half-decade witnessed the completion of monumental architectural feats, most notably the Chrysler Building, which was finalized in 1930.
Culturally, New York City during this period was at the forefront of the Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age, as it was known, saw Harlem continue to be a cultural epicenter, with the Harlem Renaissance reaching its peak. Jazz clubs, speakeasies, and theaters became hubs of artistic expression and social interaction.
From 1915 to 1920, New York City transformed dramatically, both in its physical landscape and cultural identity. This period, building on the architectural revolution of the previous years, saw the city’s skyline further enhanced by the Woolworth Building.
