Memorial '76

A photographic time capsule of a pre-gentrified South Brooklyn Memorial Day parade that preserves a neighborhood and a moment now largely vanished

On Memorial Day 1976, weeks before the nation marked its 200th birthday, South Brooklyn filled with flags, brass bands, scout troops, and families along Fifth Avenue. A vivid portrait of South Brooklyn in 1976, patriotic, diverse, and on the cusp of change, this book gathers more than fifty photographs by lifelong New Yorker Larry Racioppo, who left his nearby apartment that morning to record the pageantry of “America’s Birthday.” What he captured is a timeless record of Brooklyn’s people and pride during the Bicentennial year, now published as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

Italian-, Puerto Rican-, Irish-, and Polish-American neighbors appear as marchers and as specta­tors on stoops, at bar windows, inside ethnic clubhouses, and in second-story windows. The pictures register storefronts and fraternal halls, homemade floats and uniforms, and the easy mingling of ritual and everyday life that defined the blocks then. Seen together, they preserve a local parade and the social world around it, including mom-and-pop businesses, clubs, and gathering places, at a moment when the city and neighborhood were about to change.

A foreword by novelist and historian Kevin Baker situates the work within the civic culture of 1970s New York. Racioppo’s Afterword traces the 1976 route from Green-Wood Cemetery to the Old Stone House Park and reflects on five decades of photographing Memorial Day parades, from South Brooklyn to Rockaway, as generations of veterans and families pass the tradition along.

Part civic history and part street-level portrait, Memorial ’76 expands Racioppo’s acclaimed chronicle of New York’s neighborhoods, standing alongside Brooklyn Before and Here Down on Dark Earth, and offers scholars and general readers an essential visual archive of working-class pride, urban ritual, and the everyday textures of a Brooklyn that has largely disappeared.

Larry Racioppo was born and raised in South Brooklyn and has photographed New York City since 1971. A Guggenheim Fellow and former staff photographer for NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, his work is held by the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Recent books include Here Down on Dark Earth: Loss and Remembrance in New York City (Fordham) and Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983.