Earlier today we looked at the trailer for Baz Luhrman's Great Gatsby, which features a very vibrant-looking New York City during the year 1922. Now you can click through and see what New York really looked like during that year (but wait, it's better if you first press play on the below song). And here's what was happening in the five boroughs:
- It was just a couple of years into the Prohibition Era, and New York City's speakeasy clubs were multiplying—in fact by 1925 there "were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs" here.
- On the field, Babe Ruth had just signed a 3 year contract at $52,000/year with the New York Yankees. (It also had him promising to "go easier on drinking.")
- On the stage, Eugene O'Neill's "Hairy Ape" had just premiered—the play was about "a brutish, unthinking laborer known as Yank, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich."
- In the zoos, the 1st duck-billed platypus was publicly exhibited in the U.S., at the Bronx Zoo.
- The Coney Island boardwalk was under construction, known as "Coney Island's Fifth Avenue," and opened the following year on May 15th.
- And on the radio, Al Jolson had a popular song called "April Showers."
