BOOK REVIEW: Remnants a photographic memoir

By Aline Smithson

I remember particular Saturdays in years past, when I’d get on the C train, working my way through the maze of New York subways until I reached the F train and got off at Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. I was in another world, stepping back in time to a neighborhood filled with pickle vendors, delis filled with smoked fish and pastrami, and vendors selling clothing hung from the fire escapes ready for purchase.

It was a place with a distinctive past and energy, built on the history of immigrants.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the Lower East Side in the past five years, and have been dismayed to discover a new Orchard-street, closed to traffic on weekends, covered in astroturf and ping pong tables, new stores and restaurants replacing the rich history, now where only the mighty survive. In 2008, the National Trust for Historic Preservation added the neighborhood to its list of America’s Most Endangered Places, and many believe the cultural institutions and ideologies that established the Lower East Side are disappearing forever.

Photographers and photography dealers, David Scheinbaum and Janet Russek have spent almost two decades documenting this unique slice of Manhattan, and like Jacob Riis more than one hundred years before them, they have chronicled a  neighborhood in a time of extraordinary transformation.

 With their new monograph, Remnants, Photographs of the Lower East Side, Scheinbaum and Russek capture remnants of history through their intimate portraits of traditional businesses, places of worship, people, and the old world architecture that have defined the Lower East Side for generations.

Remnants, Photographs of the Lower East Side has been published by Radius Books and comes in a trade, signed and special edition. The book includes texts by Amy Stein-Milford, the Deputy Director of the Museum at Eldridge Street and Sean Corcoran, the Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.