Park Row and Beekman Street, 1970s
The same spot in 2014 above, and then…
I’m not sure what to make of nostalgia. I’ve never been to Park Row & Beekman, never even been in New York, but the first photograph has a sense of taking me back to something familiar, something from before I was even born. Perhaps it’s that much of what was in the seventies (and long before then even) survived into the eighties and nineties, when I was very much alive and in a place where development was slow and many areas that I knew were more impoverished. People there took what was built and then vacated and used it for their livelihood. No new development or remodeling, just taking the old shells and filing them with new commerce and survival strategies.
Now, of course, this particular set of old buildings has been replaced by a new enclosed behemoth, as shown in the final photograph. The most recent Google street picture that shows the old structures is from 2014. I guess if I was to describe the feeling, it’s a bit of sadness that I can’t point out what was to someone new and young. There are these photographs, but they don’t capture what it was like to walk along a street like this, to take in all the signage and mix of people hocking wares, or to walk into an old building that you know was not made for you but for some long-dead privileged few who abandoned their structures like hermit crabs in search of a bigger and shinier shell away from the poverty of new immigrants, new people, new lives that needed something and took what they could get and made it theirs.