New York/The Bowery

The weather was beautiful today in New York. Cool, but crisp and comfortable. I worked on an assignment in the early morning light, and in the late afternoon walked up the Bowery north of Houston Street doing several photographs with the view camera around 3rd and 4th Streets.


East 4th Street and the Bowery (digital)

There's a lot of construction in this area–Cooper Union's new building, a hotel, and an apartment tower rising above a row of mostly 19th century buildings on the Bowery. The hotel is by Carlos Zapata, best known for Soldier Field in Chicago, a controversial architectural insertion into a historic stadium structure. Here the white accented glass reminds people of the Frank Gehry IAC building on the west side. Over there, the billowy Gehry building sails confidently along among older warehouses and factories. Here, the first impression is of an overly shrill, snooty, tower giving the cold shoulder to the humble tenement surrounding. But I am cautious about rushing to judgment on unfinished buildings. Only when it and the adjacent Thom Mayne (Cooper Union) building are complete will it be possible to assess the effect on the neighborhood–and on each other.


East 4th Street and the Bowery (digital)

This is where my life in New York began–Cooper Square and the block of East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue. Looking at these pictures, it seems an unfamiliar world, despite the fact that most of the older buildings remain.

New York/Bowery

The Bowery

Without comment.

New York/LES

East 2nd Street (4x5 film)

A spring picture--from a year ago, actually--but one that I've just gotten around to scanning. It shows the Bowery Hotel under construction, and a couple of pre-Civil War structures that survived the wave of tenement buildings that replaced most of the townhouses in the area. This picture was taken on East 2nd Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue.

New York/Madison Square Park

Brendan holding order buzzer at the Shake Shack

Today was sunny and warm--the first really warm day of Spring. Brendan and I hit the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park beneath the Met Life clock and a stone's throw from the Flatiron Building. The line was 15 minutes, but was twice as long when we left. A bevy of nuns in full habit sat nearby, probably in town for the Pope's visit.


Flat Iron print on W25th Street

New York/ABC

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

I let my 9 year old son Brendan stay up and watch the ABC News Democratic debate because he has become interested in the campaign and wants to feel a part of what is going on. He is broadly familiar with the big issues like the war in Iraq, global warming, poverty, etc. After 30 minutes of flag pins, guns and religion, sniper fire, names like Wright, Ayers, and Farrakhan, my son asked, "Dad what are they talking about?" "Why are they talking about hunting?"

Things did not get better, so I shut off the TV and sent my son to bed. What had been meant as an exposure to the democratic process, however imperfect, turned into an insulting display of big media arrogance and stupidity. Although it appeared to me to be a hatchet job on Obama (I admit to being biased), I felt it made a mockery of both candidates, the election process, and democracy as a whole. I do not think that ABC should get away with this unpunished. And Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, the moderator and questioner, should be hounded into early retirement.

New York/Flushing, Queens

Flushing, Queens

One of the reasons for visiting Flushing was to do a photograph for an article being written by my wife for a Dutch magazine on the sub-prime mortgage issue. She is an urban planner, currently working on the staff of Community Board 4 (Chelsea and the west side of Midtown). Most of the sub-prime-related foreclosures have been in the so-called outer Boroughs, Queens being one of the hardest hit. It's definitely a "tale of two cities" (please forgive the cliché) with Manhattan and the more prosperous neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens virtually untouched by the mortgage crisis while lower income, mostly black and hispanic, neighborhoods suffer.


Flushing, Queens

I took the 7 train out to Main Street Flushing, which has become a largely Asian area, something that is immediately visible to all. I walked through some surrounding residential neighborhoods where two and three story row houses are making way for tall apartment blocks, often in jarring fashion. It's clearly evidence of a hot real estate market, but whether the recent mortgage mess is slowing things down, I don't know. In any case, I was pleased to get this somewhat enigmatic image of empty row houses surrounded by tall wooden fencing and apartment high rises under construction in the background.


Grand Central Terminal

Back in Manhattan.

