Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971-1983
176
Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971-1983
176Hardcover
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Overview
In Brooklyn Before, Racioppo lets us see the vitality of his native Brooklyn, stretching from historic Park Slope to the beginnings of Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park. His black and white photographs pull us deep into the community, stretching our memories back more than forty years and teasing out the long-lost recollections of life on the streets and in apartment homes. Racioppo has the fascinating ability to tell a story in one photograph and, because of his native bona fides, he depicts an intriguing set of true Brooklyn stories from the inside, in ways that an outsider simply cannot. On the pages of, Brooklyn Before the intimacy and roughness of life in a working-class community of Irish American, Italian American, and Puerto Rican families is shown with honesty and insight.
Racioppo's 128 photographs are paired with essays from journalist Tom Robbins and art critic and curator Julia Van Haaften. Taken together, the images and words of Brooklyn Before return us to pre-gentrification Brooklyn and immerse us in a community defined by work, family, and ethnic ties.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501725876 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2018 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 512,957 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.80(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Before the Gold Rush
TOM ROBBINS
Somehow it has become accepted wisdom that before New York turned so grand and fabulously costly it was a desperately lousy place to live. This line of thinking holds that, beginning at some point in the mid 1970s, everyone who could got out of town. They didn't come back until things got safe, supposedly some time around Rudy Giuliani's second term in City Hall. Those who couldn't flee the city's terrors lived sullen, fearful lives trapped in darkened apartments in woebegone neighborhoods. The alleged documentary evidence for this claim is a handful of shopworn images: photos of blasted ruins of collapsed tenements, fearful passengers aboard litter-strewn, graffiti-covered subway cars, and of wild crowds storming past shattered shop windows, gleefully hoisting stolen trophies above their heads during the great blackout riot of 1977.
For good measure, even though it is total fiction, inserted into this montage are also images from the movie The Warriors, showing youths in leather vests stomping savagely along a darkened street beneath an elevated train. The parade of urban ruin usually culminates with shots of John Lindsay, who is presented as the hopelessly liberal mayor who created this debacle, looking stooped, worried, and apologetic.
Any thinking person understands that, as a summary of life lived in this town in those years, this is complete nonsense. What? You think 6.9 million New York City residents is nobody? That all the seats in Yankee Stadium and Shea went empty? That the IRT and IND trains ran on their tracks all day, all the way up to the northern Bronx and way out to the Atlantic Ocean, just for fun? That the Metropolitan Museum went on lockdown? That Nathan's shuttered its windows because no customers came to Coney Island looking for well-done franks?
No, this bogus portrait of a city begins with small, insecure people who insist that they have turned streets of dread into streets of gold. Never mind that fewer and fewer can afford the price of admission to the city they've rafted. These claims gather momentum every time there is a need to justify the way things are now: Oh? You don't like it that our greatest parks are now governed by clutches of plutocrats who decide where you can walk or play?
You are upset that you can't hold a big rally against a bad war in the vast Sheep Meadow of Central Park because it will hurt the grass? You have a problem that neighborhoods that were once affordable now require a huge paycheck or modest trust fund in order to reside there? Well then, they say, and here politely sympathetic smiles at your naïveté turn to gnashing teeth: Well then, maybe you'd like to go back to the jungle that was? And bingo, out comes another photo, this one of a city police car flipped upside down, seemingly trapped by the menacing horde around it.
This fractured history has prevailed for so long now that journalists repeat it as rote. They pick it up from the drumbeat of politicians and developers who invoke this twisted account for their own benefit. The writers should know better, but it makes for an irresistibly simple turn of phrase to invoke the bad old days as counterpoint for all that is shiny and new in Gotham.
Sadly, an entire generation has now come of age having been schooled on this myth. They are not to be blamed for their ignorance. How are they to know that, despite the truly legitimate problems that plagued that era — we speak here of street crime, drug gangs, landlord arson, and noxious boom boxes the size of suitcases — life went on fairly normally? That even though we lacked the blessing of aristocratic conservancies protecting our parks, families still spread blankets on somewhat tattered lawns there, flew balloons, and passed out ice cream to celebrate their children's birthdays?
How are they to know that in the storefronts where people now furiously pump up and down on exercise machines, there once were glorious saloons filled with men and women whose lives of hard work had earned them the right to spend an afternoon tipping glasses of Budweiser and highballs? That along those same stools, under just enough light for the bartender to slice the lemons, passed the wit and wisdom of a city? How can they be expected to know that, after the usual wreckage of Saturday nights, the streets filled on Sunday mornings with families dressed to the nines and headed to church?
