Grand Ferry Park, the Williamsburg BridgeTook a long walk through Williamsburg the other day. It’s a neighborhood that, some years ago, supplanted the Lower East Side as a haven for creative newcomers to New York. Depending on your perspective, it is either already over, or it is just coming into its own. In any case, […]

Lafayette and Houston Streets Random New York street scene.

On the Lower East Side along Houston Street there are numerous buildings going up. One is a real monster, designed by the ubiquitous Costas Kondylis, towering above Katz’s Deli. This is your basic bland Manhattan high rise, the kind of building occupied by people you never meet, planted in a neighborhood where funky and chic […]

New photographs of the Lower East Side. I continue to work on this never-ending project, still looking for a venue for showing this–I think–extraordinary encapsulation of New York history. It is important for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Lower East Side is America’s quintessential immigrant neighborhood, a portal […]

Bond Street In my comings and goings to and from my apartment/office on the east side, I often walk through Noho, the relatively small area of loft buildings hemmed in by the East Village, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy (Nolita). For years, the neighborhood was dotted with small, odd, seemingly temporary structures, auto shops, gas […]

Essex and Stanton Streets on the Lower East Side Spring finally blooms in New York.

Lafayette Street Brendan movin’ and groovin’ on the street.

Bayonne, New Jersey Without comment.

InfoBox and Berlin Wall, 1996 (4×5 film) In the previous post I compared Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and ground zero (WTC) in New York. Both are historically sensitive places in which rebuilding symbolizes attempts at reclaiming loss. Both entail large commercial development, and both include memorials, either at the heart of the effort as in […]

Wall fragments at Potsdamer Platz, 1990 (4×5 film) As I wrote in an earlier post, ground zero (the World Trade Center site) reminds me of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin during the great wave of construction that occurred in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the circumstances leading to the two rebuilding […]

South Street, Fulton Fish Market, mid-1980s (4×5 transparency) Going through my archive the other day, I came across this image of the former Fulton Fish Market on South Street in Lower Manhattan. The market was moved for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, was the requirement that it be in a refrigerated, […]

Brendan at the Museum of Modern Art Went to MoMA yesterday with inlaws from Holland. Brendan, son, announced as we entered the museum that he didn’t like art, and then proceeded to go from painting to painting talking up a storm about the colors, lines, images, commenting about one Paul Klee that it appeared that […]

East 13th Street and Avenue B (4×5 film)Spring is slowly arriving in New York. But on the Lower East Side spring blooms all year, at least at the community garden at East 13th and Avenue B.

West Street opposite the meatpacking district Yesterday, I walked again with my view camera up to Chelsea to photograph the IAC building, the first Frank Gehry building completed in New York. It’s fun for me to do this kind of thing when there’s no client breathing down my neck, and I can take things as […]

Apartment I woke this morning, still lying in bed I called to my son Brendan to bring my camera, and took this picture.

The High Line under construction I walked up to Chelsea by way of the Meatpacking District (Gansevoort Market), the formerly gritty meat market inhabited by bloody-aproned butchers and meat cutters as well as transvestite prostitutes. The area is now the epicenter of New York cool. The beautiful people wobble about on the cobblestones, and edge […]

Hudson Street, Brendan and Renée Spring hits New York. Brunch with my wife and son. Planning to get out with the view camera over the next few days.

On Sunday I fetched the paper as usual, turned to the Metro section as usual, and was surprised to see a photograph of James Presson, the 16 year-old son of good friends of mine, along with two other students from Wilton High School who have created a play about Iraq told primarily through the voices […]