“Which way is the right way at the Guggenheim?” asked an article on April 28, 1996, paraphrasing a confused German tourist, Jens Reusch, who visited a few years after extensive renovations. “It’s up?” he exclaimed in disbelief among the Mondrians. Photo: Angel Franco/The New York Times
March 13, 1993: a powerful snowstorm with the “heart of a blizzard and the soul of a hurricane” rammed the East Coast, spawning tornadoes and 6-foot snowdrifts, killing 33 people and cutting power to 2.5 million homes. A week later, this photo, showing a woman struggling against the elements on 14th Street, appeared with a blurb about the reeling insurance industry, which struggled to cover the billions of dollars of recent storm damage. Photo: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Feb. 26, 1995: The published caption posed the question: “Are guillotines on the way?” A blurb about the cost of capital punishment in New York cited a study that estimated that “New York’s death penalty would cost, over five years, the same as hiring 250 police officers and building prisons for 6,000 inmates.” Photo: The New York Times
Oct. 25, 1995: “A stretch of Highway 12 snakes through one of the wilderness areas, Old Spencer Flat,” read the original caption on this photo, which ran with an article about a battle over public land in Utah. “John Ford tried to capture this region in his western movies, and Ansel Adams attempted to do the same thing with a still camera,” the article read. “What Congress is poised to do now is pass a bill that will essentially zone 22 million acres of public land here in such a way as to determine how nature and commerce will interact for decades to come.” Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Jan. 20, 1994: “Time Out From a Higher Calling,” read a title on this photograph alongside a story about a group of East Harlem nuns originally from France. Sister Marie Chantal, leaping, and Sister Marie Francesca worked out at the Tae Kwon Do Academy at 828 Ninth Avenue. “The fact that we know tae kwon do doesn’t change anything,” Mother Marie Martha, the group’s mother superior told David Gonzalez, the reporter. “It’s just a sport.”Photo: Jack Manning/The New York Times
Dec. 7, 1994: The original Carmine’s, on Broadway at West 90th Street. The second location opened in 1992 in the theater district. ”New Yorkers,” a Times reviewer wrote, “in spite of all the talk about a new abstemiousness, love to tackle quantities of food that would make a Jewish mother cry uncle.” Photo: Ángel Franco/The New York Times
July 21, 1993. “Where Sharks Face Off With Gentler Souls,” read the headline on an article published that month about the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. “This is a bargain for those in search of the deeper perspective,” wrote the reporter, who traveled there with his son. Or maybe just a scare: “If you were to mix one drop of blood with a hundred million drops of salt water,” he noted, “a shark could detect that drop of blood as far as a quarter mile away.” Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
