Open House New York, Year II

This month I volunteered again with Open House New York as a site photographer. I had intended to shoot fewer sights this year, but there were so many interesting locations to choose from that I ended up with five over the two days.

Saturday

First up was the hard hat tour of ABC No Rio’s ongoing renovation of their space at 156 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. Executive Director of ABC No Rio Gavin Marcus and principal architect Paul Castrucci explained the motivation behind the $21M demolition and sustainable rebuilding of their premises as a high-performance “Passive House,” serving as a model for resilient, low-carbon, healthy building practices.

 

 

Next, I headed down to Centre Street to the Manhattan Borough President’s Office to see the Original Map of Manhattan. Executed by Johny Randal Jr. in 1820, this was the first map to plot the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan which established the Manhattan street grid from Houston Street to 155th Street. It was fascinating to see the early grid laid out and the names of all the landowners scrawled across their respective parcels. Another interesting discovery was seeing how much of the Upper East Side was expanded east with landfill, covering a significant inlet of water from the East River.

 

 

My final location on day one was back in Astoria at Spacetime, sculpture artist Mark Di Suvero’s studio in the yellow aluminum warehouse on the waterfront. Founder of Socrates Sculpture Park in 1986, Di Suvero is a master of interactive steel sculpture on a massive scale, and his work has been exhibited worldwide. Some of the pieces displayed in and around the warehouse were so enormous they truly defied imagination.

 

 


Sunday

My first location on day two was to the newly opened Printemps department store on Wall Street to see “The Red Room,” a landmarked mosaic interior space designed by muralist Hildreth Meière in 1931. While the recently renovated Art Deco building at 1 Wall Street was given landmark designation in 2001, the interior (walls and ceiling) of the Red Room could not be landmarked until 2024, once it was reopened to the public. Members of the International Hildreth Meière Association lead a very impressive tour of the space, delving into the history and significance of the room, as well as Meière’s history as one of this country’s most accomplished Art Deco artists.

 

 

The final location of the weekend was at Sky Farm LIC, located on the rooftop of the former Standard Motors building on Northern Boulevard. Run by the kids of the Variety Boys and Girls Club of Queens, the farm offers the children a chance to learn how to grow vegetables and flowers, keep bees, and participate in wholesome activities in a free third space. (There were no children present during the tours.) It also has a breathtaking view of the city!

 

 

Easily the best part of OHNY Weekend is checking out new areas of the city that I’ve either never been to or haven’t ventured to in a long time. I prefer to keep to one borough since the subway is notoriously unreliable on the weekends, this one included. As my roaming project is always in mind, I took the opportunity to shoot along the way. These are a few of my favorites.

 

 

 

 

In Focus: Stephen Shore's Early Work

Earlier this month, Stephen Shore made an appearance in the Rare Book Room at the Strand Bookstore upon the release of his new monograph, Early Work.

The photographs in this portfolio are the earliest of his work – taken between the ages of eight and (roughly) seventeen – and strike a much different tone than that of his well-known American Surfaces or Uncommon Places. Completely shot in black and white with a succession of early cameras – his first, a Ricoh 35, followed by a Nikon F, Leica M2, and Leica M3 – the mostly portrait work evokes Garry Winogrand or Vivian Maier. There is an innocence in the way he approached his subjects; no one would bat an eye at a camera-toting twelve-year-old. He was free to experiment (his parents allowed him to turn the bathroom in their apartment into a darkroom at the age of six) and free to learn. And he remembers none of it.

As Shore states in the back pages of the monograph, “I realize that I’m writing more as an observer of these photographs than as their author. Editing the photographs, I’ve been aware of how little recollection I have of making them.” However, these early photographs seem prescient of the future of his work. As his editor, Liv Constable-Maxwell, so carefully articulated, “There’s a sense of clarity of your approach at such a young age, prefiguring so much of your future practice.” Even though much of the work is a departure from what we would see him do later, there are definite indications.

Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025

Stephen Shore, Early Work - Stephen's parents in Rhinebeck, 2025

Stephen Shore, EarlyWork, 2025

Shore learned photography from books: he was given Walker Evans’ American Photographs by a neighbor for his tenth birthday, and explored the work of Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Robert Cappa, and Helena Levitt. He became friends with the editor of Contemporary Photography Quarterly magazine, Lee Lockwood, who was the first to publish Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, Dave Heath, and Duane Michals. Dave Heath and Shore became friends; Dave taught Stephen how to print and introduced him to his friend W. Eugene Smith. (It seems like Shore rubbed shoulders with just about every influential photographer of the era.) Shore’s only formal photographic education came from taking a class with Lisette Modell at the New School, for which he was given special dispensation because he was just fourteen years old.

 

Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025

As I sat in the dimly lit room and listened to Shore and his editors discuss this early work, I was taken by the way he described his process and the way he sees:

“I see from the very beginning there are two things:

I understood that a camera doesn’t point, it frames. …I look at that picture [points at screen] and see there’s a formal awareness there. I’m thinking about how everything relates to the frame, how everything sits in the frame.

The other thing I notice is that there is a necessary gap between the world we experience and the world inside a photograph, and it seems like I understood that at the very beginning. The world inside of the photograph has to be coherent to itself and make sense in its own truncated terms; it is decontextualized from the world, and it has to make sense in terms of that decontextualization. I don’t know how it happened, but I see both of these qualities in the early pictures.”

Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025

Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025

At one point, Shore was watching the tv screen the event had set up with a revolving slideshow of images, and interrupted himself to say, “Look at this picture! Look at the hands, the space of it!” Thanks to the lack of recollection, Shore was able to remain an outside observer of his own work and appreciate all the cues to what he would go on to create in his decades-long career.

 

Stephen Shore, Early Work, 2025

Toward the end of the evening, Shore described what I believe is one of the most interesting ways to approach an ever-evolving photographic body of work. He stated that each new project is a “visual problem,” and that exploring that subject matter is in effect working to solve that problem. Uncommon Places came to a natural end because “there was nothing left to solve.” When Shore began working with the 8x10 view camera, he “found the tool he’d been searching for without realizing he was looking for it.” He believes that a new camera allows for the creation of a photograph he couldn’t have taken before, which in turn leads to a new problem to solve.

This work will be on display at the 303 Gallery in November. I am eager to attend.

City Lens: A Mystery Underfoot

Working in the industry I do occasionally grants me the benefit of access to some very interesting places. Generally, these locales are not accessible to the public and are often dirty, dangerous, or downright strange.

After researching The Cable Building for my June post, I was discussing my findings with a partner at my firm when he suddenly recalled that another building under our banner has existing wheels in the sub-basement. He described them only as large and upright – I immediately asked to see them when he next ventured downtown.

Last week, upon hearing the time had finally come, I decided to spend time researching the building to find out what these mysterious wheels could belong to. Some background about my time in the city: when I moved here my first fascination was with the subway. Coming from the rural north devoid of public transit, I fell in love with the idea of the subway and learned everything I could about it. I visited the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn, I read books about the history of the system - the development of the original three lines and their consolidation into the MTA (and their abysmal choice to keep the fare at 5 cents for around 40 years while the system hemorrhaged funds) - and learned of early predecessors’ attempts to build their own “subways.” Alfred Ely Beach, inventor, and creator of Scientific American Magazine, built his own test tunnel as a technology demonstration between 1869-1870. Dubbed Beach Pneumatic Transit, the test tunnel carried one car on a 312-foot track with giant fans at each end, which pressurized the track, allowing the car to run under Broadway from Warren to Murray Streets.

