TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

My last trip on Amtrak to New York City was in March 2020. I sat next to a friendly lady in my age range for an amiable chat. I enjoyed one of my frequent stays with my grandchildren on the Upper West Side, taking them to daycare in the morning and picking them up afterwards. Other than those weekday responsibilities and maybe a few loads of family laundry, I had the whole day free to have breakfast in the nearby bistro, meet with friends, walk through Central Park, decide on a museum exhibit or foreign film, all the while window shopping and people watching to my heart’s content.

I considered myself a dual citizen of Boston and New York, surfing the couch at my daughter’s 17th floor apartment for weeks at a time.

Our view of San Remo Towers

I grew up in the metropolitan area and have felt at home in New York City since childhood. My parents took me and my brother to the Bronx Zoo and Hayden Planetarium, and my mom took me alone to Broadway musicals, where we waited at the stage door for the cast to sign the Playbill. But for me, the highlight of the adventure was to board the train in Linden and exit at Penn Station to blend into the pace of the crowd and the magnificent city itself.

In fact, I was born at the Sydenham Hospital on 125th Street, but I have never lived in the city. When I returned to New Jersey for a judicial clerkship after graduating from law school, I headed to New York for weekends, staying with friends in the Village and soaking up the artistic, literary, film, and café life. I had met an editor of The New York Review of Books and we hung out with her writer friends on Saturday nights till closing, for wide-ranging conversation over Sambuca-laced espresso at Caffe Dante on MacDougal Street (photo courtesy of website).

During my more recent family visits, I frequently encountered famous New Yorkers while walking miles around town. New York is home to many celebrities in the TV, film, and live theater scene who live there or stay temporarily for the duration of their show. Resident New Yorkers must run into them all the time but respect their privacy as fellow citizens going about their daily business.

Over the years, I have seen many stars up close, immediately recognizable in passing, including Elliot Gould near the Harvard Club, Martha Stewart and her entourage while waiting to enter a Broadway theater, Alan Alda, John Lithgow at a restaurant table next to mine, Willy Geist, Alec Baldwin in a trench coat (passing him while crossing an avenue from the opposite direction), Elie Wiesel in an elevator, author Tom Wolfe in his distinctive cream-colored morning suit, George Stephanopoulos on a cellphone engaged in an intense conversation on a park bench. More recently, I spotted Gloria Steinem at the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the Whitney, dressed smartly in a black leather jacket, black leggings, and suede ankle boots, emitting her star power as a feminist icon.

My experience of the city, while worldly and social, encompassed only the commercially and culturally vibrant areas of Manhattan. But from 1971 to 1972, when I clerked for the judge, much of the city that New Yorkers or visitors experienced – except perhaps for exclusive sections with doorman buildings – was considered unsafe at best and life-threatening at worst.

In the 1970s, New York had the reputation of being a crime-ridden and grimy city, a dark Gotham where the NYPD warned people not to take the graffiti-filled subway (the NYPD widely distributed a pamphlet entitled Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York). Many desperate people squatted in abandoned buildings left in disrepair by landlords who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay property taxes. Every type of crime – robbery, assault, murder, grand larceny – was on the increase. Trash littered the streets and New York was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975.

In summer 1972, I left for Boston to get married. Two years later, a young man of twenty-three, David Bookbinder, arrived from Buffalo, moving first to a tenement on the Upper West Side, where he worked odd jobs and freelanced for local newspapers, and then later to Brooklyn.

David’s Upper West Side was nothing like the family-oriented, restaurant-rich, high-end apartment and shopping mecca that it is today. It was a place of urban decay and, often, grinding poverty, inhabited by a mix of older residents who survived on Social Security, students in run-down apartments, business owners barely hanging on, and down-and-out characters and transients, some in questionable or even dangerous pursuits. These are the people we walked past on the street with averted eyes.

