In 1978, Matt Weber was a taxi driver in a city plagued with a crime, abandoned buildings and a government on the verge of financial collapse.

Axar.az reports citing Dailymail.

New York City had seen better days.

Working the night shift, Weber witnessed the fights and arrests, saw the hookers and the homeless, and ‘so many crazy things on the street that I kept saying, “Damn, I’ve got to buy a camera,”’ he said in a 2017 article.

‘If you saw the movie Taxi Driver that was the world that was out there. There were prostitutes on the corner, Times Square was crazy; it was a dangerous part of town. I was robbed in my taxicab at double gunpoint.’

So he picked up a camera and started chronicling the porn, peep shows and prostitution in Times Square, the busted cars in Harlem, and the sailors who came to town for Fleet Week.

His decades of documenting the city are now part of a new book, 'Street Trip. Life in NYC,' published by Carpet Bombing Culture.