Forgotten Holga shots and the sad loss of the Cheyenne Diner

So I have all this 120 film that I shot in my first couple of years of living in New York and am starting to get around to actually processing it and scanning it. And it’s great when you find things like this. These are two dear friends of mine who I worked with at Milk Studios and these two pics were shot on a cold 2008day when we used to attempt ‘cultural Saturdays’. This was also during my Holga phase too. Behind Aly and Danielle is the Cheyenne Diner. It was built in 1940, was a beloved Hell’s Kitchen mainstay  and was frequented by a very diverse range of ‘old New York’ personalities (David Letterman and Jerry Lewis used to eat there a lot). It was shuttered in 2008 when developer Greg O’Connell bought it to close it and build a (you guessed it) condo building. All was not lost however as the developer decided to actually move the diner (some of these were built off site and trucked in) to Red Hook, Brooklyn BUT it was too big to drive over the bridges that line the East River into Brooklyn (many diners were built off site and moved into their location in a single moveable piece. In the end New York’s loss was Alabama’s gain as it was shipped to Birmingham in tact. The sad thing is that diners used to dot the streets of Manhattan. They were frequented by customers of all walks of life and professions and financial demographics. Artists and businessmen would rub shoulders late into the night at the same counter or booths mulling over their daily lives. I feel sad that this integral part of New Yorks’ culture is almost gone, but lucky to have been able to shoot a photo of it.

Farewell Coney Island

It’s the last days of November, it’s cold and grey and the type of day where the sun belts through every once in a while but it doesn’t warm anything. Going out to Coney Island on a day like this is like another world after the summer crowds have moved on and the sideshows have shuttered their store fronts. Like a ghost town, a couple of businesses on the boardwalk stay open during the week, defiantly, like Ruby’s Bar (packed on July 4th weekend, probably sees 5 customers a day this time of year) or Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs, and the local businesses opposite the eerily silent fun park. It’s nothing short of atmospheric, made more so by the fact that it is slowly being torn down to be redeveloped into a Disneyland-esque funpark. It’ll be a shame once it re-zoned, cleaned up and gentrified. It feels like one of the last pieces of old, old New York that you can walk through. These pics were shot on the Lomo ‘Sproketrocket’ landscape camera that shoots widescreen style and you can rewind the film manually to to multiple exposures wherever you want on the film. Great fun. Fingers got damn near frozen though.

I HEART POLAROID

Polaroid kicks ass. Real Polaroid that you shoot, and pull out of the camera by hand, and wait for it to develop. Having a Polaroid app for your smart phone is cool and all as you can take Polaroid style snaps without costs. But Polaroid is tangible, and real, and you can hold it, and there’s a romanticism. Long live Polaroid. I shot these on an old Polaroid land camera that I found at a flea market in Hell’s Kitchen. Cost me five bucks. Sweet.

Click on an image to see a larger version (Shot in New York City, Brooklyn and California)