Station, Tunnel Portal, and Car of the Beach Pneumatic Transit in New York City
New York Historical Society, Bildnummer 70265

The plan of the Beach Pneumatic Transit station and tunnel
Scientific American, March 5, 1870 issue

The project was a success with the public who were able to ride it as an attraction; the 25-cent entry fee was donated to charities. Beach attempted to secure funding to extend the line all the way to Central Park, but initial interest waned, investors began to pull funding, and finally, the stock market crash of 1873 shut the project down permanently. The tunnel was sealed and largely fell out of public knowledge.

Then, in 1912, when excavating for the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit – one of the original three systems) along Broadway, workers dug into the Beach tunnel, finding the remains of the car and the grand piano and crystal chandelier, features of the waiting room, still intact.

Beach built his test line under the Rogers Peet department store building at 258 Broadway, across the street from City Hall. The original five-story building burned down in 1898, was replaced by an 8-story building in 1899, and was designated a New York City Landmark in 2010. This is the building where my company has agency, and where the sub-basement – completely off-limits to the public – holds mysterious wheels.

Last Monday the 18th, I finally ventured into that sub-basement. Hoping to get a glimpse of the Beach tube, I was disappointed – as it turns out, the existing tunnel is within the limits of the defunct old City Hall station across the street and can no longer be accessed except by a (rumored) manhole on Reade Street (something I won’t be attempting). However, what I did find was most intriguing indeed: two huge, nearly upright wheels, partially imbedded in the floor of the sub-basement, surrounded by raised concrete slabs.

Rogers Peet Building Sub-Basement © Chelsea Pathiakis, 2025

Rogers Peet Building Sub-Basement © Chelsea Pathiakis, 2025

The room was a cluttered mess of building materials, an excessive amount of hand sanitizer, and more dead cockroaches than I had (n)ever hoped to see in this lifetime, but I was thrilled nonetheless. And then the mystery set in: Are these existing cable car sheaves? Why can’t I find a record of them being here anywhere online? Are these left over from the original building or were they installed when the second iteration was being constructed in 1899? It is surprisingly difficult to find concrete information on the city’s cable car and streetcar lines but maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places. Perhaps I have a trip to the City Museum in my future.

Whatever the case may be – and I will keep searching for answers – the city history enthusiast in me is overjoyed. My Roaming project is in large part about documenting what remains of bygone eras in this city and this mystery fits right in.

In Focus: William Eggleston

A pioneer of color street photography, William Eggleston’s work has floated in the periphery of those whose work I am more familiar with. A contemporary of Stephen Shore, Eggleston’s work similarly focuses on the ordinary and mundane – street signs, condiments, gutter trash – and brings a rare quality to them with his use of color transparency film and later, the dye-transfer printing process. 

Dye-transfer is a printing technique that yields pure, intense color, originally used to print Technicolor films, color prints used in advertising, and large transparencies for display. The process is responsible for the deep, deep reds present in much of his work, and most especially in Greenwood, Mississippi, 1971, also known colloquially as The Red Ceiling.

William Eggleston, Greenwood Mississippi, c. 1971

The first photo I saw of Eggleston’s was En Route to New Orleans, 1971-74, from his Los Alamos series. I was struck, not only by the simplicity of the subject matter and the absolutely dazzling color, but by the framing of the shot and the elongated, translucent shadow of the glass on the tray table. I found a postcard of the photo in the gift shop at The Met years ago and knew instantly that this piece was something special. 

William Eggleston, En Route to New Orleans, c. 1971-74

I had the postcard hung on the wall of my apartment and one lazy weekend sometime in 2017, I decided to look further into Eggleston’s body of work. I stopped in my tracks when I came across Untitled, c.1983-1986, also from the Los Alamos series. 

William Eggleston, Untitled, c.1983-1986

So simple, so stunning, and there was that brilliant red I loved so much. I printed a copy on high-quality paper and added it to the wall in my bedroom. And I took note: street photography subject matter does not have to be groundbreaking, because even the most ordinary of objects can mesmerize. 

