The Flickr 1960Sanalog Image Generatr

No seat belts, no air bags, no brakes, no crumple zones, no infotainment center, but it was a blast zooming down the hill which our house stood on!

When I first moved to Rockland County back in 1984, I discovered the ruins of the old Gair plant and took quite a few photos inside and outside the ancient, dank smelling factory complex. The amount of gentrification since that era has been absolutely amazing. There's no trace today that any of this used to exist for over 80 years.

At the bottom of the image, you can see a curvy road with railroad tracks approaching the plant. That's the very start of the Piermont Pier, which today is a beautiful nature preserve and linear park which goes out halfway into the Hudson River.

Below are some shots I took of the paper plants when they were already abandoned in the mid 1980s...

My Dad probably handed his Kodak Retina camera to a friend, who took this photo. It couldn't have been me, since I was only two years old! As usual, Mom's wearing a little headband and sporting her ubiquitous hair bun.

Since the early 1900s, this area was a beach resort on Long Island Sound. Filled with rental cottages, it was a summer place for generations of people.

The buildings across the street were torn down in 1965. For just one summer, 1966, we had direct line of site to Long Island Sound from our house on Rock Street (just a glimpse of our house on the right with pink shingles).

In 1967, The Surf Club West built a modern pool club exactly where those cottages stood for almost 70 years.

Below is a view from 1966 where we could actually see the beach after the cottages were demolished and before the Surf Club built its facilities on this site.

OK, so it's not the best photo... but still captures a moment in time from long ago.

I've placed some Flickr Notes on the image with more details than the title allows. Shot in our neighbor's front yard at the corner of Rock Street and Merwin Avenue. This was the ONLY year where you could see the beach in the background. In 1965, all the old 19th century cottages were torn down. This became the site of the brand new Surf Club West for the start of the summer 1967 season.

A really early selfie before the term "selfie" even existed. Taken with my first camera - a cheap plastic Diana which shot 127 roll film which had an endless supply of light leaks.

Well, actually its a crop of a 127 film shot using a junky light-leaking Diana camera taken in my Godmother's kitchen in Southbury, Connecticut sometime during the summer of 1967.

This image from the past was captured with a cheap Diana camera loaded up with a roll of 127 black and white film. The next Christmas, Santa brought me a Kodak Instamatic 104 which took significantly better pictures.

My dad was really great at capturing moments like this using his 1950s Kodak Retina 35mm camera loaded up with Kodachrome slide film. Sure wish I still had that curly blonde hair!

Another one of my father's Kodachrome slides which acts as a portal to the past all these years later.

I've added a number of Flickr notes to the photo to explain the basic technology being used.

Actually, 1968 was one of the most tumultuous and polarized eras in American history. Many people feared that America was on the verge of a revolution. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, widespread urban riots as well as increasing revolt and protests against the Vietnam War characterized the year.

None of this exists anymore. The Surf Club opened in 1967 and closed in 1983 to be replaced with the Surf Village condominiums in 1984.

This is an example of REALLY early photography. For Christmas 1966, Santa was kind enough to drop off one of those yellow Kodak Instamatic 104 camera kits.

It came complete with one flashcube and one cartridge of 126 Kodachrome slide film. I still have that same camera and it works! (so why do my smartphones die after 2 years or so?)

This momentary insight into single-digit life was taken by my dad using a Kodak Instamatic 104 camera loaded up a 126 cartridge of Kodachrome slide film.

I took this shot with my Kodak Instamatic 104 loaded up with a cartridge of 126 Kodachrome film. Kodachrome was the closest thing to today's digital photography. The colors stay crisp, true and realistic for decades. Kind of like a film time machine.

Lower Manhattan was in dire shape by the late 1960s. Someone from this era wouldn't recognize how this exact same intersection appears today. The neighborhood was filled with hundreds of abandoned buildings from its 19th century maritime period when the Hudson River was lined with dozens of commercial piers.