April 1941. Storefront church and adjacent lunch wagon in the Chicago Black Belt. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Edwin Rosskam.

Chicago street scene, April 1941. Papers littering the sidewalk are "policy slips." ["Policy" was a lottery gambling system once common in some black communities.] View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Edwin Rosskam.

January 1938. Agricultural workers on a sugar plantation near Ponce, Puerto Rico. View full size. 2.25 inch nitrate negative by Edwin Rosskam.

January 1938. Train loaded with cane on a sugar plantation near Ponce, Puerto Rico. View full size. 2.25" nitrate negative by Edwin Rosskam.

Another bird's-eye view of Eleventh Avenue, a.k.a "Death Avenue," on New York's West Side as captured by the Bain News Service circa 1911. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. View full size.

Equestrian signalman on the New York Central's Eleventh Avenue freight line circa 1911. In a 1930 article on the West Side tracks' demise, the New York Times wrote of the "eight men and twenty-four horses comprising the famous 'cowboy troop' [or 'West Side Cowboys'] whose function it has been for years to ride ahead of the puffing locomotives as they wheeled along Death Avenue." The dangerous street-level tracks were eventually replaced by a 1½-mile viaduct, the High Line, that after decades of abandonment is being turned into a long, thin elevated park. View full size. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

W.T. Grant department store fire at New York's Sixth Avenue and 18th Street in April 1916. View full size. George Grantham Bain Collection.