Vanishing New York Backup

The man who jumped to his death from the 16th floor of his Tribeca apartment building on Friday night has been identified as photographer Robert Herman . He left a note that read, "How do you enjoy life?" Since the 1970s, Robert was one of New York's consummate street photographers, capturing the day-to-day life of the sidewalks with his camera and, most recently, with his iPhone. I met him once or twice, we had a similar love for the city, and he was always lovely and kind. He will be missed, along with all the photographs he will never get to take. What follows is an interview I did with him here in 2013, on the publication of his beautiful book The New Yorkers , a vivid collection of his work from 1978 - 2005. all photos by Robert Herman How would you say the city of today compares visually to the city you captured in your book? The city I photographed in the early 80’s is almost gone. Back then, it was a city of small businesses and storefronts. Where ...

Michael Seidenberg, the proprietor of the great Brazenhead Books , has passed away. According to Facebook updates, he was in recovery from a heart attack and a bypass operation. Family, friends, and fans are sharing memories on Michael's Facebook page . Their words say more than I can about a man that many remember as a one-of-a-kind New Yorker. Brazenhead was a "secret" bookshop housed in an undisclosed rent-stabilized Upper East Side apartment, complete with a twice-weekly salon, open to all who could find it. I was fortunate to visit once before it closed in 2015 . It was a truly magical place.

If you enjoy New York street photography and the unique character of this city, there's an Instagram page you should check out. New York from Behind is the creation of Bryn and Justin. I asked them a few questions about their project. What is New York From Behind? New York from Behind is a concept we created just by being citizens of this city. New Yorkers have a lot to offer visually and so often the most interesting thing is the person right in front of you. Usually the front of someone’s outfit is what’s most interesting. We notice every day that the reverse is not true. Since so much of fashion is forward focused, it sometimes proves hard for us to find interesting content. So the fun for us is to catch people who do something different and make their canvas their backs as well as their fronts. all photos via New York from Behind How'd you get started? We’re two good friends who first got started by taking pictures around the city and sharing them with our frie...

You may have seen them popping up on high-rent blight around town. Monopoly cards pasted to the windows and walls of shuttered shops. They list outrageous rents and come with a Jane Jacobs quote. They're the creation of an artist called Symbol. I asked Symbol to explain the project and what inspired him to do it. He told me: "Everywhere I walked in Manhattan there were empty storefronts, and it seemed like one big game between landlords and tenants. All these landlords waiting for a pharmacy or bank to sign a 10-year lease. Is there a better analogy for that then the game of Monopoly? Seems like no one really wins at Monopoly but everyone just tires out. All the little stores just seemed to disappear. There were no replacements and Manhattan lost its juice. Bleecker went from high rent/Sex and the City famous to an empty side street. The signs on Lexington are Amazon-colored orange. The online shopping has only added to the problem and added to my tipping point. Yea...

On a warm spring afternoon I meet John Freeman Gill on the Lower East Side for a little gargoyle hunting. Gill is the author of The Gargoyle Hunters , a novel set in 1970s New York City about a boy and his father who rescue ornamental stonework from tenements and other old buildings under demolition. For the father, it's a way to preserve a vanishing city. "The book is completely about the evolving streetscape of New York," says Gill. "The city is constantly destroying itself. Regenerating. It's always been a city in a hurry." Gill's inspiration for the book was a man named Ivan Karp, a self-taught gargoyle hunter who put together a team in the 1950s and led "clandestine raids on demolition sites." It was the time of Urban Renewal when countless tenements were destroyed, taking their decorations with them. Karp saved some 1,500 sculptures and eventually got the Brooklyn Museum to take them in. Since the days of Urban Renewal, housin...

On a warm spring day outside the Cafetal Social Club at 285 Mott Street you might find the filmmaker Paul Stone and his adopted family, including neighborhood guys like Vinny Vella, aka "the Mayor of Elizabeth Street," and Dominick Ferraro. For over 60 years the Cafetal was a social club. It's been a home-style Italian restaurant for 6 years. The guys hang out on the sidewalk to drink coffee, shoot the breeze, and reminisce about life in old Little Italy, childhoods spent sleeping on fire escapes and showering in fire hydrants with bricks of Ivory soap. Stone, a half-Italian, half-Irish native of Brooklyn, moved to Elizabeth Street in 1985. He lived in Martin Scorsese's building, played in punk bands, and made movies. In Mulberry: A Gentrification Story , he shows how the neighborhood changed in just a few short years. "A few years ago," he says, "it went from slow gentrification to hyper-gentrification. The dial got turned way up. It was a co...

Filmmaker Dustin Cohen has made a poignant short film about the dying soul of New York with one of the last of the original East Village bohemians. He writes: "I met Phillip Giambri at Grassroots Tavern (R.I.P.) on St. Mark's Place during the summer of 2016 after hearing him perform at an open mic in the East Village. He drank me under the table that afternoon, but not before we agreed to collaborate and bring his poem 'The Boho's Lament' to life." Giambri was a Grassroots regular. He was written up in the Times a couple of years ago as "the Ancient Mariner, being a Navy veteran and as relentless a storyteller as Coleridge’s salty narrator." As Cohen notes on the film's Vimeo page, Giambri "has been writing and performing in New York City's East Village since 1968," and you can find him "sipping cheap drinks and waxing philosophical at the some of the last remaining real East Village dive bars like Coal Yard, Doc Ho...

