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A Falling-Off Place
A FALLING-OFF PLACE
The Transformation of Lower Manhattan

Barbara G. Mensch

Empire State Editions

An imprint of Fordham University Press New York 2023
Copyright © 2023 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,
photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and
does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats.
Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com/empire-state-editions.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023905698

Printed in Italy

25 24 23 5 4 3 2 1

First edition
contents

vii Foreword by Dan Barry

1 Introduction

5 Part 1 The 1980s: Making a Living on the Waterfront

49 Part 2 The 1990s: Setting the Stage for a Real Estate Boom

71 Part 3 The New Millennium: Managing Change

100 Talking about the Old Days

115 Acknowledgments

v
foreword

Long after the Fulton Fish Market of Lower Manhattan closed in 2005, long after its
denizens were shoved off to more efficient but less evocative accommodations in the
Bronx, its aroma lingered. Especially when the rain fell on South Street.

Rain had the power to conjure the open waters from the concrete and cobblestones
of Gotham—a piscatorial perfume born of 175 sea-salted years. Just inhale the wet
air and there it was, all of it, again.

The fish were laid out in coffins of wax, deadened eyes staring in judgment. The
splotches of guts, gray, white, and scarlet on floors wet from ice melt. The late-night
spills of coffee and early-morning spills of beer. The grappling hooks and beeping
forklifts, the high-church blasphemies and what-the-fuck-you-looking-at stares.
The brackish sweat of nocturnal men.

And, somewhere, their good-luck Madonna, the weathered woman called Annie
whose name wasn’t Annie. There she is, flashing her breasts for the odd laugh,
hawking the wares in her cart—socks, newspapers, whatever you need, sweetheart—
and calling out her siren song of reassurance. Yoo-hoo. Yoo-hoo.

This briny Brigadoon seemed to exist only at night. By mid-morning, the trucks

vii
 and the fish and the men and Annie were gone, as if subsumed into the forever dusk
beneath the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive until the next nightfall.

The market was more than a gritty anachronism where fish were bought and sold.
The place helped to ground New York City in its humble but raucous roots; to
remind us that before Central Park and St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Empire
State Building and every other touchstone that makes one think of sleek New York,
the metropolis was a Dutch-then-English scrum at the bottom end of an island,
dependent upon the sea. Take one step south from its southernmost tip, and you fell
off the earth.

Now, if you venture to where the Fulton Fish Market once charged the air with
aromas to turn the stomach and stir the imagination, you will find only the faintest
co-opted remnants. One of the market’s old structures, the Tin Building, was
disassembled and then reimagined as a rarefied culinary mall. It features upscale
restaurants and shops offering fine cheeses, artisanal baked goods, expensive
confections—and, yes, fish, staged behind glass as if to photograph more than to
consume.

There is no longer any scent of what was. Thankfully, though, 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, the obliteration of the past by gentrification, the
irreversible dominion of profit over preservation.

For nearly a half-century, this visual artist has explored the streets of Lower
Manhattan, her boxy Rolleiflex camera—and then her iPhone—at the ready. As the
photographs in this collection demonstrate, she has the eye and the ear. She both
sees and hears the loudness in the stillness.

She recognized early on that no place as wondrously crude and authentic as the
Fulton Fish Market could survive the glass-and-steel creep toward the waterfront.
But she also saw something else in its stalls and saloons: the dignity of hard work.
viii
In the 1980s, Mensch showed up at the market, then kept showing up and showing
up and showing up, until she was as much a part of the market as the faded lettering
on the ancient brick. She saw, captured, and preserved. The fish toss. Those sunken-
shoulder moments at the bar. The man-beasts of burden, hauling another load from
the icehouse. The secret brotherhood.

And Mensch did not go away. This was not some two-month art project; this was
her life. She bore witness to the suits with their briefcases and proprietary air. To
the ancient bricks coming down, piling like pieces of a puzzle beyond solving, and
the girders rising, harbingers in the sky. To the weary, fatalistic expressions of those
hard-callused fishmongers.

