View allAll Photos Tagged eastharlem
On April 8, 2014, MTA Police and Metro-North Railroad personnel rescued a dog from the tracks at Harlem-125th Street. The dog, named Tie, is a shepherd/collie mix.
Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Joseph P. Chan
A massive fire under the MTA Metro-North Railroad elevated line on Park Av. near 118th St. caused a halt in train traffic while engineers assessed the stability of the structure. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo confers with MTA Metro-North President Joseph Giulietti.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit
With, amongst others, Chuck Rainey, Montego Joe, Richard Tee, Patty Bown and Cornell Dupree.
1970 French pressing on Barclay label.
We make you a pizza you can't refuse!
The "Est. 1937" date seems a little fictional, especially considering the LED zipper sign, or whatever those signs are called, was flashing "Grand Opening".
Crews clear debris on Metro-North tracks adjacent to scene of a building collapse at 116th St. and Park Ave. in East Harlem. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
A massive fire under the MTA Metro-North Railroad elevated line on Park Av. near 118th St. caused a halt in train traffic while engineers assessed the stability of the structure. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo surveys the scene.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit
Crews clear debris on Metro-North tracks adjacent to scene of a building collapse at 116th St. and Park Ave. in East Harlem. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
On April 8, 2014, MTA Police and Metro-North Railroad personnel rescued a dog from the tracks at Harlem-125th Street. The dog, named Tie, is a shepherd/collie mix.
Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Joseph P. Chan
"Susan Pearson, Hank Prussing Wed in Brooklyn". The New York Times, October 10, 1982: www.nytimes.com/1982/10/10/style/susan-pearson-hank-pruss...
Neighborhood report: Harlem/East Harlem; Fresh Paint for past Faces, by Nina Siegel, Published in The New York Times Sunday, june 13, 1999:
www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/nyregion/neighborhood-report-h...
How a Mural Captured a Community: “The Spirit of East Harlem” Remembered, by Elizabeth Harball on Dec 30th, 2011 archives.jrn.columbia.edu/2012-2013/theuptowner.org/2011/...
NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: HARLEM/EAST HARLEM; Fresh Paint for Past Faces By NINA SIEGAL Published: Sunday, June 13, 1999
Manny Vega stood atop a makeshift scaffold at 104th Street and Lexington Avenue, pressing the tip of his paintbrush to the azure sky.
He was putting the finishing touches on a beach scene, the last element in The Spirit of East Harlem, a mural started by Hank Prussing in 1973 and restored by Mr. Vega last winter and this spring. The piece, a towering homage to the neighborhood as it was in the 1970s, is made up of loving portraits of residents, set in a landscape of high-rises.
In the 25 years since it was completed, the mural had become a ghost of its former self, said Mr. Vega, an artist who was Mr. Prussings apprentice in the 1970s. Hope Community, a nonprofit housing developer that now owns the building, commissioned him to bring its vibrancy back to life.
Although the restored mural was shown to the public in December, it was not entirely done. The final detail, which Mr. Vega finished last week, was a rectangular area at the lower left corner that had been covered by a billboard. With the agreement of Mr. Prussing, who lives in Hartland, Conn., Mr. Vega used the space as a false billboard, advertising imaginary products.
His billboard advertises El Barrio Tours, with a mermaid emerging from tropical waters. Across the top, in bold letters, he has written Fantasia.
Theres all this talk about everybody coming into East Harlem, and about empowerment zones helping the area out, but it hasnt happened yet, Mr. Vega said. This is my way of making a political statement and trying to shake people up.
Mr. Vegas painting style and approach diverged slightly from that of Mr. Prussing, who is now an architect and said he decided not to take on the restoration because he lives three hours from the city.
Its a different point of view than what I was looking at 30 years ago, but it still shows the character, pride and individuality that I was looking at, Mr. Prussing said.
Mr. Prussing was not from East Harlem, but he was fascinated with the neighborhood and its people, said Mark S. Alexander, executive director of Hope Community.
