Sign: "Frank Lava Gunsmith. Revolvers Bought Sold Repaired."

The apartment above the Frank Lava Gunsmith shop on Centre Market Place was pretty much the perfect locale to live in if you were New York City’s leading crime photographer, as Arthur “Weegee” Fellig was from the 1930s through the 1950s. This classic 1937 photo of Weegee (photographer unidentified) shows the street-smart shutterbug during the daytime, but it was the graveyard shift when he worked and dominated. From a 2008 New York Times piece about Weegee by John Strausbaugh:

“Weegee’s peak period as a freelance crime and street photographer was a whirl of perpetual motion running from the mid-1930s into the postwar years. Ceaselessly prowling the streets during the graveyard shift, he took thousands of photographs that defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of hoodlums and gangsters, Bowery bums and slumming swells, tenement dwellers and victims of domestic brawls, fires and car crashes. He gave it its enduring nickname, the Naked City.

‘Weegee captured night in New York back when it was lonely and desolate and scary,’ said Tim McLoughlin, editor of the Brooklyn Noir anthology series, the third volume of which has just been published by Akashic Books. ‘He once said he wanted to show that in New York millions of people lived together in a state of total loneliness.’”

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“You push the button and it gives you the things you want.”