Most of these photographs below were shot in 1982 and 1983 by native New Yorker Ken Stein when he was 17 and 18 year old, and was the staff photographer for a weekly community newspaper in The Bronx. Through his work he managed to capture the spirit of a New York quite different than the one we currently know, one with an undertone of danger and edge that has transformed over the past few decades.

“The city was different back then,” he told Gothamist. “I think it was quieter, the street lights were darker, there was more room to walk and more places to wander—often everything seemed new and the different areas of the city were just that; different.”
Ken Stein recently shared some of his old photos of New York City from the 1980s on his Flickr page. “I pulled my slides from 20 years ago out of storage and began scanning them. It’s like a portal back to my teenage years when I dreamed of going to art school to become a photojournalist.”