A static city cannot survive. The story of New York is and always has been about
change. Sometimes the change is necessary; sometimes, as in the case of the original
Pennsylvania Station, it is unforgivable; and sometimes it follows in the wake of
catastrophe. Here in this volume, the Twin Towers—only a few blocks west of the
fish market—rise and fade into a dreamlike cloud cover over Lower Manhattan.
And here they disappear again, only now the clouds are nightmarish, ominous, the
product of an era-altering terrorist attack. It is a falling-off place.

Determined to record—to remember—Mensch photographed Lower Manhattan

from Canal Street south to Whitehall Street, as it grieved, processed, continued its
transformation. All the while, she remained keenly aware of the surrounding waters.

Dark, mysterious, and central to the origin story of New York, they stir and rumble
in endless restlessness. Then, with no warning, they rise up to salt-slap our faces and
remind us of our folly, our impermanence, our need to keep moving.

Dan Barry
January 2023

ix
x
A Falling-Off Place
introduction

June 2020.

I woke up to another day of apprehension. Perhaps this would be the day when
someone in cyberspace would convince me that the sky was not really blue; that it
was OK to lie through your teeth or spew frightening conspiracy theories designed to
scare a whole population. I was thinking whether the COVID pandemic would keep
me isolated forever. It seemed that reality itself had been upended, rejected, and
condemned. To fight against these dispiriting thoughts, I would go on a journey back
in time.

Reflexively, I stared up at the storage area above my darkroom. Amid construction

materials, books, and toys, I was determined to find my early work. Hand-printed
photographs, strips of negative film, and folders of typewritten notes were buried
beneath other items. The material dated from the 1980s, when I moved to the
waterfront in Lower Manhattan. Perhaps looking at this work, I thought, would
rescue me from a downward spiral. But why?

I remembered photographing in an unadvertised haunt located on Peck Slip, just a

few steps from the East River. In a smoke-filled room late at night, grizzled-looking
men were gambling at the far end, their grappling hooks resting on tables alongside

1
 shots of anisette. In my mind’s eye I could see “Mikey the Watchman” sitting across
a table from me. We engaged in a conversation, and I posed a question: “What’s
your definition of doing something bad?” A sinister smile that showed absolutely
no innocence crept up on Mikey’s beautiful face, and then he responded, “I can’t see
walkin’ up to somebody and robbin’ dem outright . . . . Rob a big corporation, dey can
swallow it. Why rob a poor guy dat’s got ta’ feed his family?”

At that moment, I remembered how the workers at the old Fulton Fish Market spoke
genuinely about who they were, defining their assured sense of self. There was a
direct and honest response to my queries that contrasted with the present day, where
many have come to accept less than the truth.

I then found the unlabeled boxes. Some of the forgotten 8 × 10 prints were portraits
of the men who had worked at the Fulton Market. Gazing into my camera, I sensed
the subjects’ eerily communicating (to me) their inner truths. Other boxes of
photographs contained contact sheets from decades of traversing, again and again,
the familiar streets of Lower Manhattan—Chinatown, Tribeca, and the Bowery.

I shot ruins of buildings, the demolition of famous waterfront saloons, ancient

alleyways, and, in some cases, nineteenth-century buildings destroyed by mysterious
fires (and soon after replaced with new developments). The boxes also contained
images of floods and other Lower Manhattan calamities and catastrophes,
culminating in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Together, they became
my personal visual timeline. What did the passage of decades reveal to me? What
dynamics were at play in my images of the same streets that I walked repeatedly for
years? What fell off as the old was swept away by the new?

2
Lower Manhattan, with its sharp-edged shoreline of piers and landing docks that
made New York City one of the busiest port cities in the world, ca. 1850s

3
part 1
the 1980s

making a living on the waterfront

I’m proud I’m an East Side boy. You could look up and see the Brooklyn Bridge
going over it. First came East Broadway, second came Henry Street, third came
Madison Street, fourth came Monroe Street, fifth came Cherry Street, sixth
came Water Street, seventh came Front Street, and the last came South Street.
That’s where all the ships came in. . . . It was known as the Fourth Ward. I think Boss
Tweed gave it that name. . . . It was the roughest neighborhood in the city and your
life wasn’t worth a penny. They would hit you, throw you down the stairs.

O l d J ohnny (fr om C her ry Str eet), r etired box er

5
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