Flophouse - Life on the Bowery

[brambor]

Yesterday I had a chance to flip through the pages of a great photo

documentary book called Flophouse - Life on the Bowery with

photographs from Harvey Wang. It was a combination of a portrait and

one page synopsis about many of the residents. I loved it. This is

classified under Subject Material/Photo Worthy Events. If you are in a

mood for a new photo read then check it out.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0375503226/104-4629431-1678350

[rich815]

Very cool. Looks like he used a TLR?

[agardner58]

Flophouse is a fascinating book, I've had the opportunity to leaf through it on a number of occasions. I believe most of the photos are from the late 1990s, and the Bowery of old was on its very last legs. I've traversed the Bowery since the mid 70s, when there were still lots of flops, even drank in Al's Bar a number of times. There are almost none of the old hotels left. The White House has become a $100/ night youth hostel (with the same chicken wire topped cubicles! I knew quite a number of people who lived there, for $5/night back in the early 80s.

 

The oldest standing hotel in New York City is the Pioneer (now called Sohotel). This was one of the nicer hotels on the Bowery (you actally got a real door with doorknob instead of a hasp and padlock, and ceiling instead of chicken wire!). I considered moving there at one point in the eary 80s. The weekly rent was $30 for a room with a bath down the hall (I was a little down on my luck at the time). The reason I never moved in? There was a waiting list... But in those days there were plenty of cheap hotels all over NYC, where you could rent a room for less than $60/week.

 

In the late 80s drug (especially crack) addicts started replacing the winos, and the Bowery started changing. The 90s saw the closing of most of the cheap hotels, and now you can spend upwards of $1 million for an condo on the Bowery. An old gas station became a bar frequented by models. The few remaining hotels are south of Grand St, and mostly filled with Fujianese immigrants rather than the Bowery bums of old.

 

I didn't start shooting photographs seriously until 1985 or so, but I did manage to get a few shots in my travels, since I lived two blocks off the Bowery for a few years.

 

I love the Harvey Wang shots in the book, some are very moving. I believe he used an old Rollei TLR for most of these shots. He has also captured a time (even though it was less than 10 years ago) that is now gone forever. I know that has been part of what I love about documentary photography, that todays events become tomorrow's history, and there is the opportunity to capture history today by getting out and shooting.

[raymond_tai]

Great book. Really shows what the TLR is capable of.