However, while poverty plunged New York to new depths, the city's ambitious construction projects pushed it to new heights. During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and more were all completed.
Pictured: A laborer works on the frame of the Empire State Building, 1930.
A workman rides a crane hook during construction of the Empire State Building, 1931.
A laborer sits on the frame of an unfinished building overlooking Manhattan, 1935.
Unemployed men sit at the docks, 1934.
Men wait on a breadline, 1932.
Clotheslines rest over the court of a crowded Upper East Side tenement, 1936.
World War I veterans board a bus in lower Manhattan bound for upstate New York's Fort Slocum, where a government relief program offered dollar-a-day reforestation jobs, 1933.
Women talk while one of their children plays in the gutter in the southern section of the Bronx, 1936.
The hungry wait to be fed outside St. Peter's Mission, circa 1932.
Woolworth's employees on strike for a 40-hour work week, 1937.
Children's protest parade for better housing conditions, circa 1930-1933.
Men on the street outside a chicken shop at an unspecified location, 1938.
Pictured: A laborer works on the frame of the Empire State Building, 1930.
Men wait on a breadline, 1932.