How would they know that evenings were more likely to be filled not with menace but with the sound of a cuatro strummed by a man in a fedora singing ballads of his home in Puerto Rico? Of congas beaten by young men, their hair exploding in Afros? Or of a saxophone serenading a brick wall, played by a bearded black man in a raincoat, lost in space?
And how to get their heads around the almost cosmic changes to that central determining factor in the quality of urban lives — rent? Back then it could still be had at bargain rates, allowing a choice of where to work, live, and play, often in the kind of spacious realms unthinkable today except for the most privileged.
And most importantly, how are they to understand that the sum total of these decidedly modest pleasures often produced a casual and simple joy, one that vastly exceeded whatever fears and cautions accompanied the daily routines of life?
That's the hidden history of many city neighborhoods before the great gold rush descended on them. It's a largely vanished world. Aside from a few pockets that have somehow escaped the gentry's gilded advance, that city has disappeared beneath the waves, leaving few ripples to trace its fate.
If you wanted to choose one neighborhood whose past history has gotten a bad rap thanks to the eagerness of speculators to justify the titanium-level prices charged for even wood frame houses clad in chipped Permastone, it is the part of Brooklyn now known as Park Slope South.
This is the area that stretches roughly from 9th Street to Green-Wood Cemetery and environs. Back in the 1970s, it was just another part of South Brooklyn, an even larger territory that ranged from the docks of Red Hook to the Verrazano Bridge, a rough geographic designation that swept all of Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, and Bensonhurst under the same banner. It was a vast swath of metropolis, boasting more bars and churches per acre than any other part of the city.
It was also as polyglot as they come, with Italian, Irish, Hispanic, and African American families living above and below each other in walk-up limestone apartment houses. Yes, this ethnic mix fueled occasional jousting between the tribes. They would mark their turf with spray-painted slogans, declaring such delightful sentiments as "Italian Power #1" and "Spics keep out." But if you snapped a picture of the kids hanging out under that graffiti-tagged wall you were more likely than not to capture a grinning Puerto Rican kid next to a couple of equally carefree would-be Italian stallions.
That's the portrait that Larry Racioppo, born and raised in South Brooklyn, managed to take of the neighborhood during the years when it was supposed to have been a mere moonscape, a site of urban apocalypse.
Racioppo's family learned early about neighborhood displacement. Their first apartment was razed to make way for the Prospect Expressway, the highway slashed through the community in the late 1950s by Robert Moses, the city's auto-loving construction czar. The Racioppo clan pushed south along 5th Avenue, closer to the docks along the harbor at the bottom of the hill where his father and uncles worked as longshoremen, hefting cargo and crates from freighters supplying the city's needs. While they lasted, these were good jobs, with good pay, especially for men whose education stopped well short of high school degrees. They were also sometimes dangerous jobs. One uncle was killed when a load collapsed on top of him.
Racioppo was twenty-two when he started taking pictures of his neighbors and the streets they walked. After graduating from Catholic high school, he had briefly considered going to the seminary. Instead he read up on Eastern religions, spent a few years at Fordham, then drifted west to California. On his return, he started looking at the world through the viewfinder of his camera and found ample signs of the Lord's presence all around him.
Racioppo found the holy and miraculous in the living room of his aunt's apartment on 18th Street, above the plastic slip-covered sofa, between the cuckoo clock and the wall-mounted portrait of a kindly Christ. It was in the face of the solemn proprietor of the candy store on 5th Avenue who wore a tie to his job selling Chuckles, Ludens cough drops, and El Producto cigars. It was in the afternoon quiet inside the taverns that graced opposite corners of 7th Avenue and 9th Street. It was in the grass growing through the cracks in the asphalt in front of the swastika-tattooed handball courts. It was also in the lines of laundry strung like naval flags across backyards sprinkled with rose bushes. It was strewn about in the wagon of the last horse-drawn vegetable vendor and to be glimpsed in the statue of the bronzed Doughboy, heroically charging the Huns from his pedestal outside the armory on 8th Avenue. Racioppo even found the Divine in the wistful look of the girls who hung out near the collapsing stone stairs on Hippie Hill in Prospect Park where the kids went to toke up.
Most of that world, along with the people and images Racioppo brought into focus, are demolished and gone or improved and gentrified to such a degree that much of the history of the place is but a shadow. The crumbling stairs of Hippie Hill are long since cleaned up and repaired. The kids who congregated on that grassy hilltop are gone as well. They weren't really hippies, just local kids with long hair and a love of Bob Dylan and Smokey Robinson, the children of working class families who lived in the limestones and walkups surrounding the park. Each evening they could be found draped atop the brick wall that lines the park's northern perimeter, drinking tall cardboard containers of beer from Farrell's, the tavern on the other side of Bartel-Pritchard Square where off-duty cops and iron workers jostled for space at the bar.
