The East Village of Nelson Sullivan

The following post was written by EV Grieve contributor Shawn Chittle:

Long before Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and cell phone cameras — in 1980s New York — there was Nelson Sullivan. He pointed a bulky 8mm video camera with a wide fisheye lens at himself and filmed everything. As the first video "lifecaster" he was years ahead of his time. Not a narcissist by my definition, but someone who wanted to document the culture that he clearly realized was something special. I have a bunch of his stuff. Sadly, he died in 1989 of a heart attack.

This clip below was just released yesterday — destined to become a classic as Avenue A, East 6th and Avenue B are captured in all their grimy glory. In this video, he tries to get a table at (a yellow painted) Sidewalk Cafe, but "all the freaks" have the tables. Instead he improvises and drops in on his friend who lives on East 6th Street and Avenue B. They all head back to find friends and an empty table at Sidewalk where the video fades out.

Waiting for a Table at an East Village Sidewalk cafe



Previously on YouTube. (Find more of Nelson's work on YouTube here.)

A Trip to Avenue A in NYC



You can read more about Nelson and his role documenting his surroundings during the 1980s here. He died of a heart attack on July 4, 1989.

Going Your Way

[John F. Conn]

2 4 Flinching recently compiled a slew of NYC subway photos from the late 1970s and early 1980s.... including....


[Bruce Davidson]


[John F. Conn]

[Via BoingBoing ... thanks to Mick for the link!]

An East Second Street now and then

Earlier today, I posted several photos from Brian Rose's new book on the Lower East Side from 1980 and today...

Thanks to EV Grieve reader AdamA for pointing out a pretty good Google Street View approximation of one of the photos...


East Second Street where it merges with Houston between Avenue C and Avenue D

And via Google... a Street View that is at least two years old... the corner of Houston and Avenue D has been razed. Still.



Previously on EV Grieve:
"A continuum of decay and rebirth" on the Lower East Side

"A continuum of decay and rebirth" on the Lower East Side

In 1980, Brian Rose, in collaboration with fellow Cooper Union graduate Ed Fausty, photographed the Lower East Side during what he called "its darkest, but most creative moment. While buildings crumbled and burned, artists and musicians came to explore and express the edgy quality of the place."

After the project was completed and exhibited in 1981, it remained unseen in Rose's archive. And Rose moved on, working on various projects while living in Amsterdam for 15 years.

Rose revisited the streets of the Lower East Side with his camera some three decades later. Rose has put together "Time and Space on the Lower East Side," a self-published book contrasting the LES in 1980 with today. However, as he notes in the book's description:

"From the outset it was clear that this would not be a simple before/after take on the neighborhood. While keeping an eye on the earlier photographs done in 1980, I wanted to rediscover the place with fresh eyes, with the perspective of time, change, and history. The result, still being added to, is a set of photographs that looks backward and forward, that posits the idea that places are not simply “then and now,” but exist in a continuum of decay and rebirth."

He told me that the project is still looking for a publisher and exhibition venue. In the meantime, the book is available for purchase on Blurb.

Rose shared a few of the 1980 images with me....



East Second Street where it merges with Houston between Avenue C and Avenue D



On East Fifth Street between C and D. Rose was standing near Fourth Street



On the Bowery looking north toward East Fifth Street — now JASA/Cooper Square Senior Housing and the Cooper Square Hotel



The Jefferson Theatre on 14th Street between Second Avenue and Third Avenue (now the Mystery Lot)


Details:

Brian Rose Photography

Preview and buy the book via Blurb.

A look back at Avenue A and Second Street

Well, we've had a lot of discussion this week about the future of Avenue A and Second Street where Graceland called home for 20-plus years... Many thanks to EV Grieve reader BaHa for this photo from the early 1980s... this is looking north on Avenue A at Second Street....



How about another upholstery shop here now instead of an Italian eatery, bank or 7-Eleven?

Mid-1980s East Village via Flickr

I came across the photography of Cactusbones on Flickr. She has plenty of LES/East Village urban landscape photos from her time here in the mid-1980s.

Her photos include:


Life Cafe



An abandoned lot on Seventh Street between Avenue B and Avenue C



Looking north on Avenue C at Seventh Street



And for grins, I tried to line up the same shot today



Thanks to Cactusbones for permission to post these photos. She has more here.

On the Bowery: "What the hell is this?"

As Eater noted on Monday, fancy sushi chain Koi is looking to nab a liquor license for a new joint .... at the site of the now-closed Salvation Army residence at 347 Bowery. Seems about right.



The Koi news prompted me to revisit a short story written by Jack Henry Abbott titled "On the Bowery." His piece was part of an anthology titled "Low Rent: A Decade of Prose and Photographs from the Portable Lower East Side" published in 1994.

