It's 5:30 AM in New York City, 1927. The subway costs a nickel, the stock market is booming, alcohol is illegal, and jazz is pouring out of Harlem. In two years, it will all come crashing down.

Live one day in the Roaring Twenties, hour by hour: from the tenements and pushcart markets of the Lower East Side to Wall Street, the Automat, Yankee Stadium, Broadway, the speakeasies and the jazz clubs of Harlem.

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 5:30 AM: The city wakes up
0:40 Morning on the Lower East Side
1:40 The subway
2:12 Work: sewing machines and skyscrapers
3:09 Wall Street
3:31 Lunch at the Automat
3:57 Lindbergh
4:23 Afternoon: the Yankees and Coney Island
4:49 Evening at home: the radio
5:37 Broadway and The Jazz Singer
6:10 Prohibition and the speakeasies
6:47 Harlem
7:42 2:00 AM
7:56 The crash of 1929
8:31 The city kept building

🖼️ Images
Archival photographs, paintings and posters are in the public domain or CC0, via the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum and Wikimedia Commons. Some street scenes are from the 1910s; first-person and animated scenes are illustrations made for this video.

🎙️ Narration voice generated with AI (ElevenLabs). All photographs and illustrations are authentic, unaltered archival material.

🎵 Music (all public-domain recordings)
Zez Confrey, "Kitten on the Keys" (Edison, 1921)
George Gershwin, "Rhapsody in Blue" (Paul Whiteman Orchestra with Gershwin, 1924)
Pietro Frosini, "New York Blues" (Edison, 1916; restoration by Adam Cuerden)
"Three O'Clock in the Morning" (Paul Whiteman Orchestra, 1922)
James P. Johnson, "Charleston" (Arthur Gibbs and His Gang, 1923)
"Dipper Mouth Blues" (King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong, 1923)

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#NewYork #1920s #History