I would love to know the addresses they were taken at. I love New York Then & Now. 

Nice post. "Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t
no man got to be common." - The immortal Satchel Paige

These are terrific photos.

This was a time when young people didn't leave their homes unless they were neatly, impeccably dressed. If only that mindset would return. Please post more photos! Love!

There was a time when everyone, even the poor, made an attempt to look presentable in public.  Today half the people you see on the street look like slobs, and the other half look like escaped mental patients.

What do you mean look like?  :-) 

Preach, brother!

The Satchel Paige pics from Life mag are by George Strock. Not sure why the Gothamist caption writer thinks the kids Satchel is walking with are "Yankee fans."

I wonder if they did some updating to those captions when they digitized the images. 

The photos are all from the LIFE archives, and those are LIFE's captions.

On the Life website it's called "Walking with the kids"
http://www.life.com/gallery/30...
The original caption from the time, of course, would not use the term "Young African American"

click through on that page with "Buy Print".  The caption is noted.  Why would the term "Young African American" not be used in 1941?  

Cause the white PC libtards weren't around then to coin the phrase.

Yeah! Back in the old good days we called 'em "colored" or "Negro" or even the cherished N-word. All those terms make SO much more sense and are SO much more descriptive than "African-American." And best of all they have no insulting or offensive context whatsoever, right whiteiris?

Idiot.

Love it!!! Please do this more often!  If anyone is interested in vintage pics of Brooklyn, check out brooklynpix.com.

That pic of Joe Lewis reading Mighty Mouse is fantastic!

On your next post of vintage photos from the UWS, make sure the caption includes similar modifiers -  "Young Caucasian children playing in the street ..." / "White baseball player Joe DiMaggio enjoys a slice ...". 

these were the original captions as noted in LIFE magazine

http://images.google.com/hoste...

I was wondering if some of those "African" Americans were from Dominican Republic or Trinidad or Jamaica or Haiti.

Doesn't really matter.  They're still black and African American is a fairly recent racial designation in this country and during that time period people from the Caribbean refered to themselves as blacks and it gets kinda hard to keep up with superficial designations when you're fighting against the injustices they were dealing with in Harlem during that time period.