A few more favorites from the Los Alamos, 1965-1974 and The Outlands, 1969-74 series’:

City Lens: The Cable Building

Being positively enthralled with NYC history for more than a decade, I have come to learn about so many interesting places lost to development, lost to technological advancement, lost to time. 

The Cable Building © Chelsea Pathiakis, 2023

The Cable Building, an imposing nine-story, beaux-arts style construction at 611 Broadway, comes to mind. Built in 1892 and still standing, its original use has been lost to all three factors. The Cable Building was the power station of the Metropolitan Traction Company, one of the city’s cable car companies that moved cars on Broadway from Bowling Green to 36th Street. The cables, housed in the basement of the building, were carried on four 32-foot wheels that pulled the cables which pulled the streetcars. The power station was in use until 1901, after the steel cables, rife with mechanical issues, were replaced with electric cables. Later that year, the Broadway line ceased operation. 

1894 Scribners magazine, Public Domain,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149661343

The building was sold in 1925 and was then occupied by offices and small manufacturing. Keith Haring had a studio in the building from 1982 to 1985. (According to Andy Warhol, Haring’s rent was $1,000 in 1983 and the large space did not have a bathroom.) In 1989, the Angelika Film Center moved into the west side of the building, at the corner of West Houston and Mercer Streets, and converted the basement space where the cable wheels were previously housed into its six-screen theater. The building is in the NoHo Historic District, designated as such by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1999. 

Keith Haring in his studio at 611 Broadway by Andy Warhol, 1983

There is something so gratifying in learning the history of spaces like this one. I was first drawn to the Cable Building because of its architecture; then learned of its connection to a lost form of public transportation, a constant interest of mine. Finding out Keith Haring kept a studio in the space was the cherry on top. Eleven years here, and there is so much still to discover.

Reminiscence

When I was nearing the end of my time in art school, I began to put together a master notebook filled with notable photographers, darkroom procedure, basic camera mechanics, and notes from photo exhibitions. I had kept dozens of notebooks with this information prior and felt it all belonged in one central place. A few days ago, as I was flipping through my notes on photographers, I realized that some had since passed away. Among them were Robert Frank, 1924-2019; Jerry Uelsmann, 1934-2022; George Tice, who I’d met when he did a guest lecture, 1938-2025; and just last week, Sebastião Salgado, February 8, 1944-May 23, 2025. Salgado actually passed the day I was updating my notebook which made me feel uneasy for a short while.

Updating these dates and pouring over my notebook again, I began to think of times passed. The exhibition announcement for the Mount Washington summer landscape photography course I took in 2009 is taped between two pages. I remember that summer vividly: driving up to the White Mountains in my old Chevy Malibu listening to Death Cab, staying at the Mount Washington Hotel’s historic Bretton Arms Inn, roaming the grounds around the main hotel and finding a stockpile of old sinks and bathtubs in the woods (no doubt discarded there after the last renovation), waking up before sunrise to drive down to Franconia Notch and cautiously trying to photograph a moose through the open car window. 

Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge, Whitefield, New Hampshire © Chelsea Pathiakis, 2009

I chose to focus on creating panoramas that summer, even purchasing a nifty little gadget for my tripod to help the frames line up better. At the exhibition in the Vault Gallery (RIP), I displayed three or four long, glossy panoramas mounted on foam board. That was the summer Michael Jackson died, and we all sat around the large tube TV in the makeshift computer lab in one of the Inn’s parlors, watching the shocking news unfold while it rained in the mountains. That was the summer I took a ferry to Star Island in the Isles of Shoals and left three rolls of black and white film on a rock near the shore, and some kind soul brought them to the front desk of the visitor center I called a week later in a panic. 

Star Island, Isles of Shoals, New Hampshire © Chelsea Pathiakis, 2009

More recently, it’s been a year since I started updating this blog monthly. It’s brought me such pleasure to spend each new month researching a photographer of interest or giving an update on my Roaming project. I’m delving deeper into my areas of interest and loving the process of discovery.