The Search for the 'West Side Story' Album Cover in NYC

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 8/17/13 at 9:31pm

Once, album covers were considered to be as important as the music they housed, integral to the whole experience of owning an LP. Today, cover art has become nothing more than a postage stamp-sized image on an iPod screen.

But even as downloading renders album art increasingly secondary, a music fan named Bob Egan has launched a website to uncover the New York City locations of some famous album covers.

Called Pop Spots, one of the site's first projects is the cover for the original Broadway cast album of West Side Story. Taken in 1957, it shows Tony (Larry Kert) playfully chasing after his girlfriend Maria (Carol Lawrence), on a block of four- and five-story tenement buildings, similar to the one in which Maria might have called home in the musical, set in the mid-1950's New York.

Through some dogged detective work involving a microscope and camera, Egan found that the scene was photographed in front of 418 West 56th St., between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. He discovered the location by scrutinizing the garbage can just to the left of Maria, which shows the address: 418 W. 56th Street



Article and Images

[Addison D.]

Posted: 8/17/13 at 10:36pm

Within the last 12-18-ish months there was a thread here with a link to an article that had a whole bunch of these kinds of photos.

Some of them were a nostalgia gut punch--both for the long-gone days of vinyl records and because some of the photos were of blocks/buildings/rooftops that I (think I) remember so vividly. Memory is a tricky thing, of course...

I can't find that BWW thread--I thought the link contained in the thread was to a NYDN article, and when I search the NYDN, I do, in fact, find an article of that sort, but it doesn't have the photos I (think I) remember


NYDN Cover Art images