New York/Hampton Roads

I traveled with my family to Virginia for the Thanksgiving holiday to visit with my parents--separately--as has been necessary since their divorce a long time ago. Extended sit downs with one parent or the other are to be avoided since they usually, unfortunately, turn painful. My mother reminisces about my growing up, remembering things as a parallel universe that barely jibes with my own recollections. My father, who is elderly but not senile, cannot or chooses not to remember anything at all.


The Monitor Center, The Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia

So, excursions out into the real world are necessary, especially since we are traveling with a nine year old who is not content to sit around the living room. This time we drove down the peninsula (between the James and York rivers) to the Mariner's Museum in Newport News. I'd only been there once as a child and knew that much had changed in the last few years, most notably the building of the Monitor Center, a new wing of the museum to house the recently recovered turret of the ironclad Civil War ship the Monitor.

The Monitor Center is actually a vast addition to the original museum, perhaps doubling its size, and it tells the story of the famous battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac (dubbed the Virginia by the Confederates). The center includes interior and exterior mock-ups of both ships as well as the actual rotating gun turret of the original ship salvaged from beneath the sea off the Outer Banks of North Carolina.


Monitor memorial, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Earlier this summer I photographed the Monitor memorial in McGolrick Park in Greenpoint as part of a documentation of Civil War monuments in Brooklyn. Standing before the memorial for the first time I wondered why this rather odd statue was placed here. On it were the words:

ERECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE
STATE OF NEW YORK
TO COMMEMORATE THE BATTLE OF THE
MONTOR AND MERRIMAC
MARCH 9TH 1862
AND IN MEMORY OF THE MEN OF THE MONITOR
AND ITS DESIGNER JOHN ERICSSON

Later, I found out that Ericsson, a Swede who had come to New York via a successful engineering career in London, was the designer of the Monitor and supervised its construction and launching into the East River from a shipyard in Greenpoint. None of this information is provided by the inscription beneath the statue of a stylized heroic figure pulling on a diminutive ship's hawser. The nude figure carries no reference to a period of time, and the tiny ship bears no resemblance to the Monitor. And McGolrick Park, while in Greenpoint, is not particularly close the place where the Monitor was assembled and launched.

So it goes with a majority of memorials that inhabit, often invisibly, the streets and parks we pass through daily. The event, person, or locale depicted has, with the passing of time, become disconnected from our own era. These, often, lavish tours de force of sculpture serve more as urban furniture than as carriers of memory or history.


The Monitor's turret

In Hampton Roads, in the heart of Navy country, the battle between the Monitor and Merrimac is central to the region's symbology and meaning. The Monitor's turret lies in repose beneath a watery solution (eventually to be exhibited dry) like Lenin embalmed in his tomb in Red Square. The accompanying exhibition is exhaustive in detail, almost fetishistic in its focus on this one story and object.

In New York, however, where the Monitor was built, there are two monuments offering cryptic references to the ship and the battle. One is the strange sculpture in Greenpoint, the other is a statue of Ericsson in Battery Park in Manhattan, which I have undoubtedly walked by, but have so recollection of ever seeing.

New York/LES

Delancey Street (4x5 film)

Another Lower East Side photograph. Garishly photogenic Delancey Street between Suffolk and Clinton. This one is the 4x5 version seen in an earlier post.

New York/LES

Clinton Street

It's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

- Leonard Cohen (Famous Blue Raincoat)


Houston Street

a man lay dead on Houston street
he'd been dead for many days
and they all walked by with nervous feet
as though he was just drunk or dazed

after all there was nothing they could do
like donate time or money
but I'm going on back to Houston
where they don't talk so funny

- Jack Hardy (Houston Street)

New York/The Bowery

The Bowery and Houston Street

There will be a short period of history in which many of the cabs in New York were seen stickered with flowers. It's an art project involving children from schools and community groups who colored the decals. Here's the official website if you're curious.

Previously, such momentary cultural expressions might get photographed, but the specific circumstances of the thing would be lost along the way. In today's flourishing blogosphere, flowered taxis will not go undocumented.

New York/Bleecker Street

Leaves and flags on Bleecker Street

Without comment.

New York/First Color Photo

Richmond, Virginia, early '70s

I got my first camera when I was a teenager, a Nikkormat 35mm with a 50mm lens. I had bought it with my savings and hid it away for a year because my parents were not enthusiastic about my "hobby." I surreptitiously shot black and white film for a while and had some small glossies made. I was pretty good right off the bat. At some point I ran a roll of Kodachrome through the camera.

The photo above was from that roll. I was, perhaps, 16 or 17 years old. I remember that it was taken in Richmond, Virgina, which is an hour away from Williamsburg where I grew up. It's a fully realized image. I knew somehow what I was doing, maybe a mixture of luck and intuition. The photograph doesn't mean anything necessarily, though such lantern jockeys were common in those days, especially in black face, and I may have been thinking about the social significance of such things.

