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City Limits exists to show New York another side of itself, and over the past 40 years, a roster of talented photographers (joined, occasionally, by a not-so-talented editor who happened to be holding a camera) has helped capture the people and places we covered. Some of the photos below were found in our archives with little identifying information. Click on the “more” button to read the stories behind some of the shots.
Children at Camp Homeward Bound, an upstate summer camp for homeless kids.
Iliana Rodriguez couldn’t open a window, receive a visitor or turn on her stove without encountering a problem that her landlord should have fixed—despite her Bronx building being on the Public Advocate’s watch-list. (Adi Talwar) More
Special Agent John Gilbride of the DEA with a bag of cocaine, 2009. (Lizzie Ford-Madrid) More
At an 81st Precinct Council meeting, July 2010. (Marc Fader) More
Jackie Dsaga of the Needle Exchange Program drops used needles into a waste receptacle as volunteer Josephine Rivera counts them, 110th Street and Park Avenue, August 1994. (Gregory P. Mango)
Christopher Colbert works out at Atlas Cops & Kids Boxing Club in East Flatbush, one of a dwindling number of youth boxing programs. (Suzanne Tobias) More
Eighth Annual AIDS Candlelight Vigil, June 25, 1993, near the Hudson. )
Paul Parker lost a son in a 2002 fire at a Bronx building linked to a controversial real-estate operator (Marc Fader) More
Rev. Al Sharpton in Crown Heights. (Andrew Lichtenstein)
From right to left: J. Santiago, Jeremy Fantauzzi and Oswaldo Mota share a laugh while hanging out on the corner of East 120th and Pleasant Avenue, 2011 (Marc Fader) More
A family makes do while waiting for a Section 8 apartment to open up, 1993. (Gregory P. Mango)
City Marshall Oren Varnai amid a day of evictions in the Bronx. (Marc Fader) More
Fulton Ferry manufacturing workers demonstrate outside Industrial & Commercial Incentive Board hearing, February 1984. (Jim Mendell)
Gowanus Canal, site of a Superfund cleanup and a real-estate boom, 2014. (Adi Talwar) More
Dancer at Club Tobago during Carnival, February 2002. (Regina Monfort)
Then-Speaker Christine Quinn on the night of the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary. (Adi Talwar)
Brownsville, 1993. (Suzanne Tobias)
A protest calling for pro-tenant reforms to rent regulation laws, 2010. (Marc Fader)
Nicole Tai, a green-building materials pioneer, in 2003. (Margaret Keady) More
Tiffany Jones is legally a man but identifies as a woman. Thanks to a pioneering New York City policy, she was able to go to a women’s shelter when she became homeless. Were she to go to a men’s shelter, she claims, “I’d be beaten up or raped.” (Marc Fader) More
Wall of Dreams on Liberty Island, 2002. (Mitsuhiro Shoji)
A year after losing a retail job, Jerome Mosley entered a job-training program for NYCHA residents. When we met him in 2011, he was making good money on a roofing project. (Marc Fader) More
A shelter in Lenox Hill, January 1997. (Dietmar Liz-Leporiz)
Gathering water in the wake of Sandy, Coney Island, 2012. (Pearl Gabel)
Ruins of a building near Crotona Park. (Andrew Lambertson)
A mural in Bushwick, 2009. (J. Silberberg) More
Julia Boyd and Andre “Smootch” Boyd at ACORN headquarters, 2000. (Gregory P. Mango)
Future Councilman John Liu protests the treatment of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist accused of leaking nuclear secrets.
Downtown Detroit, 2011 (Cybelle Codish) More
Landon Wickham and Jamel fix bikes, 1996.
Johnny Hincapie, incarcerated for a role in an infamous murder, seen in Sing Sing prison in 2010. His conviction was later overturned. (Marc Fader) More
A cross erected on a lamppost in Bedford Park, the Bronx. The crosses are still there.
In an era when major bookselling chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble are struggling, independent Westsider Books—a narrow, split-level shop crammed floor to ceiling with used and rare volumes—somehow survives. (Marc Fader) More
Lilliam Rodriguez and 19-month-old daughter Leena in the entrance to their apartment. (FM Kearney)
Martha Jones and Jeanette Zelhof of MFY Legal Services.
Frank A. Kotnick, Jr. president of the Glendale Civilian Patrol, gets a radio call while making his rounds one night in April. The Glendale group is one of several citizen anti-crime efforts that remain active. (Adi Talwar) More
Workers near the former Wolff-Alport chemical factory near the Brooklyn-Queens border. A series of studies have found varying degrees of radioactive contamination near one of the three Superfund sites in or adjacent to Brooklyn. (Marc Fader) More
Corlandress Pittman at the Willard J. Price Houses in 1992.
Derek Vincent Kelly, grandson of fallen firefighter Capt. Vincent Fowler, in 2011. (Marc Fader) More
Andrew Salmon, a general contractor who experienced unemployment in 2010, at the tail end of an economic downturn that saw historic spikes in black male job loss. (Colin Lenton) More
A combined-sewage overflow pipe where the Bronx River and Soundview Park meet, 2009. (Jarrett Murphy) More
A building at 800 Fox Street in the Bronx burns in 1983 (Rilly Flores)
Francena Brown of Springfield, Mass., lost her son to gun violence five years ago. (Marc Fader) More
At the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Promise Academy, 2010. (Alice Proujansky) More
Stacy Burnett plays with her son on the floor of the visitors’ room during a Mothers’ Day reunion at Albion Correctional Facility. (Patrick Egan) More
Organized by the upstart Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, Jing Fong workers claimed the restaurant had been stealing tips and shorting workers on overtime. In 1997, then New York State attorney general Dennis Vacco sued Jing Fong for $1.5 million More
Doreen Consantino and Tracy Wheeler outside a Bronx bodega in 2008. She was a nurse before she contracted HIV. He was a strapping 215 pounds before neuropathy put him in a wheelchair. They looked out for each other. (Jarrett Murphy) More
Muslim women in Bay Ridge, a neighborhood subjected to intense surveillance after the 2001 terrorist attacks. (Aaron McElroy) More
Craig Crimmins has applied for parole, and been denied, every two years since 2000 for a murder he committed in 1980. (Adi Talwar) More
Mayor Edward I. Koch, Mr. T. and then-Department of Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Anthony Gliedman announcing the T-Force campaign to combat housing discrimination.
Graduation day, Bronx Community College, 2010. (Jarrett Murphy)
Beach 44th Street in 1990 and, below, today. The area was undergoing change before Sandy. It accelerated afterward.
A store on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 145th Street in what 1980 or so and again in 2012 (photo by Taleen Desdepanian). Since 1978, when real estate records indicate Mighty Jim Realty bought the property, more than the awning has changed. When Mighty Jim got the property, some $184,000 changed hands; in 2011 the assessed value of the building was more than $2 million. More
The guard tower at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, one of the New York women’s prisons with what federal surveys said were high levels of sexual misconduct involving officers and inmates. (Marc Fader) More
A woman at the senior center in NYCHA’s Kingsborough Houses, 2009. (Jarrett Murphy) More
Players show the flaws in the synthetic field at Flushing Meadows Park, 2010. (Adi Talwar) More
Sensa Alomar and Elias Rodriguez, at a homeless shelter in the Highbridge neighborhood in the Bronx in June 1985. Their daughter, Sensa, is in the crib. (George Cohen) More: (see last page).