Matt Weber (Street photography), Color, Old New York, Times Square

Times Sq. 2010

Maybe my nostalgia gets a little carried away sometimes…This metal piping was used over 100 years in many subway stations to keep people from falling into stairwells and subway tracks. Hardly ornate, I was still sad to see all remaining traces of this removed from the 96th Street station. It would be nice to have just a smidgen of tradition here and there…

Same thing goes for Coney Island. Ruby’s bar is probably gone forever and should have been given a reprieve. Yes, upgrade the rest, but for once don’t clean the slate completely…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Color, Coney Island, Kiss Kiss

Coney Island 2010

I don’t know if these buildings are still standing, but Joe Sitt is in the process of tearing them down. He will replace them with one story taxpayers. When the outcry is sufficient, he will probably be paid handsomely to turn the properties over to other developers. This is what he has always done. Business is business, and to hell with history. Coney Islands last handful of nineteenth century buildings will make way for a Duane Reade or Walgreens! I have been going to Coney Island since ’61 and It hurts that one rich scumbag can do this and that our billionaire mayor will twiddle his thumbs and let him get away this…

 

I should create a category called “Nauseating” just for this picture…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Harlem, Urban Wildlife

“Across 110th Street” 1972

In 1972 I was a fourteen year old kid studying art (oil painting) with an old Russian couple who lived in a tenement on 110th St. Nicolai Abracheff was a contemporary of Picasso and also an early cubist. I was still dabbling with photography. This was one of the last rolls of film I would shoot, with one exception for the next 12 years…

1972 was also the year that the film “Across 110th Street” was produced.

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Kids & Teens, Old New York

NYC 1989

The Amsterdam projects were among NYC’s first. I’m pretty sure Robert Moses had a hand in their coming about. Built in 1947 they were a partial answer to all the troops that had come home after the war and needed affordable housing. I think they may have been better off leaving the tenements alone, because the projects eventually became isolated neighborhoods within a neighborhood. To this day, you have people who barely leave the projects to shop and it creates a weird type of personality disorder. Just knowing that your entire existence is based on government handouts could make the people feel a bit depressed as the affluent flutter about the perimeter. Rich people walking their kids to private school, pass the projects full of welfare recipients and crack dealers, who glare back unhappily. I know that some people will use the cheap rent to launch a better life for themselves, but most will spend all their days in these experiments from the laboratory of Moses and his minions…

One last gripe about NYC’s housing projects…If they had just put in larger windows, these buildings wouldn’t resemble the virtual prisons which they are. A little more light could have made a difference…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Kids & Teens, Old New York

“The City Game” 2005

If you’ve grown up in a city in the northeast, you remember what it’s like. Playing with someone else’s ball that’s worn so bad, strings are coming out of it. It’s cold out and you’re wearing a t-shirt and then someone lets a pass slip through their fingers. Now you have to wipe the yellow dog piss snow, or something a lot worse off the ball and you look for some newspaper. Fingers numb, starving, throat dry from no water fountains, you keep playing till all you have are those old greenish streetlights, barely making it possible, for you to know if you’ve hit your last jump shot…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), homeless, Men of New York, Old New York

“The Summer of ’88”

I have a pal who swears this summer will be brutally hot. Of course he’s not a meteorologist but if he’s right, nobody suffers a heatwave more than the homeless (and the elderly) Back in the old days, hydrants were open all over the city and at least if you had a bar of soap you could stay somewhat clean. The kids were happy too. These days the sprinklers are on, but they pale compared to the hydrant’s at full blast. I’m not for wasting water, but I’ve noticed that in some parks, the water fountains are becoming scarce. Not everyone can drop a two spot on a bottle of Poland Spring…

All Photos © Matt Weber