Langdon Clay: New York 42nd Street

42nd Street, 1979 contains Langdon Clay’s (born 1949) photos of a quintessential strip of 42nd Street near New York’s Times Square—showing its gritty neon charm before it became the more Disney/Las Vegas hub for theater concoctions that we know today.

Clay recalls the drab and dusty mood in New York City at the end of the 1970s: the political sea change wrought by the Vietnam War and Haight Ashbury had given way to a sense of apathy, intensified...