Across the street, just north of the square on Prospect Park West — 9th Avenue as the older natives insisted — sat the mammoth old Sanders movie house, a grand, Moorish-styled cinema where tickets were purchased at a terrazzo-tiled art deco booth with rounded glass windows and a single broken pane. Inside the cavernous one-screen playhouse, you were often chilled to the bone in the winter, true. Yet for its lack of proper heating the Sanders was a true temple of entertainment until the last film flickered across its enormous screen in 1978. The soaring old palace stood bricked-over and empty for years as investigators unraveled the real estate frauds perpetrated by the crooked ex-police detective who had owned it along with a swath of other Park Slope parcels. Eventually, wiser businessmen opened a multiplex there, one that shoe-boxed customers into narrow rooms with a mere slice of the old magnificence over their heads.
The Sanders wasn't the only sanctuary shriveled, diminished, or destroyed by hard times. The ranks of worshippers at local churches thinned as well, thanks to the loss of jobs and housing. Despite fewer souls in the pews, on the streets of South Brooklyn crowds of worshippers and gawkers still flocked to the streets to watch the annual Holy Week pageant, following the Christ figure carrying his immense wooden cross, guarded by centurions and led by the mysterious Penitentes in their black hoods and robes. Families, brimming with pride, still celebrated the first Communions of precious young girls in white lace, of boys tucked into their first suits.
The one refuge that survived all assaults and served as a center for those living along its flanks was vast Prospect Park. To Brooklynites, Prospect was the true masterpiece of Frederick Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, more majestic than the much larger Central Park across the river where the landscape geniuses had first practiced their talents. Prospect's graceful meadows, wooded hills, ravines, lake, and ball fields were a haven for all, no admission charged. Whatever dangers might lurk on lonely pathways at night, the park by day and evening was a safe harbor to the neighborhood and its children. No corner was left unexplored. Perched atop a ridge above the long meadow and half-hidden in the woods sat an old Quaker cemetery surrounded by a high chain-link fence. The cemetery predated the park by several decades and was supposed to be off-limits to nonmembers of the faith. But to the youth who roamed the hills the fence was just another dare and they regularly tunneled under or clambered over it to wander among the plain-faced tombstones.
The bandshell near 9th Street was another vital community retreat, despite the torn posters and spray-painted tags that adorned its curving walls. Today the site boasts concert-quality speakers and professional lighting and the best seats are cordoned off to all but paying customers. Back then, drawn by the sounds, you could slide into a seat unchallenged and hear the likes of Randy Weston, the jazz piano great from Bedford-Stuyvesant who played to cheering crowds there beneath the blurred stars of a Brooklyn summer's night sky. Despite the acknowledged perils of the park after dark, the audience clapped and whistled instead of quaking with fear. Walking en masse, the crowd would exit the park in complete safety and go their different ways once out on the sidewalk at Prospect Park West.
Even Shakespeare braved the hazards to put in nighttime appearances in the park. In the otherwise toxic summer of 1977, a hardy group of actors performed A Midsummer Night's Dream to a decent-sized crowd at the theater near the lake boathouse. After the performance, theatergoers on their way home passed through a tunnel beneath the park roadway where "In the Still of the Night," sung by a doo-wop quartet making good use of the acoustics, echoed from the arched ceiling.
On the night that summer of 1977 when the lights went out, a single bitter serenade drowned out all others: an endless wail of police and fire sirens sounding in the dark. At first, few of us understood what had happened. It was 9:30 PM and children had just been tucked into bed when lights in the apartments snapped out. Outside, the street lamps had been snuffed out as well. Those with a view of the city saw only shadows where once had been visible familiar landmarks. For the first hour or so, all was innocence: neighbors gathered on the stoops to share the ice cream now melting in powerless refrigerators. Then the sirens began and, for those who lived closest to the avenues, there was the sound of breaking glass. On 7th Avenue, the owner of an all-night bodega who always kept a pistol stuffed in his belt now stood in front of his shop warily holding his weapon.
