With north Brooklyn rents soon set to surpass those in many Manhattan neighborhoods and more city tenants making the move back over the East River, one can’t help but wonder what will become of those fabled bohemian districts long laid waste by chain falafel and finance bros. The last decade alone saw the shutter of Bleeker Bob’s Records, Mars Bar and CBGB’s. Will the earnest progressivism of #DeblasiosNewYork bring us back to the days of Dinkins, or maybe further?
Jessie Tarbox Beals’ photographs from 1920s and 30s Greenwich Village capture another set of storefronts long gone — a cluttered, tapestry-strewn flapper playground which, by many accounts, was already gentrified by the mid-60s. Beals was the first published female photojournalist in America. She had a studio and art gallery in the neighborhood and many of her early photographs are now in the collection of Harvard’s Schlesinger Library — and on Flickr with no know copyright restrictions. Check out this profile on her from the Times and take note of the early dive bar and stencil work in the slideshow above. (Images: Jessie Tarbox Beals, @SchlesingerLibrary)
