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), 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

Matt Weber (Street photography), Graffiti-NYC Tags, Subway, Urban Landscape

Brooklyn 2007

In the not so distant future, I can see some guys sitting in a bar or on a stoop somewhere, having a very silly argument. Whoever wrote this lovely tag in etching fluid, will be boasting how he got up big time in ’05 and all of sudden a couple of older guys with potbellies and gray hair will walk over and say, “You guys ain’t shit” Those older guys will have been writers from the ’70s or ’80s who actually wrote on the outside of trains, in grafitti’s heyday..

A parallel could be made by comparing the Vietnam vets who came home and found themselves being told by guys twenty years older, that their war wasn’t shit compared to the “Real War” (WW II)

All Photos © Matt Weber