City Through Time

C directed me to a Times article that has a special interest to me because I am working on a similiar project. It will take time to develop, but that is after all, exactly the point of my idea.

You can read the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/nyregion/11harlem.html

Or at the jump below.

More about it in the weeks to come...

New York Times:
Neither Time Nor a Harlem Storefront Stands Still
By ALAN FEUER

Published: October 11, 2004

f they stand still long enough, New Yorkers get a rare opportunity. They can see the face of time.

This is a strange thing to say, but time has a face in New York City. It is not the cold stare you see in Egypt looking at the Pyramids or the stiff scowl you find in England standing at the Tower of London.

Stand around in New York and you figure out that the face of time is like the face of a baby. It is always changing, always shifting its expression. Like a baby's face, it has a hundred different moods.

All this begins to make some sense when you look at the photographs Camilo Jose Vergara has taken of 65 East 125th Street over the last 27 years. Since 1977, Mr. Vergara has been snapping pictures of that single Harlem storefront, wedged in on the north side of the street between Madison and Park Avenues.

He has some nice shots of the way the place has changed from a juke joint to a smoke shop to a store that sells you bedding on the cheap. He also has a fairly decent portrait of the changing face of time.

"My interest is to see what happens over time," Mr. Vergara, 60, said the other day. "I like to follow the traces until everything is new and there are no traces left."

It is possible his work could not have been done in Boston, or in San Francisco, or in any other city where they make it difficult to tear things down and start again. But in New York, that kind of destruction and rebirth happen all the time. You have a drink one night at your local bar, then two weeks later the construction crews move in.

Harlem has seen a lot of this of late, especially on 125th Street. The mom-and-pops moved out; the corporate chains have moved in. There is more money on 125th Street, but less that is vivid, less that is unique.

It is called gentrification. Mr. Vergara calls it "loss."

At any rate, something is afoot when, in less than 30 years, the Purple Manor Bar gives way to a seafood shack, the seafood shack to a discount store, the discount store to a smoke shop and a doctor's office, the doctor's office to a cabinet shop, the cabinet shop to a hair salon, the hair salon to a music store, then the music store (with the smoke shop still alive) to Sleepy's - "The Mattress Professionals."

"What these pictures tell me," Mr. Vergara said, "is that the resurgence of Harlem is real, but not in the way that people think. The way it's been sold is to say, 'We're back, we're healthy, there's folks with money here, there's fancy stuff going up.' "

"The saddest thing about the series is that what was there at the beginning is gone by the end - completely gone. What's not there anymore is what was lost."

Posted by alexis at October 15, 2004 11:45 AM