As an aspiring teenaged artist I would travel to NY every once in a while to show my illustrations. This was before websites, emails and electricity, so you had to get your work seen the old fashioned way, by pestering. I'd crash at friends'/relatives' apartments and spend the day cold-calling and pleading. If I was lucky I'd get an actual face-to-face with an art director at a magazine or comic publisher, but more often than not I'd be asked to drop off my portfolio at 10am and pick it up after lunch. I had only one portfolio (didn't think to have multiples), which left me with plenty of free time to stroll the city, and what was more eye catching than 42nd Street? I wish I'd taken 1000 more photos (and gone back at night) of the amazing buildings and people that could be found only there, but at least I got a handful of snapshots of the long-gone cool decaying seediness of that bustling stretch of real estate!
(via Mitch O'Connell's excellent blog)