David spent five years embedded in this society, determined to get to know and record street life in photographs, interview tapes, and written notes. He began to put a book of their stories and photographs together but set it aside before completion to move forward with his life in other directions, working as a tech writer, enrolling in a Ph.D. program in English literature, and eventually becoming a psychotherapist in the Boston area.

Recently retired, he felt the pull of 1970s New York City and the people whose lives were hidden from view – except in his thousands of photographs, his detailed interview notes, and in his memory. He felt driven to reveal the humanity of these people, consigned to oblivion by time and indifference, whose lives he had so carefully documented.  He sorted through the voluminous materials in storage and resumed writing their stories in earnest.

In his recently published book Street People: Invisible New York Made Visible, David combines words and pictures to create a rare immersion into this edgy and largely forgotten world. As a reader, you prowl the nighttime streets with Margie — a drag queen who inspired more than fifty artworks by Andy Warhol — and Romeo, part-time mugger, full-time philosopher, and king of the corner of West 98th and Broadway. You set up shop at the crack of dawn with Morris, a Russian immigrant, as he assembles New York’s oldest newsstand, then spend the day with the denizens of his street corner society.

Later, you slip downtown and ride shotgun with amateur pimp and prostitute Frankie and Cookie on their first night out, then cross the bridge into Brooklyn to meet Edward, the self-appointed Second Coming of Christ, here to bring down destruction on the self-destructive human race.

David’s stark black-and-white photographs intertwine with these and other stories to paint a portrait of a great city at its most raw and real.

Here’s Morris at his newsstand:

When I came in here, was Depression time. I struggled for my life, here in America. That time, newsstand was open up to twelve o’clock at night. There was no television, no radio — people used to buy papers. When I was first here, Daily News delivered in horse and wagon. Horse and wagon! Now they have a hundred-fifty trucks.

Here, the young reporter encounters a bag lady near a burnt-out theater:

A 50‑year‑old bag lady, gaunt and worn, rummaged through her pockets. She muttered, ‘You saved them with a million dollars. When they came back from the victorious war, they took over the country, they made it the way they wanted it. The savages don’t fight the same way the civilized soldiers do.’ She lit a cigarette and con­tinued: ‘Retreating back into the past, the dim dark past ages, that’s where America goes, the dim, dark savagery.’

Iconic subway scenes are deftly woven into a tale of a fare-hike demonstration gone bad:

The police held their positions for a few more seconds, but they were vastly outnumbered. One of the cops un­holstered his gun, and in that moment, the state of our world changed. Someone shouted, “Look out!” and somebody else, “Guns!” Then dozens of people screamed in terror. I was shoved toward the exit doors as, in unison, all of us seemed to grasp what would happen if bullets were fired inside the concrete vault of the station. I got off one blind shot before I was nearly swept off my feet.

Stories and portraits of the children he met on the streets of Brooklyn intertwine with images and depictions of the decaying neighborhood in which they lived:

This is the lost world David has restored to life in Street People.

POSTSCRIPT:

The city that the author portrays in stories and photos is alien to me, but appreciation of photography has nevertheless been a coin of my realm that I inherited from my father. My dad Julius was an award-winning amateur photographer with his own darkroom before he married my mom in 1943. He spent his apprentice machinist’s wages on a Rolleiflex camera and scouted the natural and man-made scenery of his hometown, Elizabeth, NJ. He was especially fascinated with the activity in the 200 acre Olmstead-designed Warinanco Park, the public of all ages enjoying the rambles, the fishing ponds, the children’s cement wading pool, the chess boards imbedded in the stone tables, the fireworks in July, the nuns from a nearby convent chatting on a park bench.

My dad’s sepia-toned and black and white photographs of the 1930s and 1940s, like David’s of the 1970s, portray an era and landscape that has vanished, along with the people who inhabited it with the fullness of their joys and struggles.

In that spirit, I am honored to present Street People: Invisible New York Made Visible, to you, my readers. Please click here or the cover, below, for more information about the author and his recently published book.

You can also see more of David’s photographs here: Phototransformations.com