What I see is a vigorous composition of lines and colors incorporating a vernacular street object, an eyeless blank gaze, the raw earth of a construction site, a shovel slightly out of scale in the rear. For a number of years afterwards, I tried to make black and white pictures do what this color slide does. I did all right, of course, but I don't think any of my photographs were as good as this early one. It was only in 1976 when I began shooting color in a systematic way that I found–or re-found–my way.

New York/Glass Houses

Silodam apartment, Amsterdam
designed by MVRDV architects

When the glass Richard Meier towers on the Hudson in the West Village appeared a few years ago, they were heralded as a new phenomenon. At least in New York. Having lived much of the last 15 years in Europe–the last few behind double height windows overlooking Amsterdam–I was surprised to see the furor these new buildings elicited. I knew that New York (and the US in general) had slept through the 90s, architecturally speaking, but now in the 00s, things were changing. So, what was the fuss all about?


Richard Meier in the West Village

Last Sunday in the NY Times, the issue was further inflated, if not examined, in an article by Penelope Green:

In New York City, where the streetscape is being systematically remade by glassy towers like the W, which have been spreading like kudzu in the seven years since the first two terrarium-like Richard Meier buildings went up on the West Side Highway, the lives of the inhabitants are increasingly on exhibit, like the performance art wherein the artists “live” in a gallery for 24 hours and you get to watch them napping or brushing their teeth.

It’s not always a pretty picture.

She goes on to reference Curbed, the snarky real estate blog (that I'm addicted to), Hitchcock's Rear Window, and Sherry Turkle, a psycholgist at M.I.T., who proclaims life in a goldfish bowl "a turning point in form."

I think there are a number of social trends at work here, and pulling them apart tends to trivialize the matter as Curbed does cheerfully, and Turkle does more ominously:

These buildings, she suggested, tell a story of anxiety, not exhibitionism.


Eldridge Street, Lower East Side tenements

In my view, New York has historically been a city with a clear distinction between public and private spheres. The street was, and is, the grand theater of urban life. People here have always lived in small quarters, sometimes inhumanely crowded together as on the old Lower East Side. The street was the space where people interacted, shopped, and communicated, while the skyline provided the dramatic backdrop. The street grid functioned as an ordering structure for all the energy, commercial and creative, flowing in the city, and the continuous street wall guarded the mini domestic castles of apartment life.


Punch card conformity on the Upper East Side

Modernism called for transparency in architecture, and in New York, that aesthetic conflicted with the notion of protected private space. Corporations embraced the glass curtain wall for economic reasons and efficiency. But there was little to see behind those walls besides endless cubicles and generic corner offices. Ironically, the World Trade Center with its barred pinstripe fenestration demonstrated profoundly its structural weakness. Few developers, however, were willing to risk disturbing the status quo when it came to residential buildings.

After 9/11 something happened in this city that has only been tangentially addressed. Certain fundamentals changed in the way things work, for better or worse. Despite the horror of the event, the city reasserted itself and began moving forward. Crime, already down, continued to plummet. Population increased. People started having families in the city, a dramatic turnaround after decades of flight to the suburbs. And for many, the silly post modern buildings of the 80s and 90s suddenly looked out of date and irrelevant.


Hell's Kitchen tenements with 90s post modernism

There are those who bemoan the changes that have occurred. Some believe that the city has lost its soul from Disneyfied Times Square to the formerly dark neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. People reminisce endlessly about the ferment of art and music back in the late '70s when there were cheap apartments, empty streets, and danger lurking. In many ways they are right–more economically marginal activities have decamped to other parts of the city–but it does little good to pine for the past when there is a present being defined by new generations with different priorities and a different internal map of the city.

I have come to believe that in recent years there has been a noticeable shift in the relationship between public and private space in the city. September 11th stripped bare the illusion of security symbolized by the walls, honey-combed rooms, and claustrophobic elevators of our homes. Inside those walls we are all online now, as is pointed out in the Times article, and the definition of community has been redefined. It takes place in real places and virtual ones interchangeably. And as has always been the case, money is the engine of this most commercial of cities. Since 9/11 money has sloshed through the streets of this town like water sweeping away and through all our old haunts.


Blue Condo, conspicuous consumption on the Lower East Side
Bernard Tschumi, architect

The new New York is not about hunkering down behind walls. Modernism's (now ancient) promise of light, air, and transparency is upon us, finally. We all live in glass houses, at least in the virtual world, so we might as well live in them in the real as well. For some it represents a kind of exhibitionism–we have nothing to hide–and there is no shortage of voyeurs with telescopes and cell phone cameras at ready, not to mention the hydra-headed apparatus of homeland security. But for others it is a breath of fresh air–and light–in a place called home.

New York/Midtown

Midtown, somewhere in the 50s

Without comment.

New York/West Village

Brendan and Renée taking a hayride

Saturday was Fall Festival at Brendan's school--a seasonal fund raising event coming right after Halloween, which is an all day extravaganza at school followed by trick or treating and the Village Halloween parade. It's fun, but all a bit over the top for me.

