Few movies capture the despair and degradation of 1970s New York better than “Taxi Driver.” So it is perfectly fitting that the Terminal Bar should have had a cameo role.

Sheldon Nadelman began working there as the day bartender in 1972. A few months after that, he started bringing his Pentax camera to work and taking pictures of his patrons. Ten years later, he had amassed 2,600 photos. And the bar closed.

It would have been lost to history, too, like almost every other joint, dive, grind house, coffee shop, shooting gallery, porn emporium and hot-sheet hotel around Times Square, if Mr. Nadelman had not taken those pictures. And it would have been lost if his son, Stefan, had not digitized, edited and annotated the trove, first in the documentary “Terminal Bar” and now in the book “Terminal Bar: A Photographic Record of New York’s Most Notorious Watering Hole.”