On the waterfront

Geology was kind to New York because the waterfront provided plenty of inlets and islands to accommodate facilities that kept the city ticking over in past decades. Elizabeth Albert's book historically looks at ten places that reveal an intriguing amount of human activity.

Islands in particular were taken advantage of by the city authorities. A prison was built on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt) in 1832, later various hospitals and facilities for the insane were also built. The unclaimed dead ended up at Hart Island, the cities Department of Corrections estimates that more than a million bodies are buried there. A photo from 2012 shows the still standing remains of a prison. North Brother Island had a hospital for infectious diseases in the early years of the last century, later it was used as a rehabilitation center for drug addicts but finally abandoned by the city in 1963.

Non-island locations include Sandy Ground on Staten Island which was the home of black farmers and oystermen (displaced from Maryland in the 1850s where they were forbidden from owning boats). The Gowanus Canal is a badly constructed 1.8 mile long waterway in Brooklyn, it has no locks and the builders hoped two tides a day would clean the water...it didn't. By 1910 the canal was almost solid with industrial waste and sewage and it remained polluted right up to recent years. A ten-year clean up began in 2015. Coney Island Creek (originally an island) is another of New York's incredibly polluted waterways and also heavy with marine litter, including Jerry Bianco's handmade Questar 1 submarine and originally painted yellow (what else) but a storm tore it from its moorings and dumped it in mud away from the shore. Page ninety-one has a lovely color photo, from 1971, of the sub being lifted by a crane ready for her maiden voyage. Dead Horse Bay was just that, a place where animals were rendered from 1860 to the 1930s. Later it was used as a landfill until 1953. Interestingly this has now been breeched by the tides and the shore is littered with a changing collection of household rubbish and animal bones.

The author makes the ten locations come alive with her copy as well essays from other writers. Old photos, graphics and contemporary photos provide the visual interest. Incidentally if you use the Bing maps Bird's eye view option you can see some of the ruins of buildings mentioned in the text and photos.

The bus: in space and (on) time

The mundane city bus gets the attention it deserves with these wonderful Paul Kirchner strips. I wasn't a reader of Heavy Metal magazine, where they originally appeared, so I missed them until I saw this paperback in 1987 and I assume it includes all the strips from the magazine.

The humor is darkly observed, beautifully drawn and thankfully without speech bubbles. Mostly the strips have six or eight panels and usually involve a bald-headed, middle-aged gent who survives everything off-beat life can throw at him. There are also ten stories that have much bigger illustrations and run over two or three pages, the one called 'Working girl' is hilarious (about a bus of easy virtue) "I pick up men right off the street...I like a man who can pay his own way...who knows where he's going...looks aren't important." The last illustration is a bus laying on cushions and revealing the underneath of the vehicle, it's called Miss March.

If you like quirky timeless humor it's worth searching out the book and there are some quirky prices on the net, too. The paperback was published in the US by Ballantine and in the UK by Futura. The French publishers Tanibis re-issued them in 2012 in a hardback.

A Big Apple for the children

I fondly remember seeing Mr Sasek's book when it first came out in 1960 and now I've just bought this reprint for my grandchildren to enjoy, they've been there two or three times for short visits. Of course you could say that in the last fifty-six years the city has transformed itself but look through the pages and it's not just nostalgia because a lot of things are the same with Sasek's text and illustrations still making the city come alive.

A few examples of things still going strong is the Empire State, Times Square -- minus the

face smoking a Camel and blowing smoke rings -- newsstands, hot dog sellers, the subway (and some that hasn't changed in decades) Rockefeller Center, skating in Central Park, the Guggenheim, Staten Island ferry and good old Coney Island. Of course Sasek included something's that are no more like the El and those guys who pushed dresses through the streets in the garment district and oddly he didn't include a Yellow Cab (battered and dirty then but now always sparkling).

A slight disappointment is the book's printing. It looks like the original pages have been scanned, no doubt the original art vanished years ago, so that there are no real blacks in the illustrations making them lack any punch and crispness. The only black is the text.

Sasek did several city books in the same format but this classic 'This is New York' is my favorite and I hope it'll be my grandchildren's too.

Yesterday in WV

I commented in my review on the bland quality of the FSA mono photos in so many books. The above is part of a page from Leslie Cabarga's title on typography and design and the two photos clearly show what is possible  even with black and white images.

A very worthwhile photographic look at West Virginia over nine years from 1934 by ten photographers. These were not all formal members of the FSA roster under Roy Strykers guidance. The odd one out is Elmer Johnson who initially worked for Division of Subsistence Homesteads part of the Department of the Interior. He took photos for them in 1934 with his work being added to the FSA files in 1935 when it was created and he became the head of the Photographic Lab until 1937.

Just over a hundred and fifty photos are in the book arranged into eleven chapters. The last one, 'Wartime photo essay', rather intrigued me, the images are from 1942/43, the poverty and desperate times are gone, folks are well dressed and fed and their energies are now focused on the war effort. Because of the extreme poverty in West Virginia, especially among coal miners, the State was lucky enough to have three model communities: Arthurdale; Tygart; Eleanor (obviously named are Mrs Roosevelt who inspired these model homesteads) and forty photos create the positive outlook that Washington wanted from FSA work.
　
Chapter nine 'Southern coalfields: 1938' has a very telling photo taken by Marion Post Wolcott. It shows what appears to be relatively new but now boarded up homes in the abandoned mining town of Twin Branch, Ford owned the mine but closed it rather than let the thousand miners join a union. The company also refused to sell or rent the deserted homes.
　
The book's landscape shape works well with the one photo a page format, each has a brief caption with location, photographer, date and Library of Congress catalog number. The last fifty-five pages includes an illustrated essay about the photographers and a useful book list. If you live in West Virginia this will be your visual reminder of how your parents lived.
　
*This State book of FSA photos shares a common fault with many other State titles I have -- a rather uniform greyness to the photos. There are no real blacks or highlights with the 175 screen printing (on average paper) because the images have had no pre-press work to bring out the quality that is obviously there. Admittedly this would take time and of course push the price up plus the book is more one of record rather than an art photo book but when you have seen remarkable FSA photos get the graphic treatment they deserve you realize how stunning they can look.