In 1980, I photographed the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with fellow photographer Ed Fausty, using a 4x5 view camera. It was the neighborhood’s darkest, but most creative moment. While buildings crumbled and burned, artists and musicians came to explore and express the edgy quality of the place. For more than two decades that work sat in my archive. A few years ago I began re-photographing the neighborhood, working alone this time. The result is a new book: Time and Space on the Lower East Side.
East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
When I first arrived in New York to attend Cooper Union, I found an apartment on East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue. East 4th was a world unto itself—an intensely political community galvanized by the city’s potentially destructive urban renewal plans—and home of the La Mama theater and other innovative arts groups.
I met my wife there, just to the left of where the photograph (above) was taken. And the block was home to Alex Harsley’s 4th Street Photo Gallery, which has been a gathering place for artists and photographers for decades. The picture means a lot to me personally, but it also epitomizes the basic structure of the Lower East Side, the wall of tenement facades and the distant vanishing point of the street formed by New York’s grid.
East 4th Street between Avenue B and C - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
Henry Street - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
For a dozen years I lived in Amsterdam, and I was there on 9/11 when catastrophe struck. I returned to New York a week later, to my studio on the Lower East Side, connecting with friends and considering how I might respond to events as a photographer. Not being a photojournalist, I knew that whatever I did would have entail a slower more distanced approach. So, eventually I came to the conclusion that I should re-photograph the Lower East Side. The old neighborhood of immigrants, the place I first made my stand in New York, would serve as a barometer of change and continuity.
Orchard/Delancey Street - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
Orchard/Delancey Street - 2010
© Brian Rose
When I began re-photographing the neighborhood, it was tempting to duplicate the vantage point of the 1980 pictures. But it seemed too easy and not always visually satisfying. Whatever compelled me to take the original photograph wasn’t present any more. The pair above, however, I set up very carefully, bringing a copy of the 1980 print with me in order to stand in just the right place. Here, before and after isn’t so much about a jarring juxtaposition, but about seeing the city and the street as an ongoing presence, the flow of time, and the flow of people moving through it.
Houston Street - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
Some of the people I know from the ‘80s become nostalgic about the New York of their youth when lower Manhattan was a big playground of creativity, punk rock bursting from storefronts, painters occupying gigantic lofts, set off by the city itself in it all its apocalyptic semi-abandoned glory. Even newcomers to the neighborhood search for remnants of a time that, in retrospect seems romantic, even heroic.
Delancey Street - 2010
© Brian Rose
But it must not be forgotten that the fires in abandoned buildings, the poverty and drugs, had real victims. The Lower East Side in 1980 was on the edge of annihilation. Huge housing projects built in the 50s and 60s had replaced the tenements along the East River and now whole sections of the neighborhood were burning down, unscrupulous landlords milking the buildings dry before their final fiery demise.
East 5th Street - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
East 5th Street - 2010
© Brian Rose
The Lower East Side once felt like a separate world to me, but it feels much more integrated into the overall ebb and flow of the city now. All of lower Manhattan has dramatically changed, not just the LES. There are so many more people here than before. So much more money. So much more commerce of every kind. The changes have been wrenching for many, the results not always happy. There have been tragic losses of historic buildings, not to mention the dislocation of people. But the Lower East Side has not been this dynamic since, perhaps, the early 20th century when immigration was at its peak.
Ludlow Street, Puerto Rican Independence mural - 1980
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
Houston Street, re-created Keith Haring mural - 2010
© Brian Rose
The Bowery - 2010
© Brian Rose
President Obama’s motorcade drove through the Lower East Side, and swept up the Bowery. It was a passing incident noted by some, not by others. A small crowd formed at the corner of Houston and Bowery awaiting the arrival of Obama.
I set up my view camera on the Bowery a quarter of a block from the corner in the midst of restaurant supply workers hauling stuff around on the sidewalk while some architects were discussing work for the interior of an art gallery, one of many popping up in the area. The motorcade approached, signaled by a few whoops of police cars, a hovering helicopter, some flashing red lights. The black cars and SUVs rounded the corner, and for a few seconds everyone turned, froze, and stared. Within seconds the event was over, the prosaic flow of work on the Bowery resumed. The most famous person in the world was a few blocks up the street, out of sight out of mind.
East 10th Street - 2010
© Brian Rose
Although the neighborhood remains densely built, the destruction of the 70s and 80s left numerous gaps in the urban fabric, many now filled by community gardens and playgrounds. In general, New York is a much greener place than it was 30 years ago.
Cooper Square - 2010
© Brian Rose
Sometimes it’s hard to believe how far things have come since I first photographed the area. Bleeding-edge architecture now crowds out early 19th century townhouses on the Bowery, and the neighborhood has become, for many, oppressively expensive. But the Lower East remains a vibrant place, full of life and complexity, as cultures collide, and the future comes rushing in to a place known more for the slow resonance of history.
Time and Space on the Lower East Side - 1980/2010
Available online and in select independent book shops.