All Photos © Matt Weber
This is how I want to remember Herman Markowitz. Smiling and being a sweet old man. When he was released from the concentration camp, he weighed less than ninety pounds. As you can see he was well built. He said he was a talented wrestler, and he was very strong into his seventies. In 1956 he moved into a 3d floor studio apartment on West 86th Street. His rent was $56 per month! When he died in 2007, his rent had climbed to $218 per month. He spent his working years in a factory in Jersey working a lathe and stamping metal pieces for who knows what. He had one close call with falling in love back in the sixties, but it didn’t work out. I should have taped our conversations. The stories he told me about being stuck in a Nazi work camp during the war, will fuck me up till the day I die…
Black and White Street Photographs of New York City by Matt Weber 
I use to live on West 95th and Riverside Dr. for 18 years and I recognize the guy sitting on the ledge on the left. Wish I would of met Herman.
Thanks Ed…95th Street use to be a tough block with plenty of SROs…The guy on the left was almost a Hell’s Angel at one point,
or so he told me…