  | East 4th Street | | | When I first approached the Lower East Side with Ed Fausty, I had the sense of the neighborhood as a rather separate part of Manhattan located off the main avenues in the shadow of Wall Street's towers. Today, I feel that it is more integrated into the city as a whole.
Barriers have come down over the past couple of decades. Some of that can be attributed to gentrification, but compared with surrounding areas the Lower East Side is still a gritty, economically precarious, place. While newcomers may find the area almost unaffordable, thousands continue to live in low income projects and in rent controlled tenement apartments.
There are other less easily defined factors at work, and locating those unknown qualities, is at the heart of why I am photographing the neighborhood anew. The horrific destruction of the nearby World Trade Center five years ago seemed to stop time on the Lower East Side—and throughout the city. But it strikes me now, as I continue to photograph the neighborhood, that time and the pace of change has accelerated since then, and that the future is rushing in to a place known more for the slow resonance of its history. | |
