Vintage 1970s Photos Show Lost Sites of NYC's Lower East Side
A quest to find his grandmother's birthplace led Richard Marc Sakols on a mission to capture his changing neighborhood on film.
About a week ago, I met a couple of friends for dinner at Westville in the East Village before going to see another friend perform in an improv show. (For out-of-towners: this isn’t some kind of confusing neighborhood ‘east-west-weast-eest’ code language, Westville is a delicious sorta-vegetarian restaurant and there are a few of them scattered around downtown Manhattan.) After shoving a lot of vegetables in our faces like a pack of crazed wildebeests, we left and wandered down Avenue A towards the theatre.
Amid the normal flow of passersby (rainbow-haired young women with high-waisted shorts, large men with tiny dogs, dudes with battered guitar cases, professional-looking people angrily walking while chewing on a slice of $1 pizza, etc.) sauntered these two white-haired women, arm-in-arm. Aw, how cute, I thought. Wait, are they both wearing the same dress? No, they’re probably just dresses with similar patterns. Nope, those are definitely the same dress. On purpose? Why? Are there more of them?
There were only two of them. Were they sisters? Partners? Best friends? Members of a fundamentalist zig-zag cult? Did they happen upon each other by chance earlier today and decide to become friends? Was I just suffering a hallucination brought on by sweltering heat and too many sweet potato fries? I have so many questions, and so few answers.
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