Jan. 5, 1954: Pierre Auguste Cot’s “The Storm” was hung at the Metropolitan Museum, one of several hundred works that went on display in newly renovated galleries that grouped paintings by time period rather than nationality — an arrangement that the museum director Francis Henry Taylor hoped would “bring order out of chaos.” Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
The Stockholm, the famous boat to collide with the Italian liner Andrea Doria in July 1956, arrived in New York to unload the crash’s survivors and undergo repairs. Photo: The New York Times
July 30, 1956: After the Stockholm, a Swedish liner, collided with the Andrea Dorea, an Italian cruise liner, killing 51, the damaged ship was dry-docked for repairs while its only Spanish seaman visited Linda Morgan, a 14-year-old American girl he rescued who spoke Spanish and was initially reported dead. In the crash, she had been “transferred from her berth on the Italian liner by the twisted steel of Stockholm.” Photo: Carl Gossett/The New York Times
A maze of parkways near Queens Boulevard, presenting a “pattern of progress.” An Aug. 8, 1955, story, with another aerial photo, described the rapid development of Queens — “the spaces are fulling up,” wrote Milton Bracker. “The imprint of the future is already visible on the still naked ground near by” what is now J.F.K. Airport, he added. “The imprint — as if the foot of an unseen cubistic monster had set itself down long enough to depress and darken the fill — is unmistakable from the crystal overlook of the airport control tower.” Photo: Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times
Dec. 9, 1957: Even in the 1950s, New York City public transit was a squeeze at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
July 11, 1958: In a terrifying age of spectacular weaponry that presaged our current era of the drone, the United States Army put on a large demonstration of 14 different types of missiles before a large audience at Fort Bliss, Tex., and the nearby White Sands, N.M., missile range. Though most were still under development, the reporter warned of what the future held — of opening “a Pandora’s box from which will leap missiles with ranges unlimited, speeds almost infinite, and actions almost human.” This image reminded a letter writer of the famous picture of the flag raising at Iwo Jima. “They are so different, and yet so similar. Place them next to each other. Makes one think?” Photo: George Tames/The New York Times
May 25, 1955: For an “air defense command story” published that summer, George Tames photographed various aspects of the operation at Andrews Air Field in Maryland and, 50 miles away, at the 647th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at Manassas, Va. Here, the warning squadron sights a “target” by radar, and its flight was recorded on a plexiglass plotting board. Photo: Geore Tames/The New York Times
Jan. 20, 1955: With stopwatch in hand, Coach Bob Kiphuth of Yale University was about to time breaststroke swimmers. He was a four-time Olympic leader and Yale’s swimming coach from 1918 to 1959, “considered by many the greatest swimming coach in the history of the sport.” He died in 1967, having been “taken to a hospital after watching Yale beat Army in a swimming meet that afternoon. Death was attributed to a heart attack.” Photo: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
Aug. 6, 1951: In Flushing Meadows, Queens, Elliot Murphy’s “Aqua-Show” featured, among its many attractions, a water ballet of 26 women in fluorescent bathing suits. Photo: Sam Falk/The New York Times
Dec. 4, 1957: Flames billowed four stories high at Broadway and 40th Street, after an explosion in a pit where men were working on a gas main. Three sustained minor burns; one of them, Hugh Harrity of the Bronx, had singed eyebrows and eyelids, but refused treatment. The spectacle was blamed on a lighted cigarette. Photo: The New York Times