New York/Flushing, Queens

The 7 train on the way to Flushing, Queens


Shea Stadium (left) and Citi Field (right)

I took the 7 train out to Flushing to scout a location for later photography. Along the way, I stopped at Shea Stadium where a new Mets stadium, Citi Field, is under construction. For a short period of time we have two stadiums next to one another. The modern looking stadium is older, and the old timey stadium is newer. I like some of the retro ballparks in other cities that relate to the surrounding urban fabric. Here in Flushing, the immediate context includes a potholed street of auto body shops and junkyards that looks like Baghdad outside the Green Zone, neighborhoods of monotonous row houses, and to the south, Flushing Meadows Park, the former grounds of the back-to-the-future 1964/65 World's Fair. So, given the choice, the stadium designers went with downtown Baltimore a la Camden Yards. That said, however, I think it will be a better ballpark for enjoying a game than the current Shea Stadium. Unlike Shea, it will be a dedicated baseball venue.


Gotham Plaza, Flushing Meadows Park


Robert Moses by Andy Warhol

There are a few structures leftover from the World's Fair, the most notable being the Unisphere and the embarrassing ruins of the New York State pavilion. As one descends from the subway platform into the park you can still see some of the fair structures and mosaics that were, apparently, done in 1998. One of them is a sardonic smiling Robert Moses--based on an image by Andy Warhol. Moses, of course, was the infamous master builder of New York throughout much of the 20th century who was also responsible for the World's Fair.

New York/Shorpy

I am hooked on a photo blog called Shorpy in which members post photographs from the 19th and first part of the 20th century. Some of the images are are from FSA photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Jack Delano. There are over 200 Lewis Hine images on Shorpy, mostly of children working in factories and mines. Shorpy was Shorpy Higginbotham, a young boy photographed by Hine who was employed in a coal mine in Alabama. He's the mascot, if you will, of the blog.


The Bowery at Houston Street, 1910, George Grantham Bain Collection

Here's a recent post from Shorpy of the Bowery in 1910 just around the corner from my office/apartment on Stanton Street. The photographer, apparently, is unknown. It's a stunning view of the scene along the Bowery just about 100 years ago. Elevated railroads ran up and down Third Avenue and the Bowery, smoke belching--the noise, undoubtedly, deafening.


The Bowery at Houston Street, 2006 (4x5 film)

The photograph above was taken just to the left of the photographer's more elevated vantage point in the historic image. Houston Street, originally a narrow street, is now a roaring river of crosstown traffic separating the neighborhoods above and below. Soho, short for south of Houston, and Noho, north of Houston, exist as named places because of their relation to this thoroughfare. The street was first widened, I believe, when subway tunnels were built underneath using cut and cover construction, which required demolishing a swath of buildings across Manhattan. The F, D, and B trains run beneath Houston. As a result, there are many blank walls along the street where buildings previously stood.

The restaurant supply building to the left in my photograph is also in the historic photo above.


The Bowery between Stanton and Houston, 2007 (4x5 film)

In the picture above, made with a view camera, the two old buildings at left can be seen in the far right of the historic image. The new apartment building in the rear occupies the space taken by the next five small buildings. Although the remaining stretch of 19th and early 20th century buildings above is probably safe from immediate demolition, much of the historic Bowery is up for grabs.

New York/Williamsburg

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Without comment.

New York/East Berlin 1987

East Berlin 1987 (4x5 film)

Continuing with photographs I made on several walks through Berlin Mitte before the Wall came down. The most obvious thing one noticed when crossing the border to East Berlin was the profound devastation still visible from World War II 42 years after the fact. The DDR had taken on a number of big urban renewal projects, especially along Frankfurter Allee, which was temporarily called Stalin Allee. Much of Mitte, however, the center of the city closest to the Wall, was largely untouched.

At the time of my photographs the East Germans were turning their attention to Mitte, and considerable demolition and rebuilding was underway. Fortunately, the fall of communism put a stop to the shoddy construction filling the gaps left by the war or by the wrecking ball.


East Berlin 1987 (4x5 film)

Walking around East Berlin with the view camera I felt more conspicuous than usual–I doubt that there were any view cameras in use in the DDR in those days–and I was given a wide berth by nearly everyone. One man, however, in longish hair and slightly unkempt appearance came up to me and asked what I was up to. I attempted to explain in my limited German that I was making urban landscape photographs.

He asked whether I was interested in social/political issues as a photographer, and I denied having any particular ax to grind along those lines. He then suggested that photographing urban landscapes could, in fact, encompass all those issues, even as the images stylistically presumed to remain neutral. I felt utterly unmasked at that point, not simply in what I was doing in East Berlin, but what I was doing in general as a photographer.