Heres this white guy from the burbs on a scaffold in the middle of winter, painting a mural about the vitality of East Harlem on the side of a burned-out building, Mr. Alexander said. But he had a wonderful rapport with the people in the neighborhood, and I sense it as a very community-oriented exercise.
For his part, Mr. Vega said that repainting The Spirit of East Harlem made him want to do another mural. Look at those mouth-watering walls, he said, pointing to a clean surface of brick across the street. NINA SIEGAL
Photo: Manny Vega restoring a 1973 mural on a building on East 104th Street (Barbara Alper for The New York Times).
ART UNDER ATTACK A four-story mural at 104th Street and Lexington Avenue from the 1970s features real-life residents. This month, graffiti vandals struck.
By DAVID GONZALEZ Published: June 26, 2009 The walls of East Harlem can speak. Dozens of colorful murals line the narrow streets and wide avenues, celebrating pleneros and poets, rumberos and revolutionaries. Defying gentrification, their dazzling colors brighten sun-starved stretches and declare that the neighborhood’s residents refuse to budge.
“We have a special flavor in our community because of our murals,” said Carmen Vasquez, a longtime resident. “Our history and culture is there. They’re a way of saying who we are and where we’re going. Everything has a meaning.”
Lamentably so. Ms. Vasquez was dressed in black, the reason for her mourning evident behind her — huge bubble letters, recklessly slathered across the “The Spirit of East Harlem,” a four-story landmark by Hank Prussing that has graced the southeast corner of East 104th Street and Lexington Avenue since 1978.
The vandalism happened about two weeks ago, said Ms. Vasquez, the deputy executive director of Hope Community, a neighborhood housing and social services group that commissioned the mural. People have always respected the towering piece, which is a collage of real people from the neighborhood depicted playing music or dominoes, or relaxing on stoops.
“How could anyone feel they could come in and destroy this?” she said. “We have built this up over so many years. It took us so long to get here.”
The mural’s celebration of everyday life and real people makes it a singular work, said Jane Weissman, a muralist and an author of “On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City.”
“Until then, murals in New York had historical figures, if they had any recognizable figures at all,” she said. “This was the first time that a mural about a neighborhood, because it’s a celebration of a neighborhood, had people who were from there. Everybody in that mural was recognizable.”
Mr. Prussing photographed local characters before he started painting. Originally, the piece was going to cover only the upper part of the apartment building, but a grant let him expand it. The upper parts of the mural feature people — and famous logos for New York cultural touchstones like The Daily News and the salsa band Conjunto Libre, among others — and the lower part is an abstract mix of color, lines and letters.
“The whole concept was to make it interactive,” said Mr. Prussing. “I anticipated there would be graffiti which people would add in keeping with the collagelike look. But not much ever happened because people respected it.”
Not that others hadn’t tried some stunts over the years. “There was a woman I painted who didn’t like it because her friends said she looked fat,” he recalled. “She got somebody to go up with a ladder and paint her face out. She didn’t want to hurt it too much, so she used flesh-colored paint. We figured out who did it pretty quickly.”
Local activists have asked politicians and city officials for donations of paint and funds to restore the work as quickly as possible. They also hope to hold a community forum to educate young people on the importance of respecting the area’s many murals, which they say is the only guarantee of protection for public art.
The vandals who tagged the mural have not been found, so no one knows why they dared deface it. But other muralists said that these acts tend to happen when young graffiti writers want to become infamous as quickly as possible. Murals by more traditional brush-wielding artists may be more vulnerable than works by graffiti artists, said Hector Nazario, who paints under the name Nicer with Tats Cru, a Bronx-based group that paints murals around the city. He said his graffiti murals were usually immune to defacing because vandals knew they might run into him. The letters may be big, but the circle is small. Word travels fast.
“Remember that scene in ?Get Shorty’ where John Travolta is waiting in the living room with the TV on?” he said. “The last thing this kid wants is to get home and see us there having coffee with his mother when our intention is to yoke them up. That’s the scenario, us waiting for you, like ?Get Shorty.’ ”
web.archive.org/web/20161014124341/http://www.panoramio.c...
web.archive.org/web/20161013150438/http://www.panoramio.c...
