JOURNAL • BRIAN ROSE

Houston Street and Bowery 1957 — from the film On the Bowery

In the previous post I wrote about seeing On the Bowery at Film Forum, and I connected several film locations with contemporary views of the same places. One of the spots that jumped out at me was the corner of Houston and Bowery where the protagonist in the story, Ray Salyer, goes in search of a day’s work. In the screen capture above, he walks up to the window of a truck–we see him from inside–and behind him is a chain link enclosed handball court with several people playing. That playground, and other open spaces along Houston, was created in the 1930s when the buildings on the north side of the street were demolished, displacing thousands of tenement dwellers, to allow for the digging of the IND subway line.

Watching the film, I suddenly realized that the wall in the rear is the same one that Keith Haring painted on in 1982, and which was used to recreate his mural in 2008. Many other graffiti artists have also worked on its surface. The original wall shown in On the Bowery is still there, but presently boxed in, now being used to showcase a changing array of artists.

Unfinished Kenny Scharf on the Houston/Bowery wall — © Brian Rose

The photo above was taken from approximately the same position as the scene in On the Bowery. But there is a major difference, and it took me a while to figure things out. In the film there is a broad sidewalk and full depth handball court on the north side of Houston. Today, as you can see above, a swath of sidewalk and about four feet of gravel is all that separates the street from the wall. What happened is that Houston Street was widened along the north side turning a four lane undivided street into the monster thoroughfare that it is today.

From the Times:

THE widening of the Houston Street roadbed, to two 45-foot-wide roadways separated by a narrow mall, did not start until 1957. The Times reported that ”new black-on-yellow street name signs will replace the outmoded blue-on-white signs,” referring to the old luminous enameled signs that occasionally show up on eBay. The new Houston Street, an eight-lane crosstown artery, was opened in 1963, just before the area south of Houston Street began to emerge as an artists’ enclave.

Unfinished Kenny Scharf on the Houston/Bowery wall
– © Brian Rose

Although the concrete handball court wall remains (a historic artifact encased in plywood), the Ray Salyers of the world no longer congregate at Houston and Bowery looking for work.

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Film Forum, Houston Street — © Brian Rose

On Wednesday I walked over to Film Forum on West  Houston to see On the Bowery, a movie I had heard about over the years, but never seen. It was recently re-released in a newly restored print. On the Bowery was made by Lionel Rogosin in 1957, and depicts three days of life on what was at that time America’s most infamous skid row. It is a hybrid film–part documentary, part directed narrative–and its characters were played by actual denizens of the Bowery, people that Rogosin had met over several month’s research before the movie was shot.

It remains, 53 years after its making, a cinematic tour de force. Rogosin worked with an extraordinary team, especially the cameraman Dick Bagley, and the editor Carl Lerner, who also worked on classic Hollywood movies such as 12 Angry Men. The story is minimal–a young man arrives on the Bowery with nothing but a suitcase and a powerful thirst for alcohol. He meets several regulars at a bar, ends up sleeping on the street, gets robbed, and is helped by his thief, a sly but sympathetic Bowery old-timer, who gives him some of the money he got from selling the newcomer’s stolen pocket watch.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — still from On the Bowery

Most of the film was shot on the block between Houston and Prince Streets, and the Confidence Bar and Grill (above) once stood at the point where Stanton Street meets the Bowery. This is my corner of the world–my office/apartment is on Stanton just off the Bowery. When I first arrived in New York in 1977, I lived on East 4th Street five blocks north. The Bowery was still skid row in those days, and remained a seedy final destination for untold thousands until well into the 1990s. It is skid row no longer as high end restaurants and galleries supplant the cheap hotels and restaurant supply stores that dominated the area, some of which of can be seen in the film.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — still from On the Bowery

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — similar view as above
– © Brian Rose

For nearly 75 years the Bowery was darkened by the elevated tracks running its length and on up Third Avenue into the Bronx. But by 1957 the steel viaduct was no longer used and was in the process of being demolished. In Rogosin’s film the hulking structure of the El lends many of the scenes a closed off subterranean feel. The stretch of Bowery buildings shown above still stands, almost as ragged looking as before, but without the encompassing gloom and claustrophobia.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

A few years ago I took the picture above with my view camera. The building at left with the cutouts attached to the facade is 254 Bowery, the former location of the Confidence Bar and Grill. In the movie still you can see the word Paragon on the building next door. That’s the same building above from around 2005.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — © Brian Rose

But those buildings are gone now. The site was cleared for the construction of a luxury hotel, a project that died when the economy collapsed in 2008. The lot has sat vacant since then, but I read recently on Curbed, the architecture and real estate blog, that a new project may be in the works.

