Dreaming on the elevated tracks at 47th Street

New York is a city of dreamers. But I wonder what the girl in John J. Soble’s 1936 painting is thinking about.

We see her on the edge of what looks like a tenement roof, staring out onto the (soon to be demolished) Sixth Avenue elevated tracks and to Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and beyond.

Her leg is kicked up in a youthful pose, while the woman holding the chair behind her seems older. A train is coming down the tracks as laundry hangs from a roof in the distance. She might be a neighborhood girl, but big city dreams beckon.

Radio City: “A must on every visitor’s list”

So states the back of this technicolor postcard, which has more to say about what was then the world’s biggest theater:

“On its huge stage are produced gigantic spectacles of great beauty and its screen provides the latest and best in motion picture entertainment. It has its own broadcasting studio atop the roof.”

And if John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s original plans didn’t go awry, it would be the home of the Metropolitan Opera. But then Wall Street crashed, the opera company bailed . . . and since 1932 Radio City has been serving up pop music and gaudy musicals.

Going to the movies on March 28, 1970

According to that week’s issue of the listings magazine Cue, one of your movie options is Airport, the disaster blockbuster starring Burt Lancaster.

Seems like a strange choice for the Easter week feature at Radio City Music Hall. But it’s also odd that Radio City regularly showed movies back then…and doors opened at 7:15 in the morning!

Another film playing in the city: The Boys in the Band, based on the off-Broadway play about a group of gay men attending a birthday party in Manhattan. This month, it was just released on DVD. You definitely can’t see it at the Loew’s State, which shut down several years ago.