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The Lively Morgue was a daily photo blog from the New York Times in which an original photo from the newspaper's archives is reposted along with tidbits of information gleaned from the historical article it accompanied. Along with a rescan of the original photograph, the backs of each photo were also scanned, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the editorial process of one of the world's best newspapers.

This posting featured an aerial photograph of thousands of beachgoers, captured over Coney Island beach on a hot summer's day in August, 1975.

Aug. 3, 1975: Coney Island was one of the few areas of activity during that summer’s hottest days, as the “Coney Island Chamber of Commerce reported a crowd of more than 1 million people, including more than 5,000 who slept on the beaches overnight,” The Times reported. Elsewhere across the five boroughs, “New York City was a town in low gear,” as temperatures seemed to linger in the 90s without any respite in sight.

The original article from 1975 has more.

At the time, New York City had a population of 5.7 million - the population had doubled in just 30 years due to mass immigration. The city was developing rapidly, and more than a quarter of the 300 largest companies in the US were headquartered in NYC.

The city was a destination for internal migrants as well as immigrants. Through 1940, New York was a major destination for African Americans during the Great Migration from the rural American South. The Harlem Renaissance flourished during the 1920s and the era of Prohibition. New York's ever accelerating changes and rising crime and poverty rates were reduced after World War I disrupted trade routes, the Immigration Restriction Acts limited additional immigration after the war, and the Great Depression reduced the need for new labor. The combination ended the rule of the Gilded Age barons. As the city's demographics temporarily stabilized, labor unionization helped the working class gain new protections and middle-class affluence, the city's government and infrastructure underwent a dramatic overhaul under Fiorello La Guardia, and his controversial parks commissioner, Robert Moses, ended the blight of many tenement areas, expanded new parks, remade streets, and restricted and reorganized zoning controls.

For a while, New York ranked as the most populous city in the world, overtaking London in 1925, which had reigned for a century. The 'Roaring 20s' also saw a construction boom, and many of New York's icons including Chrysler Center, Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building would be constructed in the ensuing decade.