Documenting Development

It isn't vanity — at any rate, it isn't only vanity — that makes New Yorkers obsessively photograph themselves and their city. Hey, it's a great city, not just because of its impressive skyline and infrastructure, but also because the "wretched refuse" that washes up here manages to transform itself into Americans. New Yorkers, by and large, are interested in each other, and so they produce photographs to document their concern. And they keep track of their works of hand. "There Once Was a Neighborhood: Photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff 1937–1950" at the South Street Seaport Museum and "New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac" at the Museum of the City of New York are two examples of such record keeping.

Lepkoff was born in 1906 in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that has been home to successive waves of immigrants, but at that time was predominantly inhabited by Eastern European Jews like her parents. Because of the restrictive immigration laws passed in 1924, the population of the Lower East Side dropped by 40% between 1920 and 1930. In 1938, when Lepkoff began photographing, Robert Moses was proposing the large scale urban developments that would change the nature of the neighborhood forever; small-scale tenements with shops on the first floor were replaced by characterless high-rise housing projects. Lepkoff's work shows us what was lost.

Lepkoff was a member of the Photo League — itself recently the subject of an exhibition at the New York Public Library — and she absorbed the League's documentary style and its ethos of social concern. The photographs she took of her neighbors are frank and straightforward. The picture of an Italian cobbler (1946) presents him working with dignity at his last in front of a wall covered with posters for Italian movies and a local church bazaar. Her picture of a butcher has him sitting in his blood-stained apron and straw boater in front of a window draped with sausages. A man lost in reverie sits by himself at a table in a Greek café; the backlighting silhouettes his profile, newsboy cap, and the reversed Cyrillic lettering on the window. She shows the same respect for a doughty tugboat photographed in the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge.

"I didn't have to think," Lepkoff said, "I just went outside and there were the streets of my mother and me, and what not. Very alive, full of activity, with people." For instance: a bearded rabbi buying a lulav and esrog (various branches and a citrus fruit used in celebrating Succoth) from a pushcart surrounded by lookers-on in fedoras, white shirts, ties, suits, and overcoats, with a signboard in Hebrew in the background. Or girls skipping rope in front of a wall of posters displaying such phrases as "Heinz Beans ‘I like ‘em.'" Or boys on the building materials at a construction site playing cops and robbers with toy guns.

But the neighborhood was going down. A crude "Welcome Boys" sign meant to honor servicemen is on a fence in front of a vacant lot. And there is a picture of demolition on Cherry Street to make way for the Alfred E. Smith housing project. Lepkoff's passion for her neighbors and neighborhood is a legacy of the Lower East Side that once was.

Eugene de Salignac (1861–1943) had a very different motive for the photographs he took; it was his job. Between 1906 and 1934, he was the official photographer of New York City's Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures. During this period, the department was busily knitting the outer boroughs to Manhattan with a series of bridges, which de Salignac documented on 20,000 8-inch-by-10-inch glass negatives. The negatives and 10,000 prints were stored in the city's Municipal Archives, largely unknown and totally unappreciated, until 1999, when Michael Lorenzini, senior photographer at the City's Department of Records, discovered them. On the basis of the 50 images in "New York Rises," the City had a very talented photographer on its payroll for three decades.

I am mildly afraid of heights, so I get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I look at "Brooklyn Bridge, showing painters on suspenders" (October 7, 1914). The 10 painters wear street clothes and no safety equipment. They do not appear to be attached to the delicate, harp-like wires they are posed on. It is their casual nonchalance — one man is reclining on a wire — that activates my acrophobia. Philippe Petit got glory for his acts of daring; these men just earn a day's wages. De Salignac shows them arrayed like flies in a spider's web, with just enough of the bridge's pier and roadbed visible to establish their position on the structure, and a faint Manhattan skyline in the distance to remind us these daring workers are New Yorkers.

"Manhattan Bridge, from Washington Street, looking west, Brooklyn, June 5, 1908" shows de Salignac's talent for formal composition, and easily bears comparison with the contemporaneous cityscapes being taken in Paris by Eugène Atget. The camera looks down a street of warehouses to the almost completed pier. There are no cables or roadbeds attached to it yet, so it stands isolated, a thing in itself, intricately sculptural and slightly surreal. It is an emblem of both technology and design, the twin drivers of the city's physical being.

A simple picture de Salignac took of three rivets propped against a white wall looks forward to Irving Penn's portraits of cigarette butts. In "Showing sample of rivets from rivet test" (September 25, 1911), these smallest and humblest of structural components become things of beauty.

De Salignac's responsibilities included photographing building sites, documenting works in progress, and taking pictures of accidents; in short, compiling a visual record of all his department's activities. Would that all the city's employees discharged their duties with his industry and feeling.

"There Once Was a Neighborhood: Photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff 1937–1950" at the South Street Seaport Museum through December 30 (12 Fulton St., between Water Street and FDR Drive, 212-748-8000).

"New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac" at the Museum of the City of New York through October 28 (1220 Fifth Ave., between 103rd and 104th streets, 212-534-1672).