Over the following twenty-four hours, most of the photos that now define that era were shot. In Brooklyn, looters hit Sunset Park, Flatbush, Bed-Stuy, and, worst of all, Bushwick, which took a generation to recover. The next morning, with the power still out and the trains not running, many took the day off. It was stiflingly hot and, without fans or air conditioners, we denizens of Kings County made the logical decision to head to the beach at the Rockaways. Me and some others piled into a friend's station wagon and headed down Flatbush Avenue, past shattered windows and twisted metal store grates that had been pulled into the street. There were no stoplights and drivers had to pick their way cautiously through every intersection and around every corner, watching for cars that suddenly lurched into the avenue. At the normally hectic junction of Church and Flatbush Avenues, a man stood in the intersection, a self-appointed traffic cop, loudly blowing a whistle and waving his arms. People on the sidewalks cheered him. It was a lone bright spot on an otherwise dismal day. A friend sat in the back seat of the wagon and surveyed the devastation. "This is really bad, really bad," she kept repeating.
Indeed it was. For those already tilting toward leaving the city, the blackout riots pushed them out the door. The racial transition of neighborhoods like Flatbush, already long underway, received a dramatic boost. The scenes of marauding looters amplified the anxiety in a city coping with the terror instilled by a deadly gunman who called himself "Son of Sam." The man whose real name was David Berkowitz had been prowling the streets for two years, targeting young women and men with a .44 caliber revolver. His crime spree haunted the entire city, especially the outer boroughs where he practiced his terror. Berkowitz helped elect a new mayor, Ed Koch. After the riots in July, Koch surged to the front of a crowded Democratic primary thanks to his campaign battle cry for the death penalty, which he carried with him through a frightened city.
Most of us remained, however. And while no one denied the city had been badly wounded, it was still the city where we raised our families. As for Larry Racioppo, a few years after he began snapping pictures of the life around him, he set up shop in the old Ansonia clock factory on 7th Avenue. The sprawling plant takes up the entire block between 12th and 13th Streets and you can trace the neighborhood's entire history right there. After the Ansonia company stopped producing its classic timepieces back in the 1930s, it was replaced by a score of small businesses and light manufacturing firms that prospered behind the looming brick walls. When those companies began slipping away as well in the 1970s, the landlord happily leased space to any one with rent money. Eventually, a developer got hold of the property and creating luxury apartments where once there had just been a warren of improvised studios and one-bedrooms, staking the first claim in the gold rush that was soon to come.
But at the point when Racioppo and some pals from the neighborhood took over a roomy studio there, the rent was the usual bargain price. After all, this was Brooklyn. The studio doubled as work space and crash pad. It was also host to many outstanding parties. These were simple affairs involving wine and beer, and a phonograph spinning the memorably urban sounds of the era. They would sing just above the record player set at full volume: t.
The parties ended with a climb to the roof to enjoy something offered by every building perched on South Brooklyn's ridgeline: a shimmering view across the river to the lights of Manhattan, the twin towers of the World Trade Center soaring above all else.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Brooklyn Before"
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Table of Contents
Preface, vii,
Before the Gold Rush Tom Robbins, 1,
A Solitary Walker in Brooklyn Julia Van Haaften, 13,
Fortieth Street, 33,
Fifteenth Street, 53,
Changes, 81,
God and Country, 111,
Country and God, 131,
Acknowledgments, 155,
Biographies, 157,
What People are Saying About This
Brooklyn Before is a delight. I see visual threads from many of Larry Racioppo’s projects intersecting these photographs: the car fins, the plaid pants, the boom box. The effect is to convey an urban grittiness that was authentic working-class reality in this patch of Brooklyn. Fantastic!
The streets shown here take me back to when I first lived in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is wonderful to revisit that vibrant ethnic urban life in Larry Racioppo’s amazing photographs. As I pored over the pages, I was once again impressed how this wonderful borough has always been a place for immigrants, the home of aspiring working-class and middle-class families. Before Brooklyn shows us the past and holds lessons for the future.
If you’re born and raised in Brooklyn like me, the rhythms and attitudes within Larry Racioppo’s photographs are like voices of old friends: They return you to your truest self. If you’re not, these images invite you into inscrutably odd and cool neighborhoods. Walking the same turf Racioppo mapped out, as I do each day, reveals scant evidence of what his camera captured. Before these streets became hip to hipsters and real to realtors—before Brooklyn became a brand—they contained worlds now nearly vanished. When I open this book, these worlds spring defiantly back to life.
In this eye-popping jewel of a book Larry Racioppo immortalizes the Park Slope Brooklyn where I was raised before it lost its unique character when it lost its unique characters. Brooklyn Before is as close as we can get to saving what was once a glorious working class Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Before offers a glimpse of a forgotten Brooklyn and captures the grit, diversity, and community of South Slope in the 1970s, before the influx of boutique coffee shops and multi-million-dollar rehabbed brownstones. Larry Racioppo’s images focus on working class families and communities during a challenging historical moment for New York City.
