New York City
I thought the poster was foreboding as all the money in the world wouldn’t vanquish the homeless people who had littered the streets of Manhattan twenty years ago. I didn’t consider that a mayor would come along and sweep them away like cockroaches…
All Photos © Matt Weber
Frankie was living in the old abandoned trolley ticket booth on the entance to the Queensboro bridge when I took this picture. No one could ever believe that Frankie was only 56 years old, but I guess subsiding on hard liquor with almost no food could age one this much…
All Photos © Matt Weber
I was cruising St. Marks Place one day when I snapped this picture. The print came out very nice and I titled it “The Urban Prisoner”…Sixteen years later a book with the same name was published…
All Photos © Matt Weber
This place was really rundown and fortunately has been restored to most of its former glory. This is also where Malcom X was murdered in 1965…
All Photos © Matt Weber
I remember thinking that there might be something here, because while Malcolm X appears behind these guys, almost calling them into action, they were just chilling and mixing screwdrivers on another dreary day on the street…
All Photos © Matt Weber
It’s been over twenty years since I took this picture, and at the time I felt like it was the saddest photograph that I had ever made. Now I still feel that sadness, because the man’s eyes show more pain than I could ever expect to know, as he pushed all his possessions across 23d Street in a shopping cart…
All Photos © Matt Weber
It was hot and hazy and I remember stopping on the Pulaski bridge in Greenpoint and taking a few snaps of my favorite building with my trusty Canon AE-1 Program…
All Photos © Matt Weber
All Photos © Matt Weber
I named this picture “Ground Zero” when I took it, because the Empire State Building was Ground Zero in the 1964 classic film Fail Safe. I wish it still was…
All Photos © Matt Weber
I pulled over and took three or four shots and then drove away. I never went back…
All Photos © Matt Weber
OK, so I can’t help it…I’m a sucker for irony…
All Photos © Matt Weber
Yes, even the upper east side of Manhattan had a whorehouse back in the day.
All Photos © Matt Weber
Even some of the pawnshops went out of business during Harlem’s decline during the late twentieth Century…
All Photos © Matt Weber
The Robert Frank part of this homage is very easy to figure out, while the Walker Evans half is a little trickier…
All Photos © Matt Weber
A place where many things went down during the sixties is torn down to make way for a rather ugly building by William Zeckendorf at Columbus Circle…
All Photos © Matt Weber
They say change is the only constant and this holds true in New York as much as it does anywhere!
All Photos © Matt Weber
Taxpayers were being raised almost daily during the 1980’s as the New York’s first big real estate boom since the post war days was underway…A lot of small businesses that had been around for a long time were gone…
All Photos © Matt Weber
A sign from the previous century was still visible in this photograph taken when the South Bronx was at its worst…
All Photos © Matt Weber
At one point New York had become so crime ridden that people actually turned their homes into jails…
All Photos © Matt Weber
The opening picture in “The Urban Prisoner” a monograph by Matt Weber published by Sanctuary Books in 2004
All Photos © Matt Weber
I never liked the World Trade Center when it stood tall, but ever since the massacre, I miss it all the time!
All Photos © Matt Weber
This was a fantastic and rare find…It was in someone’s front lawn and had survived for over two hundred years! Unfortunately someone stole it a few years later and it should have ended up in a museum. It was on 152d Street if I remember and that was approximately nine miles from NYC back in 1769, considering that New York began around Canal St in those days…
All Photos © Matt Weber
For many more photos of lost New York, check out FORGOTTEN NY
Harlem has always been a political hotbed, and hopefully will continue to be…Apathy sucks!
All Photos © Matt Weber
Black and White Street Photographs of New York City by Matt Weber 