One of the reasons there were so many spectacular photographs of the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is that the center of commercial photography in New York City is located near the Flatiron Building. The area is full of stores that sell and rent equipment, as well as services that photographers require. Large numbers of those live in the adjacent neighborhoods: Greenwich Village, Chelsea, TriBeCa, SoHo. As soon as the Twin Towers were hit, dozens of world-class photographers grabbed their cameras and ran to the scene of the action. If it had been the Sears Tower in Chicago, there would have been pictures, but not likely so many great ones.

The Foley Gallery currently has a fine exhibition called “Moving” of black-and-white photographs of New York City in the 1950s by Jerry Dantzic. Mr. Dantzic (b. 1925) is representative of the talented cohort of photographers that lived and worked here midcentury, the best of whom are known collectively as the New York School. Like many of them, he studied with Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, who had an enormous influence on the visual culture of the period. The pictures at Foley are redolent of that time and place, and of the affection Mr. Dantzic – a longtime resident of Brooklyn – had for the city.

Times Square was a magnet for these photographers, as we were reminded earlier this year by an exhibition at the AXA Gallery. Mr. Dantzic’s “After Midnight, New Year’s Eve, Times Square” (1955) is a good addition to the album of pictures of one of the most photographed geographical locations on the planet. It must be well after the ball has descended: The crowds are going or gone and the gutter is littered with confetti, but three young men are determined to party on. A sign behind them reads “STAY ALIVE FOR ’55,” and this is probably good advice.

The man to the left stands with his back to us, his shoulders hunched, his hand held up like a paw. The middle one staggers forward holding a tin horn, so as not to miss an opportunity to toot. The one on the right lists to port and is having trouble holding his head up. To the left another group of young men jeer at the trio, and the cops in the background are too unconcerned to pay attention. This is not Alfred Eisenstaedt’s romantic Times Square on V-J day or Ted Croner’s plaza of glitter, it is more prosaic, but no less dear for being so familiar.

Jazz was important to what New York was at this time, and W. Eugene Smith, William Gottlieb, and many others shot the great performers in the night spots, rehearsal halls, or wherever they made music. Mr. Dantzic’s “Louis Armstrong, CBS-Timex Jazz Show, Rehearsal, CBS Studios” (1958) is a classic photograph of Satchmo singing. All we can see of the trumpeter in “Miles Davis, New York Jazz Festival, Randall’s Island” (1957) is one eye rather coldly staring past his horn. “Sarah Vaughan, New York Jazz Festival, Randall’s Island” (1956) is a dramatic close-up of the singer, shot from below so that above her throat we see her pursed lips, her eyes shut, her head back. We can almost hear some lush ballad. “Mambo Jambo, Palladium Ballroom” (1952) is an antic picture of the sort of jitterbugging people once came to New York to see. The woman at right has her back to us, and to the left we see her crouched partner: His knees are blurred with the speed of his dancing, and his smile assures us he is having a very good time.

Like so many of his peers, Mr. Dantzic shot street photos: “Man on His Head, Duffy Square” (1957) and “Conversation, Williamsburg, Brooklyn” (1952) are two neat examples of the genre. He shot sports (“John Williams, Boxer, Williamsburg Gym,” 1957), the circus (“Flying Saucer, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Madison Square Garden,” 1953), and the ballet, (“Ballerinas, National Ballet of Canada, Les Sylphides, Brooklyn Academy of Music,” 1957). “Ingrid Bergman in Limousine with Publicist, Idlewild Airport” (1957) is a wonderful celebrity photo, with the film beauty sitting, cigarette in hand, between two members of her entourage talking business. The picture is not about glamour, but commerce: Bergman is less a goddess, more mortally human.

Jerry Dantzic had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978 of pictures of America he took with a 360-degree Cirkut panorama camera. The very different work in this show spent several decades in the attic of his house in Brooklyn until his son happened upon it. Grayson Dantzic arranged for the publication of “New York: The Fifties in Focus” (Edition Stemmle), and the book has renewed interest in his father’s work. One of his sweetest images is “East River Raft, Williamsburg, Brooklyn” (1958): Six boys adventure on a flimsy bit of flotsam, the swift waters all around, the city’s bridges and skyscrapers rising in the background.

It is as if the Mississippi flowed into Spuyten Duyvil. Two great myths of America came together for one brief moment, and – this being New York – a photographer with a passion for the city fortuitously was there to take its picture.

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The area around the Flatiron Building was once known as the Millinery district, for the obvious reason that people used to go there to buy hats. The tiles in the 23rd Street station of the IND are decorated with mosaics of hats sailing through the air, and the hats are ascribed to real people. If you go to the uptown platform you will find a floppy, gray hat with a stiff brim and a red ribbon that belonged to Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934), a green fedora with a gray band that belonged to Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), and a nondescript chapeau that belonged to Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942).

Kasebier was a leading Pictorialist photographer, Hartmann was one of the first art critics to write seriously about photography, and Beals was the first woman to be employed as a news photographer. It is a fine thing for them to be remembered this way. I love New York.

Until May 21 (547 W. 27th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-244-9081). Prices: $1,500.