Harvey Wang

You are currently browsing articles tagged Harvey Wang.

“The Sixteen-Block Stretch Of Lower Manhattan Was Jammed With Barber Schools, Bars, Missions, Men’s Clothing Stores, Slop Joints (Cheap Restaurants), Flophouses, And Tattoo Parlors”

May 29, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There are used paperback copies of the book on Amazon for as little as $1.62.

Photographer Harvey Wang and radio documentarian David Isay gravitate to those people, places and things that have passed into obsolescence in our culture and capture their essence before they become obsolete. They focus a good deal of attention on NYC, a place that changes rapidly, often driven more by the lure of the dollar than the pull of history. The two collaborated with Stacy Abramson on the great 2000 book, Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, which looked at the lowly boarding houses that still stood in that famous (and infamous) neighborhood like anachronisms with bedbugs. But despite their shabby shape, these lodgings were filled with the fascinating stories of the tenants, which Wang and Isay chronicled with great care. You can listen to audio documentaries about the flophouses here. The opening copy of the book:

“From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, the Bowery was the world’s most infamous skid row. Under the shadow of the elevated Third Avenue line, the sixteen-block stretch of lower Manhattan was jammed with barber schools, bars, missions, men’s clothing stores, slop joints (cheap restaurants), flophouses, and tattoo parlors. The estimates vary, but in its heyday somewhere between 25,000 and 75,000 men slept on the Bowery each night.

Today the barber colleges are all gone. Al’s, the last rummy bar on the Bowery, closed in 1993. There are no tattoo parlors, no employment agencies, no pawnshops, no burlesque houses, no secondhand stores, no El train. All that remains of the skid-row Bowery are a single mission and a handful of flops, still offering the shabbiest hotel accommodations imaginable for as little as $4.50 a night.”

More Harvey Wang and David Isay posts:

Tags: , ,

“It Took Bean Twenty Years Of Planning And Saving Before He Was Finally Ready To Build His Own Theme Park”

January 19, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From dust jacket flap: "This book is a tribute to some of America's greatest characters, people holding on to unique ways of life at all costs."

When I recently put up a post about Harvey Wang, it reminded me that in my whole life in New York City, I have only been the victim of theft one time and the stolen item was an excellent 1996 book called Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes, which Wang co-created with David Isay. I believe my house painter nicked it several years back when I left him alone in the apartment for a couple of hours.

The book, about eccentric Americans (snake handlers, coon-dog graveyard caretakers, hat blockers, burlesque museum curators, etc.) who aren’t willing to be swallowed whole by a homogenized culture, is definitely worth stealing, though I paid a few bucks for a replacement copy. An excerpt from the chapter, “Donald Bean, Proprietor, Dinosaur Gardens, Moscow Texas”:

“‘I Thought I Saw a Dinosaur’ reads the welcome sign to Moscow, Texas, an unincorporated hamlet ninety miles north of Houston. There isn’t much more to the place. Indeed, the number of dinosaurs residing in Moscow rivals the town’s population, all thanks to the retired carpenter named Donald Bean.

‘I try to keep this as much as I can like it would have been back then, you know,’ Bean explains as we begin our tour through the roadside attraction. Canned dinosaur sound effects erupt from small speakers hidden in trees. We round the corner and come upon the theme park’s first dinosaur–Elasmosaurus, a twenty-foot-long flippered beast residing in a murky bog of water, surrounded by a ring of pond scum. ‘If you cleaned it out,’ Bean explained, ‘it wouldn’t be a swamp.’

All told, Donald Bean’s roadside attraction consists of exactly eleven worn fiberglass dinosaurs laid out along a winding trail cut into the woods behind his home. Bean opened up Dinosaur Gardens in 1981–the culmination of a lifelong fascination with these prehistoric creatures. ‘I always liked dinosaurs. They’re large…they’re big, and they ruled the world for years…Thousands of years…Well, millions of years!’ Donald Bean came up with the idea for the theme park in the late 1950s when he happened upon a similar roadside attraction in Oregon while vacationing with his wife, Yvonne. ‘Soon as I saw that I said, ‘That’s what I want to do!’ So I did it’

It took Bean twenty years of planning and saving before he was finally ready to build his own theme park. ‘My wife wasn’t too for the idea right off the jump go, because we spent our life savings on it.’ The park cost the Beans $100,000 to build, and when Dinosaur Gardens opened it was met with just about the level of enthusiasm one might anticipate for a dinosaur theme park in the heart of Moscow, Texas. The masses did not seem to share Bean’s fervor for creatures prehistoric. There were no lines at the ticket office. It kind of disappointed me,’ Bean says, wiping a spider web from Struthiomimus‘s mouth. ‘I don’t know how many people I thought would come, but I thought there’d be quite a few.'”

Tags: , ,

“I Go To Sleep Dreaming Of Seltzer Bottles”

January 12, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of Wang's subjects, bowling alley mechanic Bill Newman, is someone I recall from my childhood in Queens.

Of all my favorite books about NYC, I think the one I love above all others is Harvey Wang’s New York. The 1990 book contains an introduction by Pete Hamill and just a few dozen black-and-white photos with a paragraph of text accompanying each one. And that’s all it needs.

Wang, a photographer and filmmaker, who maintains a website of his work, uses his trusty Leicas and Nikons to capture a phase of the city that had entered into obsolescence and is all but gone now: a New York that wasn’t drunk on self-awareness and star power, a place that was perhaps harder but less self-conscious.

In the book, Wang profiles New Yorkers at work in trades such as blacksmith, mannequin maker and scrap-metal collector, among others. He also interviews a seltzer bottler named George Williams. An excerpt:

“‘I go to sleep dreaming of seltzer bottles,’ says George Williams, who estimates he fills 3,000 empty glass canisters with a mixture of filtered water and carbon dioxide gas every day. He works at G & K Beer Distributors in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Kenny Gomberg, grandson of G & K founder Moe Gomberg says at the beginning seltzer was the biggest part of the business. Now it’s a novelty. George started in the business about thirty-five years ago at Cohen Seltzer Works in Boro Park, one of the dozens of bottlers in business back then. There are just a few left that fill the antique Czech-made bottles with a Barnett and Foster Syphon (sic) Filler machine that dates back to 1910. Says George, ‘The younger generation mostly goes for flavored sodas.'”

ALSO: Harvey Wang is having an exhibit of the many photographs he took of Adam Purple’s amazing Lower East Side earthwork, “The Garden of Eden,” fifteen thousand square feet of natural beauty that the artist somehow grew out of urban blight. It was sadly razed by developers in 1986. Wang’s photographs of the erstwhile oasis and its eccentric creator will be on display at the FusionArts Museum Gallery from February 2-20.

Tags: , , , , ,