The Sunshine Hotel, Bowery and Stanton Street — still from On the Bowery

Near the end of On the Bowery, the lead character, Ray Salyer, goes to the Bowery Mission with hopes of staying sober, but after being preached to and finding he has to sleep on newspapers spread on the floor, he heads back out to the street. In a stunning montage, as he drinks himself into a stupor, he and the other men get louder and louder, epithets are hurled, fisticuffs break out–however ineffectual–and the scene unwinds in a chaotic drunken din. Salyer, with a woman on his arm, stumbles from the bar and heads for the Sunshine Hotel, where he slaps her away (seen above). The Sunshine is one of the last Bowery flophouses, right next door to the New Museum, still home to a dwindling assortment of derelict men, a no vacancy sign on the door, the end in sight.

The film closes with another montage, as astonishing as the barroom scene. As Salyer stands on the Bowery contemplating his next move, a sequence of closeups of faces is shown, each held on the screen a few seconds. Each visage a portrait of utter dissolution, each line and crease, stubble of beard and trickle of dried blood, rendered vividly, dispassionately.

There is no redemption suggested in this ending, and even though On the Bowery was hailed by many, and nominated for an Oscar, its bleak outlook was not generally welcome in the propagandistic 1950s. Rogosin’s On the Bowery shares the unsparing outlook of Robert Frank who also revealed the underside of American society in his book The Americans. Frank’s documentary approach has been widely absorbed by several generations of photographers, but Rogosin’s method, combining documentary and staged reality, remains under appreciated by those of us schooled in the cinema verite style.

Seeing the movie, and then walking back to my office right where the film was made, a neighborhood already changed, undergoing even more radical transformation–it’s quite a lot to reflect on.

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Smith Street Station, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have been piecing together a series of images that relate directly or indirectly to the World Trade Center. A couple of years ago I came across a Twin Towers mural near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. I did a quick snapshot of it with the intention of returning to photograph it with the view camera. This morning, I finally got back there.

I took the F Train, which emerges from underground just past Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The tracks are carried high up on a massive steel bridge that spans the Gowanus Canal, an infamously polluted industrial area that has become a haven for artists, and as a result, ripe for upper middle class development. With the downturn in the economy, however, and given the cost of cleaning up the area, not much has happened. The Gowanus is still a fabulously gritty blue collar lowland between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, two of Brooklyn’s most desirable neighborhoods.

WTC mural on Smith Street, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Across the street from the subway entrance is a somewhat forlorn car wash decorated with tattered red white and blue streamers–but across Smith Street a row of old houses with slanted roofs and dormer windows is being renovated. The WTC mural with its flag motif  is painted on the side of a small building next to a chain linked vacant lot. Across the street from the mural is a heating oil depot where trucks drive up and fill their tanks. A glass enclosed command post overlooks the operation, and when I set up my camera on the asphalt just off the sidewalk, I was informed by a stern voice coming over a loudspeaker that I was standing on private property. I managed to get off one shot with my 4×5 camera.

Smith Street, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Retreating from the oil depot, I went across the street and set up the camera at an oblique angle to the mural. Promptly, a gruff voice barked accusingly, “Are you taking a picture of my truck?” I jerked my head toward the voice, and saw a grinning face sitting behind the wheel of a truck with a battered container mounted behind. He was kidding. I told him I just got yelled at by the guys across the street, and was a little jumpy. We chatted a bit, he smiled for the camera and roared off.

WTC mural on Smith Street, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Here is the image taken from “private property.” And while I think the 4×5 shot will be good, I really like these two white trucks caught left and right in the frame. You don’t see it the pictures, but there were lots of people walking around–some pretty damaged people it seemed to me–probably coming from some sort of social services facility nearby. Others were standing around under the subway viaduct waiting for a bus, or perhaps, waiting to be picked up as day laborers.

One guy started talking to me, asked me what I was doing. I pointed to the mural and told him I was photographing WTC things. He asked me about the mosque/cultural center proposed for downtown near ground zero. I looked at him more intently–he seemed to be Hispanic–I didn’t ask him where he was from. He had just seen an article in the paper. The group building the center was applying for money meant to support projects around the Word Trade Center site. The right wingers were agitating again. He wanted to know what I thought about it. I said, ” I know Christians, Jews, and I know Muslims. This is New York. I think they should be able to build their center. He said, somewhat to my surprise, “I’m with you.”

