1940's New York Map..............

Wow! That's phenomenal ... thanks!!!

I found my neighborhoods.

Weird that the map is period-correct for NYC, but they surround it with a New Jersey that has Frank Sinatra Drive and JFK Boulevard East.

Neighborhood names are particularly interesting ... I wonder how much of that was based in 1940s brokerbabble, and how much reality.

My grandmother referred to the Lower East Side as simply "the East Side", but that might have been shorthand.

Dangerous Harlem, tiny on this map, was already a good place to score drugs, if one photo is any indication. Also housing projects. And they refer to the "Negroes!" How exciting. With an exclamation point.

You can see a lot of the old West Side still remains. Very cool. Thanks for posting.

Cool! Thanks for posting!

In 1940, would you have been better off renting or buying?

I don't think there was much opportunity for buying in 1940, as nearly all apartment buildings were rentals.

Thanks, that makes sense. Those rental buildings were probably owned by magical unicorns.

A lot of the 1920s co-ops had gone bust in the Depression. The shareholders' equity was gone, and it made more sense to default and become tenants of the bank rather than keep paying the underlying mortgage.

Some were still holding on, though. The NYT archive for 1943 shows sales at 1120 Fifth, Hudson View Gardens, and Jackson Heights.

>A lot of the 1920s co-ops had gone bust in the Depression.

So you would have been better off renting in the 1920s.

The year this was published was possibly the very worst year to buy Manhattan real estate since the first submoron became a real estate borker in 1624.

The City was flush with WWII economic activity -- the overwhelming number of servicemen and materiel shipped out from Brooklyn. And (I believe) a whole lot of toxic manufacturing in the City also went to the war effort.

Then World Peace, and (coupled with massive Federal subsidies for the suburbs, the South, and the West) 35 years of economic implosion in the City.

Real estate doesn't always go up. Except maybe potato fields in LI.

Better to rent than to own.