The East Village Then and Now

An exciting and essential record of downtown Manhattan—iconic street scenes captured from the same vantage point in 1980s and today

When photographer Daniel Root moved to the East Village in the early 1980s, this constantly changing neighborhood was in one of its periods of greatest ferment. Multiple immigrant groups maintained enclaves there—including Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Dominicans, and Poles—even as drug dealers plied their trade in abandoned buildings and young artists fl...