A Falling-Off Place

Barbara G. Mensch has had numerous exhibitions of her photographic work. Her images are represented in some of New York City's most prestigious galleries, and her work is included in important collections, including those of MoMA, the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Fundacion Televisa of Mexico City, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the author of South Street and In the Shadow of Genius: The Brooklyn Bridge and Its Creators.

vii Foreword by Dan Barry 1 Introduction 5 Part 1: The 1980s: Making a Living on the Waterfront 49 Part 2: The 1990s: Setting the Stage for a Real Estate Boom 71 Part 3: The New Millennium: Managing Change 100 Talking about the Old Days 115 Acknowledgments

You can practically smell the tobacco and the brackish aroma of stale seawater. No city changes quite as fast or as frequently as New York. Mensch provides the city with a memory...-- "Avenue Magazine" A falling off can indicate decline or diminishment, often gradual--the petering out of a business, for instance, or the decay of a once marvellous building. Or it can refer to something abrupt, absolute. . . Both senses haunt Barbara Mensch's photographic history of lower Manhattan, in particular the Fulton Fish Market, which, for a time, was an island unto itself.-- "The New Yorker" Photographer Mensch documents the upheaval of downtown New York City's working-class and immigrant communities from the 1980s to the 2000s with images of disasters and bulldozing.-- "Publishers Weekly, Fall Announcements" Alison Stewart: When you describe it as a 'falling-off place, ' what does that mean? Barbara Mensch: 'This is the miracle and mystery of the creative process. I started thinking about certain playwrights like Thornton Wilder, I thought about Our Town. I thought about community and sense of place. This idea of falling off is also a metaphor for something that's uncertain, or time passing. I said, 'That's the title.' ---Alison Stewart, All of It, WNYC Barbara Mensch joins MetroFocus to share many of her stunning black and white photographs in her new book A Falling-Off Place: The Transformation of Lower Manhattan.---PBS, Metro Focus Mensch returns us to the grimy, long-vanished world of ice haulers, unloaders and fish mongers--the denizens of her remarkable 2007 volume, South Street, but with the added, wider view of a disappearing Downtown that would follow. While not the sort of extensive, visual rumination on loss that photographer Danny Lyon brought to The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, Mensch offers a sort of visual postscript to her valuable documentation. Many of the images are of a Downtown coming down, in advance of its residential renewal.-- "The Tribeca Trib" An epic narrative . . .[A Falling-Off Place] takes an affectionate but unflinching look at Lower Manhattan through three eras: the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. -- "The Broadsheet" From time to time, we like to look back on how New York has changed over the years, and there's a new book of photographs that does just that. A Falling-Off Place documents the transformation of Lower Manhattan from a working man's neighborhood to downtown's rebirth after 9/11.-- "CBS News" There is Barbara Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain. She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city's inexorable evolution.---Dan Barry, The New York Times In this striking collection, photographer Mensch traces three decades of change on Lower Manhattan's eastern waterfront, paying particular attention to the Fulton Street Fish Market. The beautiful images, often rich in chiaroscuro rendered by streetlights illuminating rainy nights or misty mornings, are complemented by quotes from residents and workers who provide insight into life in Lower Manhattan prior to gentrification. Visually evocative and spare on text . . . It's ideal for anyone nostalgic for old New York. -- "Publishers Weekly" Barbara Mensch's A Falling-Off Place features a variety of extraordinary photographs, ranging from images of demolition, to men at work, to abstract interiors, and to individual portraits. Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, her work documents the material reality of New York in an unprecedented way. And it offers a vision of the relentless physical transformation of the city and its impact on working people and their labor.---Daniel Czitrom, author of New York Exposed