Out and About in the East Village

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

By James Maher

Name: Jerry
Occupation: Display Artist and Producer
Location: 12th and 2nd
Time: 5:45 on Monday, Oct. 28

I’ve lived around here for more than 50 years. I came downtown when I was about 18 and I’m now 85. I grew up in the Bronx, escaped from the Bronx, and started music and then art and I worked my way down here.

It was a creative area when I moved downtown and rents were incredibly low. My first place, I lived in a 4-room apartment for $28 a month in the West Village. Then I lived over between Avenue B and C and it was like $18 a month. We fixed the apartment up. We tore the walls down and stripped them and finished the floors and when I left they were getting about $2,000 a month.

When I moved here, it was a neighborhood with a lot of ethnic groups clinging together. There were a lot of Polish people, Jewish, Italian. Lanza’s was where the Mafia used to meet. That was fabulous. At one point there was always a big limo parked outside and someone would be polishing it and it would be one of the dons inside eating. It wouldn’t be anybody else in there but a couple of tables being used. They had their meetings in there.

I met my wife in the neighborhood. I was an artist, designer, and sculptor and she did the same stuff. I had just quit a job that I had for a long time as a display director for Barnes and Nobles. I designed the stores and the interiors. My wife had a display studio on 2nd Avenue and she lived on 2nd Avenue and a mutual friend of ours said that she was in trouble and needed help with her business.

So I came down, we met, and that was it. It changed my life around. We started working and living together 24 hours a day. It was Christmas time so we had all these projects. Christmas time in the display business, you work your ass off. You work 24 hours a day. We worked and lived together for 50 years. She just died last year.

We did displays all over the city, but in the recession of 1973, our business collapsed because we weren’t a union shop. So I went out and started working for other people and corporations. I started producing displays. Not just one at a time, but thousands. When I started I was designing one thing at a time — I designed it, I built it, and I installed it. By the end of my career I was producing thousands of displays that went all over the world. Anything would go as long as you had an idea that would make it happen and make it sell.

Computers changed the world. That’s when everything started to be produced out of the country. All the parts were made in China and Taiwan. I would have to go there to produce the displays. That was an experience. Especially when they fucked up and you had to make them do it right and not lose face. It was a whole psychological thing where you had to go in and tell somebody they screwed up. You couldn’t make them lose respect. You just had to allow them to find a way to correct it, while you suggested ways for them to do it.

I’ve seen things evolve and I was there through the steps as they evolved. Machines started doing what I used to do by hand. I learned all of these pieces and machines that did the individual aspects of where we are now. The technology changed but the concepts and ideas never changed.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.