If you watch any movie or TV show shot in New York City, chances are you'll see a scene set in one of New York’s “many” seedy alleys. According to Hollywood, they're everywhere. But in reality, New York barely has alleys at all. So where did the myth come from and why doesn't NYC have alleys?

Found at a New Zealand garage sale by redditor pangium, this vintage documentary from 1998 highlights dog culture in Manhattan at that time. Enjoy!

Years ago I was picking through the VHS tapes at a garage sale in Westmere (my childhood neighbourhood in Auckland, New Zealand). I was looking for unlabeled tapes in the chance of finding old, taped TV shows or home movies or something. The woman running the sale told me she had chucked all those sorts of tapes out the week before. She asked me what sort of tapes I was after and I told her I was looking for ‘oddities’. She looked puzzled but a little while later came out of the house with a blank tape in a clear case. She told me it was a documentary an old friend of hers had made in the 90s and that she’d always intended on digitalising it, but knew realistically that she would probably never get around to it. She said it sounded like the sort of thing I was looking for and gave it to me for free. A few days later I watched the tape and it was indeed exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

A few years have passed since then and I’ve watched the tape ‘The Dogs of Manhattan’ a few times with friends. It’s a charming portrait of dog-walker culture in 1990’s New York and sort of feels like it could be a sleeper cult classic. Now that I’ve finally digitalised it, it is on the internet for the first time. There seems to be no record of it’s existence online until now.

Tom Delgado takes you around one of New York's richest areas: Manhattan's Upper East Side. He talks about the history of Carnegie Hill, Lenox Hill, and Yorkville, as well as legendary Park Avenue. Shot by Eric Thirteen.