After serving 19 years in prison, Abbott arrived in Manhattan at 3 a.m. on June 6, 1981. He stayed at the Salvation Army here at 347 Bowery. Here are a few snippets of his short story:

Sitting on the corner across the street there was a man wearing filthy jeans and a tee-shirt. He needed a shave. He was sitting on the curb with his feet in the gutter. There was a dirty handkerchief tied around his head. His long brown hair fell wildly about his shoulders.

He had a steel garbage can turned upside down between his legs. All its contents were in piles around him and he was beating the bottom of the garbage can with a pathetic vengenace. He was using his fists and the palms of his hands, alternately. I stared at him for awhile, then my gaze passed along and took in the immediate environment. Debris was everywhere in the street and sidewalks. Third Avenue traffic had not yet started. The streets were deserted.

Then I noticed a body laying stretched out on the sidewalk against a rundown building. And then another and another and another. The bodies of sleeping derelicts were scattered liberally around the sidewalks and on the stoops on buildings. It took my by surprise. My mind was blank. I finally thought: "What the hell is this?"

One morning someone came in half carrying a man in his late twenties. The man being helped was over six feet tall. He helped him sit on the cushion of the naugahyde couch I was sitting on in front of the fan. It was exceptionally hot that summer.

The man was filthy, his clothes were torn. His right pants leg was bursting at the seams. He had been lying in the gutter down the street for three days before someone decided to help him into the Salvation Army. From what they could get out of him, he had been wandering in the street one night and a car had struck him. He had crawled between two parked cars. His right leg was broken. It had been bleeding.

P.S.

You likely know what later happened to Abbott, who previously had received help from Norman Mailer to get "In the Belly of the Beast" published. Abbott's story has been told many times. Here's a piece from -- why not? -- Wikipedia: "On the morning of July 18 (1981), just six weeks after getting out of prison, Jack Abbott went to a small cafe called the Binibon in Manhattan. He clashed with 22-year-old Richard Adan, son-in-law of the restaurant's owner, over Adan's telling him the restroom was for staff only. The short-tempered Abbott stabbed Adan in the chest, killing him."

In an entry on the Bowery and LES, Brian Rose wrote the following:

I lived around the corner on East 4th Sreet at the time, and ate in Binibon the day of the murder. I was unaware that anything had happened. Nowadays one would expect to find the crime scene taped off, people milling about pointing and murmering, and, perhaps, the beginnings of an informal memorial of flowers. In those days, it was just another murder on the Lower East Side, though once the connection to Mailer was made, the story became national news.

For further reading:
Writer murders writer in the East Village (Ephemeral New York)

For more on the Salvation Army residence hall here, please read: No Salvation (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

The woman who "captured graffiti’s golden and assaultive years"

The Times has a feature on Martha Cooper, the photographer who captured the prolific NYC graffiti artists of the 1970s-1980s. As the paper notes, her 1984 book “Subway Art,” created with Henry Chalfant, a photographer and filmmaker, "captured graffiti’s golden and assaultive years."

The above photo from 1980 by Cooper at the East 180th Street subway platform in the Bronx.

Here comes the fun?

From Negev Rock City:

Too bad when I get to New York the city will be a bankrupt Gerald Ford-era dystopia.

THANKS MTA.

Actually, this means the Lower East Side and the E Village might even be fun again.

[Photo: © 2008 - Don Ventura]

As hard as they tried, the Times couldn't find anyone to say Yes

Hasn't this story been done already?....From the Times today: As Hard Times Loom, Will New York’s Streets Get Meaner?

Uh-oh!

If a shrinking economy, soaring jobless claims and a troubled financial sector are not angst-producing enough, the threat of increased crime is leading many conversations toward a nagging and persistent question: Will the bad old days of record numbers of murders and ubiquitous street muggings be far behind?

YES! RIGHT?

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, for his part, said he has heard this all before.

He said similar worries were being voiced as he took over in 2002 for a second stint as the city’s top police official: Things were headed in the wrong direction, the economy was devastated after Sept. 11, 2001, and there were predictions that crime would increase.

Instead, overall crime has dropped nearly 30 percent in the last seven years, he said, and in 2007 the lowest number of killings was recorded since the city started keeping what it considers reliable records, about four decades ago.

“There’s a lot of predictions that crime is going to go up as a result of the economic crisis,” Mr. Kelly said on Friday...

“The fact of the matter is that hasn’t happened,” Mr. Kelly said. “The fact is we’re down 14 percent, and we’re down in every category across the city.”

Hmm, well...I'm sure this story will be revisited in another month or so.

The bad old days of the 1980s are back (but maybe not what you're thinking)

From today's Wall Street Journal:

At law firm Bickel & Brewer, even the mailroom clerks wear suits and ties. Until recently, that might have been considered extreme. But now, power dressing is coming back in style, and the old-school law firm has a new relevance.

As law-firm layoffs mount, fear of unemployment appears to be speeding up the resurgence of power clothes, even among the youngest recruits. Legal interns have begun flouting business-casual dress codes and wearing suits instead, says Gretchen Neels, a Boston communications consultant who works with law firms and graduate schools. "In our economic times, you really want to have your game on. You can't be too formal," she says.

