Look Up
© Adam Friedberg - 245 W 34.
“This is not a statement on gentrification,” Adam Friedberg says. He’ll say this numerous times throughout our interview, almost fearful that I will misinterpret his work—paint him as the New York City neophobe, clinging to the remnants of the New York that Patti Smith and The Clash sing about.
Friedberg’s recent projects document architectural gentrification in the East Village and surrounding neighborhoods. However, he’s very conscious about articulating the difference between his intent and the potential interpretation of the subject matter captured.
“I don’t feel that I’m some kind of visionary, trying to defend the status quo… this is not political.”
Friedberg is a New York City local, having lived in the East Village for close to 30 years. “This wasn’t a neighborhood for rich people,” he tells me. On an avenue where you might now see fitness influencers and film majors brunching at picnic tables, decades ago the same streets were home to junkies and the occasional chicken bobbing and clucking in an empty lot. “It was a place where you could be anything you wanted to be and you were accepted. I mean you were ignored, but that was being accepted. It wasn’t a wonderland.”
© Adam Friedberg - 89 1st Ave.
Friedberg, like many New Yorkers, has trouble articulating his work outside the context of the city. Stories of the city are inextricably linked with his professional and artistic career, as he chronicles his New York City past. He regales me with stories about his eight-bedroom apartment on Avenue B, which has housed bohemians, migrants, and artists, his cocktail party run-ins with architectural up-and-comers, and the rich history of cultural landmarks, like Katz Deli. He tells me how Katz Deli recently sold the properties around their storefront—twelve lots down Ludlow and across Houston—for 80 million dollars to NYC developers.
“Where ‘Katz’ used to fit in as an unnoticed single story along East Houston—it’s essentially turned into Epcot. You go into this Fantasy World of the Lower East Side to get yourself a pastrami sandwich with people from Iowa. There’s no semblance of the neighborhood that it was once part of… it’s one of the weirdest places downtown.”
© Adam Friedberg - 205 East Houston
I ask Adam about the origins of his personal projects, The Empty Lot Project and The Single Story Project. He explains that in the early 90’s, a majority of the blocks between Avenue A and Avenue D were scattered with empty lots. He jokes that like most photographers he’s extraordinarily self-centered, viewing the world in relation to himself. He’s drawn to architectural structures and spaces in the village that are precarious in the same way that his own place in the neighborhood is precarious. While these projects were personal to him, most people were uninterested and unmoved. He understood, though, telling me, “what I was shooting was very repetitious and there was so much nothing there. But pretty much, nothing was what I was trying to shoot.”
Leading me down St. Marks Place with his words, he shares the inception of The Single Story Project. Two single story buildings—a McDonalds and the Continental, which were flanked by two larger buildings—created a negative space that caught his eye. His tendency for analogies leads him to an anecdote about losing his tooth. “If you have ever broken a tooth, there's a weird feeling of powerlessness and you feel like everything is crumbling away. I got that feeling when I looked at this block and saw the emptiness hovering over these two tiny buildings formed by the taller buildings around them.” He captures these vanishing buildings with large-format sheet film, unobstructed by humans or cars, which demands a rigorous schedule of shooting in a narrow window of the early morning hours.
© Adam Friedberg - From The Single Story Project
For decades, the area between 3rd Avenue and Avenue C was almost entirely comprised of single story buildings. They’re basically all gone now. His attitude, which teeters between sardonic and indifferent, does not overly-sentimentalize the value of these older structures.
“These are not loved spaces. They’re not useful spaces. They’re not architecturally significant.”
For the most part, these were buildings that he hadn’t paid much attention to, or hadn’t even noticed, really, prior to shooting this project. Yet, now that they’re gone there seems to be a coldness in the modern monotony of the condos filling their places. I told him that I noticed many of the condos, seemingly appearing out of thin air in the East Village, did not look occupied. We mused that it was perhaps this inherent coldness, which is antithetical to the village aspect of downtown New York, that keeps people from moving in. “When you have a building that has fifteen units, takes up a whole corner, with a 7-Eleven at the bottom—that’s not a neighborhood, that’s a mall.” Pausing, he says, “But I’m not a preservationist. I’m not trying to tell anybody what to do.”
© Adam Friedberg - 71 4th Ave.
Friedberg is acutely aware that he is not a victimized native. As an original gentrifier of a predominantly working-class Polish, Italian and Puerto Rican area, he doesn’t feel he’s in a position to blame or judge others. Rather than wagging a finger at the NYU students who undoubtedly are raising rents and pushing NYC inhabitants to the peripheries of the city, he’s documenting and displaying the architectural changes in downtown Manhattan.
Friedberg hopes that in his small way, he might help start a dialogue between community developers and everyone else. While the texture, grit and character of downtown Manhattan is structurally disappearing, this is not an uncommon complaint through the past century. From Dutch settlers to merchants to working-class immigrants, to beatniks and hippies, each displaced group indubitably laments the loss of something. Sharing these stories are an integral part of Friedberg’s work, capturing the fragility of the city’s impermanence. This is not a statement on gentrification— it’s the story of it.