A recently renovated building on the northeast corner of 105th and Lexington in East Harlem. Looking mostly like it did in 1940.
Railroad crews working around the clock to make temporary repairs to the railroad’s Park Avenue Viaduct in Manhattan that was damaged by a four-alarm fire underneath the viaduct on Tuesday evening. The fire caused structural damage to one steel supporting column and three adjacent horizontal steel girders that run east-west along the width of the underside of the viaduct and are known in engineering terminology as floor beam stringers. Photo: MTA Metro-North Railroad
Several artists and supporters turned out for the Cemi Underground's "Un Caribe in Nueva York" show. From left: Elena Marrero, Sery Colon, Clarisel Gonzalez, Eliud Martinez, Luis Cordero, Chris Lopez, and Adrian Daniel Roman.
Mr. Martinez and Mr. Lopez were the other two "Nuyorican" (a pun on New York and Puerto Rican) artists whose photography was displayed at this exhibit.
A massive fire under the MTA Metro-North Railroad elevated line on Park Av. near 118th St. caused a halt in train traffic while engineers assessed the stability of the structure. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo surveys the scene.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit
A massive fire under the MTA Metro-North Railroad elevated line on Park Av. near 118th St. caused a halt in train traffic while engineers assessed the stability of the structure. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo surveys the scene.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit
Crews clear debris on Metro-North tracks adjacent to scene of a building collapse at 116th St. and Park Ave. in East Harlem. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
Metro-North customer representatives assist customers making connections to and from Woodlawn station as service was suspended into and out of Grand Central Terminal following a building collapse at 116th St. and Park Ave. in East Harlem. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / J.P. Chan
Crews clear debris on Metro-North tracks adjacent to scene of a building collapse at 116th St. and Park Ave. in East Harlem. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
OUT OF MANY, ONLY ONE.
Today marked a year since the tragic gas explosion that took eight lives in New York City's East/Spanish Harlem community on the morning of March 12, 2014.
The silent observance organized to commemorate the victims who died as a result of the blast began at 9:31AM. By 10AM only a small crew remained dismantling the portable stage used by the politicians for a few well-planned speeches and the requisite photo-op. Aside from the teary-eyed relatives and close friends who’ve suffered so much since the sudden catastrophe took their loved ones, the overall event seemed more like an obligatory shore than a true, heart-felt remembrance for the dead. A news reporter trampled the small, white candles laid at the based of the riser where the podium had been set up as she and her cameraman eagerly tried to frame the family members symbolically pouring water on the plastic flowers in the background for her news story’s intro.
A small, gold plaque sat surrounded by white long-stem roses at the base of a sapling that will be placed in the vacant lot and grow into a tree where the two buildings that collapsed once stood. Its inscription carefully crafted to avoid any politically embarrassing questions on such a delicate day. “In memory of the eight victims of the March 12, 2014 building explosion, forever remembered by the El Barrio/East Harlem community.” The word “gas” carefully excluded. Did the buildings “explode” in a vacuum?
Somehow this organized/unorganized event did not feel much like a fitting memorial for the eight human souls who died here on the first anniversary of their passing. A family member at the center of a press huddle a few feet away noted as much, stressing that the City could have done more without even trying. A year after the fact, the National Transportation Safety Board has not issued a report on the findings of its investigation into the cause of the explosion, and now even language on a commemorative plaque continues to dilute what took place there.
At the tail-end of the morning’s proceedings, after the news cameras had been packed and reporters had tracked back to their bureaus notes in hand, a solemn NYPD police officer approached the makeshift memorial that has sprung up on the chain-link fence and silently paid his respects, pausing to acknowledge that human beings had perished here and that the ground beneath his feet was now sacred. He bowed his head, crossed himself, and walked up the street to where another officer awaited. The officers got into their cruiser and went back to work. No pomp or circumstance, just good old-fashion solitary respect. And that’s exactly what the family and friends of those who died there a year ago would have settled for. Not much to ask.