Barbara Mensch’s new photographic history, “A Falling-Off Place,” begins in the early eighties, and shows a city transformed.
, in this magazine, of its proprietor. Mensch’s bewitching portraits of individual salesmen and unloaders are of a piece with Mitchell’s sympathetic character studies—tonal representations of personalities that are inseparable from their environs.
Mensch was in the streets until seven in the morning, when white-collar workers headed to Lower Manhattan’s financial institutions. A photograph from 1983 shows the cultural clash that occurred in these early hours, as the rest of the city came alive.
Mensch catalogues the spasmodic conversion of lower Manhattan during the next decade. An ornamented Victorian clock gathers dust on Duane Street, and an obliterating fog envelops a security guard along Schermerhorn Row. Floods, demolition, and arson clear the way for glass-and-concrete condominiums and chauffeured limousines. The ultimate destruction comes on September 11, 2001, an event that Mensch documented as it was happening.
One of Mensch’s photographs from 2020, when the city tore down both the Tin Building and the New Market Building, illustrates the cross-hatching of historical periods characteristic of New York. The rigging used to demolish the New Market Building presses up against the picture plane so that it appears magnified, a monumental array of intersecting lines and forms resembling a David Smith sculpture.
What is lost and what is gained in such transformations? Mensch doesn’t address the question directly, but it’s not hard to see what sort of answer she might give. The book’s final photographs, from the past couple of years, depict several new high-rises that seem indifferent to the people below—people perhaps unmoored by a city that no longer affords the familiarity of distinct neighborhoods.
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