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Greenpoint, Queens (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

This is my America, from my heart, and by my heart. I give it now to my children and grandchildren, and to yours, so they will always know what it was like in America when people were free.

–Sarah Palin (from the introduction to her forthcoming book America By Heart)

Delusional and dangerous.

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Lafayette and Bond Street — © Brian Rose

The New Museum — © Brian Rose

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Song lyrics by Leonard Cohen

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Somewhere on the #6 line — © Brian Rose

Until it’s safe to have a tea party again–I’m drinking coffee.

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Photograph by Ansel Adams

By now you have probably heard about the controversy surrounding a bunch of negatives of Yosemite National park attributed to Ansel Adams. Rick Norsigian from California bought them at a garage sale for $45 and now a dealer is selling them for $200 million. Now there’s more.

From the New York Times:

Then an 87-year-old woman surfaced to say that she had three prints that looked a lot like Mr. Norsigian’s images — one was hanging in her bathroom — and that they had been shot, she said, not by Adams, but by Earl Brooks, her uncle, who was a little-known photographer.

Now Melinda Pillsbury-Foster says her grandfather Arthur C. Pillsbury, a well-known photographer of the period, should be added to the list of possible creators of the images of Yosemite park and the Northern California coast that Mr. Norsigian bought a decade ago.

It seems they all photographed the same subjects with view cameras around the same period of time–Adams, of course, being the more famous by far. As with the story of the newly uncovered Jackson Pollocks–or forgeries–the interest is all about money and the potential undermining of a brand jealously guarded by dealers and estates. None of this has anything to do with the art itself.

Yosemite Valley by Ansel Adams

Which is where I will get myself in trouble with some folks. I’m sorry, but some of us long ago became photographers because, among a few other more positive reasons, we hated Ansel Adams’ photographs and the whole heroic landscape aesthetic. I am well aware that Adams did a lot to put photography on the map, and that his pictures were important to the creation of the National Park system. But there was never a more stultifying influence on photography than Adams and his zone system, and the attendant cult-like worship of the silver print. Moreover, his depiction of America as a land of untrammeled beauty was always a lie–even before we realized how rapidly our environment was being despoiled.

Yosemite Valley by Carleton Watkins

Before there was Adams, photographers like William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins revealed the majestic scope of the American west to the public. Their images, while meticulously and artfully composed, were as much utilitarian as aesthetic. In contrast, Adams’ images–especially printed in almost surreal high dynamic range–are bombastic, theatrical.

Adams is popular because his work offers escape rather than engagement. His self-consciously composed images of a pristine American landscape were nostalgic and retrograde the second they were taken, and in today’s political climate of global warming deniers and “drill baby drill” extremists, Adams’ imagery supports, however unintended, an anodyne version of American ideals.

It seemed that way to me in 1970 when as a teenager I first started taking pictures–well before the “new topographics” rejiggered our way of seeing the landscape–and nothing since has changed my opinion.

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West 4th Street subway station — © Brian Rose

I came across a photo of mine in the West 4th Street  subway station–part of a large installation called “Made in New York,” which features the work of New York City based architects. It’s the image on the top row, second from left, of the Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College by TEK Architects.

Here’s an article about the project. And another.

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I went to PS1 in Long Island City to the New York Art Book Fair, an immense bazaar of independent publishers and self publishers. It was overwhelming. Thousands of books and a crowd exuding off-the-charts coolness. I felt I was in some parallel universe, a self-contained world of hyper-awareness and solipsism. Lots of great stuff I’m sure, but it all began to diminish before me, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, smaller and smaller and smaller.

So, I did what I always do when confronted with such situations–I took pictures. First a security guard leaning against a glass wall. Then out the window, the Citibank tower aglow. Then in the courtyard, a concrete wall and rosy sky. Through the museum entrance and into the street I followed the last shards of sunlight bursting in a kaleidoscope of graffiti painted walls, I walked home toward the G train past a contructivist mashup of shapes and letters.

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

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A photographic impromptu done while documenting the Louis Kahn bath house and day camp pavilions. The series starts with a view of the pavilions and then takes in the grove of trees, sheds, and various objects that dot this nondescript, but oddly compelling landscape.

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

© Brian Rose

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Fall little league in J.J. Walker Park — © Brian Rose

The liberal marxist San Franciso Giants beat the right wing brownshirt Texas Rangers last night in the World Series. Such is the state of our politics on this election day. Somehow, I think we are all going to come out of this election as losers.

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