ON the north side of Broome Street, between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street, you can stand where a dead guy once lay. Of course in New York City you can stand on lots of spots where dead people once lay. There are, after all, “eight million stories in the naked city,” as the narrator of “The Naked City,” the 1948 film noir classic, intoned. But as Andrew Izzo sprawled on this sidewalk on the Lower East Side in 1942, Arthur Fellig, one of the city’s most famous photographers, took his picture.
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesA recent view of the block that housed Sammy's Bowery Follies, above, and a photo of the club by Weegee, below. More Photos »
via nytimes.comLate on the night of Feb. 2, 1942, Izzo and accomplices tried to hold up the Spring Arrow Social & Athletic Club, near the Bowery. Shot by an off-duty cop, Izzo staggered toward Elizabeth Street and fell dead on his face, his gun skittering across the sidewalk.
The first photographer on the scene was Fellig, better known as Weegee. He was almost always the first photographer on the scene.
Born Usher Fellig in 1899, in an eastern province of Austria, he came with his family through Ellis Island (where his name was Americanized to Arthur) to the Lower East Side in 1910. He left home as a teenager and began working as an assistant to a street photographer who shot tintypes of children on a pony. Through the 1920s he worked as a darkroom assistant at The New York Times and Acme Newspictures, which was later absorbed by U.P.I. Photos.
Weegee’s peak period as a freelance crime and street photographer was a whirl of perpetual motion running from the mid-1930s into the postwar years. Ceaselessly prowling the streets during the graveyard shift, he took thousands of photographs that defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of hoodlums and gangsters, Bowery bums and slumming swells, tenement dwellers and victims of domestic brawls, fires and car crashes. He gave it its enduring nickname, the Naked City.
“Weegee captured night in New York back when it was lonely and desolate and scary,” said Tim McLoughlin, editor of the “Brooklyn Noir” anthology series, the third volume of which has just been published by Akashic Books. “He once said he wanted to show that in New York millions of people lived together in a state of total loneliness.”
Manhattan has changed a lot since Weegee’s heyday. Now the Naked City is probably best preserved in the archives of the International Center of Photography, which houses some 20,000 of Weegee’s photographs, along with hundreds of his filmstrips, the newspapers and magazines where his work originally appeared, and two of his hats.
Christopher George, an archivist at the center, has created online maps of many Manhattan sites associated with Weegee. He led me to Centre Market Place, between Broome and Grand Streets. It’s now a quiet row of renovated town houses in the shadow of the former Police Headquarters building, itself converted to luxury apartments.
But when Weegee lived in a single room at 5 Centre Market Place from the mid-1930s to 1947, the street was a drab block of tenements inhabited by reporters and photographers who worked the crime beat. No. 4, known as “the shack,” was their main hangout. Frank Lava’s gunsmith shop, with its wooden revolver sign, was at No. 6. Weegee lived over the John Jovino Gun Shop at 5. (It has since moved, with its own revolver sign, around the corner to Grand Street.) You can still see over the door at No. 7 the gold-lettered sign for Sile Inc., purveyor of “Humane Police Equipment.”
Every morning the narrow block was crowded with paddy wagons (Weegee called them “pie wagons”), bringing in the night’s arrests from various precincts for booking and processing. The newshounds crowded the sidewalk for the morning “perp walk,” when cops paraded their handcuffed catch.
“The perp walk is a combination of courtesy and hubris on the part of the police department,” said Mr. McLoughlin, a former court officer who bought his first service revolver at Jovino’s shop in 1983. “The press wants the photos, and the police want the credit. So the perp walk could be rather elaborately planned.”
Weegee sometimes bribed the police to bring a perp in a different entrance, “so he’d be the only guy standing there with his camera, while everybody else was waiting around the corner,” Mr. McLoughlin said. One of his most striking perp-walk shots was of Norma Parker, a pretty young woman who in 1936 held up a number of restaurants on lower Broadway using a cap pistol, for which The Daily Mirror nicknamed her the Broadway Gun Girl.
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