Power clothes are selling well at menswear retailer Paul Fredrick. Those white-collared, colored dress shirts that Gordon Gekko favored in the 1987 movie "Wall Street" have been big sellers in recent months, says Dean White, executive vice president of merchandise. So are yellow power ties, another 1980s dress-for-success accessory.

Whatever...I just hope those mobile phones come back in style...I still use mine. The looks I get!

The city's greatest generation?

The Village Voice unleashes its annual "best of NYC" issue this week. Check it out here. The issue features an essay from Tom Robbins titled "The Hidden History of the City's Greatest Era." He writes, in part:

The fact is that to live in New York in the late '70s to early '80s was to enjoy a cornucopia of inexpensive artistic and intellectual entertainments.

25 years of yuppies

Lots to do and see in New York's 40th anniversary issue.

For instance, here's Jay McInerney in an essay he wrote titled "Yuppies in Eden"....He says he first heard the term "yuppie" in 1983 while having breakfast at Veselka. A painter he knew muttered "fucking yuppies" after seeing an Upper East Side-looking couple in chinos.

Not long after my first actual sighting, I would see the earliest DIE YUPPIE SCUM graffiti around the neighborhood, an epithet that was soon vying in popularity with that LES perennial EAT THE RICH. The vituperative tone with which the Y-word was pronounced on East Fifth Street was in part a function of rapidly escalating real-estate prices in the East Village; after decades of relative stability that had made the area a bastion of Eastern European immigrants and young bohemians, though, it’s easy to forget at this distance that it was also a war zone where muggings and rapes weren’t considered news. The Hells Angels ruled East Third Street, and after dark you went east of Second Avenue strictly at your own risk. The cops didn’t go there. East Tenth beyond Avenue A was a narcotics supermarket where preteen runners scampered in and out of bombed-out tenements. In fact, great swatches of the city were dirty and crime-ridden. Even the West Village was pretty gritty by today’s standards, and Times Square was a scene of spectacular squalor. Check out Taxi Driver or The French Connection if you want to get a sense of what this urban wasteland looked like.

And later...

My first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, came out in September 1984, although it was set a few years earlier, in a grubbier, less prosperous New York. No one was more surprised than me when The Wall Street Journal described me as a spokesman for the yuppies. The protagonist of the novel was a downwardly mobile fact-checker and aspiring novelist, and unless I’m mistaken, he didn’t eat any raw fish in the novel. His best friend, Tad Allagash, was a likelier yuppie, an adman with entrée to all the right places, an uptown boy who knew his way around downtown. And they both did a lot of coke, a.k.a. Bolivian Marching Powder, which was to become the emblematic drug of the eighties, what acid had been to the sixties.

A toe-tapper for these tough times

Bronx native August Darnell claims to have had a vision of the band he fronted -- Kid Creole and the Coconuts -- in a nightmare while walking down Fifth Avenue. (Must have been in August...) His Kid Creole persona was inspired by Cab Calloway. Here's 1985's "Endicott," a toe-tapper for these tough times.

Al's Bar, 1987-88

Just enjoying a shot of the Bowery via amg2000's Flickr page. Plenty more provocative photos there.

Al's Bar, 108 Bowery, circa 1987-88. (Closed in 1994)

Tina Turner takes to the mean streets of NYC

Yesterday, reader Eric E. sent along the link for Sade's "Is it a Crime" video showing some delicious Times Square pornage lights circa 1985.

This morning, I came across Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to do With it" video shot in NYC in 1984. Love the extras from central casting. And, fyi: Don't fuck with Tina on the streets.



Still, nothing beats Pat Benatar's free-the-exotic-dancers scene in "Love is a Battlefield."

And a little Staten Island from Madonna, who turns 50 today.

"every time i look at this photograph, i want to cry..."

That headline is part of the caption to this photo from 1987: "Astor Place looking west towards the subway and restaurant...every time i look at this photograph, i want to cry..." The photo was taken by dmax3270. Check out his other black-and-white photos from NYC in the 1980s and early 1990s on his Flickr page. You can see another one of his photos in the above post.

Looking at 377 E. 10 Street -- then and now

I've been admiring the work of amg2000 on Flickr. There's a nice collection of then-and-now shots of downtown NYC...as well as 59 black-and-white photos from the 1980s.

I can't stop looking at this one, though -- 377 E. 10th St., the squat that got legal rights to the building a few years ago:


Here's what it looks like today:

[Note: I took the shot of 377 today...this one wasn't part of his then-and-now series.]

The most accurate depiction of life as a runaway in New York City that I have ever seen

At least watch until the Big Dance Scene. (The 3:21 mark if you're in a hurry.) And some nice shots of 8th Avenue from the early 1980s. (And did you know that Pat Benatar was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski in Greenpoint? Anyway, I always kind of liked her.)