As part of the festival, we took a hayride through the streets of the West Village. If you squint a bit, and pretend the cars aren't there, it could be 150 years ago.


Barrow Street

Meanwhile back in Washington:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Department of Homeland Security will investigate a Halloween costume party hosted by a top immigration official and attended by a man dressed in a striped prison outfit, dreadlocks and darkened skin make-up, a costume some say is offensive, the department's secretary said. Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and host of the fundraising party, was on a three-judge panel that originally praised the prisoner costume for "originality."

New York/LES

Take what may be called "the" typical tenement house district, the triangle or rather trapezium, bounded by Fourteenth Street, the Bowery and the East River. This district comprises the even numbered Assembly Districts from the Fourth to the Sixteenth, inclusive, and the population of it is just short of half a million, 480,626. It is thus in itself the second city in the State of New York.

It is perhaps the most crowded district in the world. Part of it certainly carry congestion to the utmost limits. The normal habitation is the "double decker" tenement, four families to the floor, five floors high, often six, sometimes, by dint of a high stoop and a basement for shops, seven. And this population in a large measure and particularly in hot weather lives on the sidewalks. There are squares where it is hard to make one's way, for the absolute pressure of the crowds of sitters and standers.

-New York Times, July 21, 1901




On Friday I did a three hour Lower East Side walk. Moving slowly, I covered a relatively small area, but took about a dozen photos with the view camera. The first spot I got to was of a vacant lot I photographed in 1980 with a mural of a baseball game on an adjacent wall. The painting had faded, but was still visible. A few days ago I noticed that the wall was in the process of being torn down. When I arrived yesterday, it was mostly gone, and a fence obscured the view, though I did a shot of it anyway.

Around the corner on Pitt Street, I photographed a large Catholic church and tenements next door. It was a crisp fall day, and the light was beautiful. I moved on down Pitt Street toward the Williamsburg Bridge and did a couple more photographs on the same side of the street.


Our Lady of Sorrows church, Pitt Street

The church, Our Lady of Sorrows, was apparently once called St. Aloysius and had a largely German congregation according to the 1901 New York Times column quoted above:

There is a remarkable church, remarkable for the spaciousness and gorgeousness of its interior in such a region, St. Aloysius in Pitt Street, attached to the Capuchin monastery at Pitt and Stanton. How many readers of this paper know that there is such an institution in New York as a monastery of barefooted Capuchin friars?

This church holds its services in German, and it is a curious testimony to the changing conditions of its neighborhood that the authorities report that its congregation has sadly fallen off of late years by reason of the migration of its parishioners.


Attorney Street

I turned the corner at Delancey Street and walked west, turning again into Attorney Street. I mad two photographs in the street including one with a graffitied wall by Andre Charles with his street logo "Brandon," a baby with a pacifier in its mouth. Charles' stuff is pretty good, and on his website he writes:

But through out the year's I was painting walls, doing night clubs, running with the lady's, which is all part of being a famous urban super star artist from the hood. I really didn't understand what I was really doing or what was going on around me. All I know is when I look at T.V., pictures in art books of other artist. I wanted to be famous just like them. So I went out to do what I've seen as a young entrepreneur black boy from the SOUTH BRONX running after my dreams.

He goes on to thank God for his gift, which, despite the modesty/bravado is significant. All the graffiti writers, including Charles, ramble on about Keith Haring, who I remember seeing at work in the subway, and Basquiat, the painter who spun out of control and died of a drug overdose in his studio, a block from where I lived at the time. A Basquiat website states:

Basquiat.com is a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), an artist who came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction.

Okay. I guess that sums up the 80s. Some of us missed out on the money, hype, excess and self-destruction, but at least we're still here making art.


Delancey Street

Back out on Delancey Street I did a photograph of the window of a fast food restaurant, and then planted my tripod in front of a row of shops that I've photographed before. Delancey is a ragged concourse of discount shops that cater to the Latino population of the neighborhood and beyond. It's long been a shopping destination. Million dollar apartments are now sprinkled in among the discounts and cheap chains, a dissonance nearly impossible to express in photographs except by means of crude juxtaposition, which I try to avoid.

As I began doing a series of pictures of the storefront of a clothing shop with a wonderful array of signage above, the owner/manager came out and we chatted about the changes in the neighborhood. He'd been around since the early 70s. He told me that the shuttered shop to the left and several others in the row are coming down to make way for another condo project. We agreed, however, that, whatever happens, there will always be people who need discount. As I fiddled with the view camera a crazy/drugged man veered in front of me. So, I snapped.

New York/Halloween

Mad Scientist on West 22nd Street.

Brendan joined the throngs of kids and parents to trick or treat in Chelsea. We tried catching a glimpse of the big Halloween parade, but couldn't get near it. Watched a bit of it on TV at home.