Why can't we all live in NYC?

Solinar said:
Try shooting during the lunch hour. Plenty of folks will be out and about.
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...which I do... the lunch hour is great! As well... summer is just around the corner so all the people cooped up in the winter stampede outdoors. Speaking of stampede... The Stampede is a 2 week stretch of non-stop partying for many in the city (and tourists).

Also... I've discovered that almost every weekend during the summer months, there's a festival of some sort somwhere...

... maybe its just the winter blues catching up to me.... 🙄
 
"Nasty parts of cities"? I doubt if 5% of the people on this forum would have the guts to go for a stroll in some of the "nastier" neighborhoods in metro Miami (where I live) or any other large city carrying Leicas, doubly so if you're white or don't speak at least a smattering of Haitian Kreyole or Spanish. And then there's cranking up the ISO and shooting at night. Any takers?
 
I've lived in NYC twice in the past but unfortunately I was hardly shooting both times. My first stint was in the early 90s when I was studying architecture at Pratt Institute. I was living in a dodgy neighborhood called Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. It would have been pretty dicey to do street photography then, as muggings and murders were regular occurences at the time. Even cab drivers in Manhattan would refuse to take me home to that neighborhood, for fear of getting robbed.

The second time around I was in grad school at Columbia in Morningside Heights in 2001. By then, Giuliani had cleaned up the city and the lack of crime and grime made the city somewhat less compelling to shoot, but certainly a lot safer.

I look at Bruce Davidson's photos of New York in the 80s and I am amazed at how daring he was, doing what he did. It was probably akin to being a war photographer.
 
I use to live in Williamsburg Brooklyn, an abandoned part of the city, before it got conquered by hipsters, yuppies and wanna be artists. Had a loft in front of an old sugar refinery that stretched along the East River before it was abandoned. We lived in a no-man's- land: In a three block area there were no people living outside of our small building. In our first month living there, there was a breakin, and our loft was ransacked on Christmas Eve.

One night there was a noise that kinda sounded like an air conditioner being dragged down steps. My girlfriend asked, "What is that?" I said, "I don't know," but I recognized the sound of someone emptying a magizine, probably a 9mm. An other time I found a shell casing just outside my door.

Lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The tenent upstairs, a cop tried to reassure me that iwe lived in a very safe neighborhood, after an old woman who lived down the block was mugged right in front of our house. This happened in the first week living there, just after we moved in. Bill the cop said, "This is a very-very safe neighborhood. There's usually only one murder in Greenpoint a year." In the three and a half years I lived there, two of the annual murders occured within two blocks of my house. A young man was stabbed in the brain with an ice pick while sitting on his mother's stoop. The second murder involved a drunk being beaten to death in the park.

Now I live in Long Island City. The Citigroup skyscrapper is my backyard. I have 24 hour foot petrol provided by Citigroup because I live next to a terrorist target. When it snows Citibank shovels my sidewalk.

At the age of 51 I want to move to Vermont. BTW Santa Fe is also nice. I'm getting too old for this.

Calzone
 
Many European cities, especially in the south, don't have separate 'business' and 'residential' districts.

We get houses and apartments right next to shops, offices, and restaurants.

So the city is busy from early morning to late at night, and sometimes all through the night too.

It's interesting how different cultures are organized around the world.
 
I live in a city of 70,000 after living in Toronto for 10 years. I kind of enjoy shooting the emptiness of this city but I also enjoy my visits back to Toronto for shooting crowds. I think downtown Toronto is similar to New York in that many people live right downtown and after hours the city is still busy.
 
ClaremontPhoto said:
Many European cities, especially in the south, don't have separate 'business' and 'residential' districts.

We get houses and apartments right next to shops, offices, and restaurants.

So the city is busy from early morning to late at night, and sometimes all through the night too.

It's interesting how different cultures are organized around the world.
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Yes but I’d rather spend an evening in NYC than Naples or Marseilles, and Venice is deserted in the evenings
 
I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison. You do have a point about zoning & land use that separates residential & work areas, & North American cities tend to embrace that much more than elsewhere in the world because of the "blank slate" of the New World, the dominant Anglo-American culture, & the greater availability of cheap, habitable land. However, much of NYC is zoned just like other U.S. cities, e.g., business districts like Midtown & the Wall St./financial district (or what's left) are plenty quiet @ night & on weekends, just like the Loop in Chicago.

NYC is just much bigger & denser than Chicago; Brooklyn alone has roughly the same population as the city of Chicago (not greater Chicagoland). At some point, cities become so dense that there will always be people on the street. E.g., even in the brand-new, bland parts of Shanghai & Beijing, which are strictly zoned & organized around massive high-rises, there is more street life going on than in most of Washington, DC, which is mostly "suburban" like most North American cities. If you think NYC, London, & Budapest are hopping, you should visit Tokyo, HK, or Shanghai.

swoop said:
Every city in the States is exactly the same. The only other places I've seen alive at all hours of the day is Budapest and London.

The thing about New York is that its the only city in the U.S. where people live and work in the same area. And so it's always alive and bustling. The first time I went to Chicago I was astounded how a city of 2 million could be so quiet. And it's because "Downtown" is where everyone works and hardly anyone lives. So once the business day is done, it's desolate.
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Chriscrawfordphoto said:
My hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the same. The downtown is a dead zone, and the suburbs are a cultural wasteland. I wouldn't want to live in New York. Too expensive, too many people, too dirty. I miss Santa Fe.
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Wilmington rolls up the sidewalk at 5:30 PM most nights as well. Another vote for Santa Fe over NYC...
 
i left new york in 1972 and still miss it.
i go back occasionally but it's not the same being a tourist.

when i left new york city for edmonton, the population of n.y.c. was 19 million and the population of canada was 22 million. (iirc) talk about culture shock and living in wide open spaces.

joe
 
I think Calgary suffers from what a lot of "new" cities suffer from. They were largely developed after the advent of automobiles and therefore most of their population is sprawled out over a large geographic area. I find that generally cities outside those considered part of the Northeast (US and Canada) lack a living downtown. San Francisco is an exception. Ottawa is an exception, but the other way around, it's in the northeast, but is largely deserted at night (save for the small area around the market).
 
I'd like to suggest another way of looking at your 'conundrum'. I face a similar situation in my bit of suburbia. I think of it (street photography in a place with a "lack of life", on the surface at least) as a huge challenge worth taking on. For me, the question is "how can I create a powerful photographic representation of "suburbia" and everything that the word suggests?

I live near San Francisco and I venture there often with my camera. There's a lot of "life" there on the streets and so I find myself taking a lot of pictures. This can be deceiving, in my view. Just because I'm burning up a lot of film doesn't mean I'm producing anything more significant that I would here in my little town. My test of what's worth photographing is whether I feel something (good or bad) in that environment. And I must say that I have very strong feelings, like yours, of there being a "lack of life" here. So.... WHY? Why is there a lack of life on those streets. As soon as I ask that question, lots of thoughts start streaming in regarding photo opportunities. Thoughts like "Where is everyone? What are they doing? How can I represent this 'emptiness' on film?" Questions like these have led many well-known photographers onto the path of major photographic projects.

Best wishes to you in your efforts to find your own "important questions" to pursue. They can fill a lifetime!
 
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