Overview

"Photographer Barbara Mensch's rediscovered photo archives and interview tapes capture symbolic transformations of Lower Manhattan. Many of the images are published here for the first time. The photographs evoke the passage of time by dividing the images into three parts: the 1980s, 1990s, and the new millennium (2000 and beyond). The photographer shares with the viewer: ""I would shoot ruins of buildings, the demolition of famous waterfront saloons, ancient alleyways, and in some cases, 19th-century buildings destroyed by mysterious fires. There were images of floods and other calamities/ catastrophes in lower Manhattan, culminating with 9/11. These photos captured what had been, what no longer exists. They served as my visual timeline. What did the passage of the many decades reveal to me? What dynamics were in my images of the same streets I repeatedly walked for years?"" Her images from the Fulton Fish Market in the 1980s document the generations of immigrants and their children pursuing a gritty American Dream next to the Brooklyn Bridge. Photos from the 1990s present images of floods and fires that paralyzed the area juxtaposed with continued bulldozing to clear the way for luxury housing. Politics reshaped Manhattan's skyline by encouraging new commercial shopping, food, and restaurant destinations. This restructuring marked the beginning of the end of Downtown's blue-collar origins and white-collar replacement, challenging us to ask, ""What was lost?"" In the 2000s, the seminal event: September 11th, reinforced Downtown's rebirth as the global economic engine with no room for the past. Also included in this section is an interview with an insider privy to the mafia leadership of the Fulton Fish Market during Giuliani's opportunistic crusade against them in the 1980s. Dan Barry, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, offers a poetic and insightful tribute to the artist and photographer. *Definitions: falling off suggests a decline in quality or quantity, falling off suggests the passage of time or changes over time, falling off suggests a detachment, an alternative path to a questionable destination, falling off suggests a separation, falling off suggests something that comes to pass."

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9781531504397

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Reviews

"A falling off can indicate decline or diminishment, often gradual--the petering out of a business, for instance, or the decay of a once marvellous building. Or it can refer to something abrupt, absolute. . . Both senses haunt Barbara Mensch's photographic history of lower Manhattan, in particular the Fulton Fish Market, which, for a time, was an island unto itself.-- ""The New Yorker"" Photographer Mensch documents the upheaval of downtown New York City's working-class and immigrant communities from the 1980s to the 2000s with images of disasters and bulldozing.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Fall Announcements"" Barbara Mensch's seminal photographs of the Fulton Fish Market in its waning days of the early 1980s are given new life--and subsequent historical context--with her recently published book, A Falling-Off Place: The Transformation of Lower Manhattan.-- ""The Tribeca Trib"" In this striking collection, photographer Mensch traces three decades of change on Lower Manhattan's eastern waterfront, paying particular attention to the Fulton Street Fish Market. The beautiful images, often rich in chiaroscuro rendered by streetlights illuminating rainy nights or misty mornings, are complemented by quotes from residents and workers who provide insight into life in Lower Manhattan prior to gentrification. Visually evocative and spare on text . . . It's ideal for anyone nostalgic for old New York. -- ""Publishers Weekly"" Barbara Mensch's A Falling-Off Place features a variety of extraordinary photographs, ranging from images of demolition, to men at work, to abstract interiors, and to individual portraits. Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, her work documents the material reality of New York in an unprecedented way. And it offers a vision of the relentless physical transformation of the city and its impact on working people and their labor.---Daniel Czitrom, author of New York Exposed From the Foreword by Dan Barry: there is Barbara Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain. She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city's inexorable evolution.---Dan Barry"

"Photographer Mensch documents the upheaval of downtown New York City's working-class and immigrant communities from the 1980s to the 2000s with images of disasters and bulldozing.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Fall Announcements"" In this striking collection, photographer Mensch traces three decades of change on Lower Manhattan's eastern waterfront, paying particular attention to the Fulton Street Fish Market. The beautiful images, often rich in chiaroscuro rendered by streetlights illuminating rainy nights or misty mornings, are complemented by quotes from residents and workers who provide insight into life in Lower Manhattan prior to gentrification. Visually evocative and spare on text . . . It's ideal for anyone nostalgic for old New York. -- ""Publishers Weekly"" Barbara Mensch's A Falling-Off Place features a variety of extraordinary photographs, ranging from images of demolition, to men at work, to abstract interiors, and to individual portraits. Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, her work documents the material reality of New York in an unprecedented way. And it offers a vision of the relentless physical transformation of the city and its impact on working people and their labor.---Daniel Czitrom, author of New York Exposed From the Foreword by Dan Barry: there is Barbara Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain. She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city's inexorable evolution.---Dan Barry"

Barbara Mensch's A Falling-Off Place features a variety of extraordinary photographs, ranging from images of demolition, to men at work, to abstract interiors, and to individual portraits. Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, her work documents the material reality of New York in an unprecedented way. And it offers a vision of the relentless physical transformation of the city and its impact on working people and their labor.---Daniel Czitrom, author of New York Exposed From the Foreword by Dan Barry: there is Barbara Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain. She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city's inexorable evolution.---Dan Barry

Author Information

Barbara G. Mensch has had numerous exhibitions of her photographic work. Her images are represented in some of New York City’s most prestigious galleries, and her work is included in important collections, including those of MoMA, the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Fundacion Televisa of Mexico City, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the author of South Street and In the Shadow of Genius: The Brooklyn Bridge and Its Creators.

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