Banksy is back in town. He unveiled a mural on the Houston Street wall today, urging the liberation of Turkish artist Zehra Dogan. A Banksy rat appeared on a clock at 14th and 6th Avenue, atop the old Greenwich Savings Bank that will soon be torn down for luxury condos. photo via Banksy Now Instagrammers are finding more possible Banksy easter eggs around town, including one somewhere in East Harlem: And another at Avenue I and Coney Island Ave -- both with a similar message for the capitalist class:

The following is from photographer Michael Berman: ’99 Snapshots is a documentary project about people I met and photographed in 1999. I met them on sidewalks and in places of business in each of Manhattan’s many neighborhoods. I am now re-photographing and interviewing as many of the 300+ original people as I can find, seeking details about who they were in ’99, who they are now, and their thoughts on multiple topics including New York but also big ones like life and the passage of time. Because I encountered the people in 1999 randomly, the group as a whole reflects demographic diversity. I aim to turn this into a book and a documentary film. Marian and Lindsay, Harlem I’m able to find many people on my own, using social media and the phone book (I have their 1999 names). But some people I can’t find, so I post “ISOs” to the project’s Instagram feed , with hopes that people might help out. Sometimes I find out that a person has died. If possible, I want to include them anywa...

Feeling apocalyptic these days? Go see "Empire," the Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber show at Clampart Gallery on West 29th St. Photographs of post-apoc miniatures of the city present "a world transformed by climate uncertainty and a shifting social order as it stumbles towards a new kind of frontier." It's oddly relieving to see it all fallen apart. You'll also find a few of Nix's miniature sculptures on display, including a trio of abandoned hot dog carts and a scene of sidewalk newspaper boxes complete with rats and Chinese take-out containers. The headline? GLOOM, DESPAIR, AGONY, ENNUI The show is up until January 27 and there's an artist talk on Saturday, January 13, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Rachel Shuman is the director of the film One October , a time capsule of New York in 2008, "when gentrification is rapidly displacing the working and middle classes, Wall Street is plummeting, and Senator Obama is making his first presidential bid." Along the way, radio host Clay Pigeon talks with everyday New Yorkers to "poignantly reveal urbanist Jane Jacobs’s idea of the 'ballet of the good city sidewalk.'" One October will be screening on November 8, complete with a live score and discussion with the director, at the Rubin Museum. Buy tickets here . I asked Shuman a few questions: JM: You ended up with a film in which many people speak about the changes of the city, about gentrification and "mallification." Did you know you would get that? Was that the intention or an accident of sorts? RS: The film was inspired by Chris Marker’s film "Le Joli Mai," which is portrait of his native Paris in the month of May 1962, a moment wh...

Author and musician Josh Alan Friedman was working for Screw magazine, covering the Times Square beat through the late 1970s and early 80s, when he wrote the cult classic Tales of Times Square . Recently, he dug up the tapes he made from that time--interviews with the denizens of the old Deuce--and turned them into a podcast. Tales of Times Square: The Tapes takes you back in time through the voices of "strippers, old fighters, burly-Q men, peep show girls, hustlers, cops," and one man who ran the penny arcade at 42nd and 8th since 1939. I asked Josh a few questions. All photos via Josh Alan Friedman's blackcracker You've had these tapes for decades. What inspired you to digitize and turn them into a podcast now? Two years ago people started asking if I was involved with The Deuce going through on HBO. So I offered to contribute but they wouldn’t take our calls. My wife, Peggy, said, "What about all those cassettes you recorded back in Times Square?...

Next Tuesday, October 24 at 6:30pm, the editors of the book Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park will explore the after-effects of the popular luxury park, looking at gentrification along with causes and consequences of the “High Line Effect.” ( See more description and info here .) I asked co-editor Brian Rosa some questions: What motivated you to "deconstruct" the High Line? When the High Line first opened, and for quite awhile, it felt forbidden to critique it in any way. Why this book now? How has the possibility of deconstructing the High Line opened up over time? The genesis for this project was when Christoph Lindner and I first met at an authors’ meeting for a book he was editing, called Global Garbage, in June of 2014. We were wondering out loud why the reception of the High Line had been almost unanimously celebratory. Your op-ed in the New York Times from 2012 , along with a few articles here and there, wa...

This summer, Columbia University Press published Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City by Daniel Kane. I asked Daniel a few questions about his book. Q: You make the point throughout the book that poetry in the 1950s and 60s, specifically New York School and Beat poetry, was far more transgressive than rock and roll of that time. How so? A: Well, poets could write things like "fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy" as Allen Ginsberg did in his poem "Howl," or publish a magazine entitled "Fuck You: a magazine of the arts," as Ed Sanders did, and kind of get away with it. Sure, these poets faced hassles with the law--Ginsberg's publishers were charged with obscenity, as was Sanders later on, but these charges were later dismissed. These poets set the stage for the literary freedoms we've enjoyed since. Pop music at the time simply didn't have that kind of radical ambition or sense of possib...