A Walk to Weegee's Street: Centre Market Place

From 1934 to 1947, the years that serve as the focus of the current Weegee exhibit at the ICP, the photographer lived in an apartment at 5 Centre Market Place in Manhattan. Living directly across the street from the old Police Headquarters, the freelance crime photographer had quick access to the activities of the police, and he often could get simple shots of suspects just by walking out his front door. While this area of Lower Manhattan has changed a great deal since Weegee's time, especially since the police long ago relocated their headquarters further downtown, the neighborhood around Centre Market Street makes a good destination for a walk.

Centre Market Place. #5, the taller building in the middle, is where Weegee lived
in the 1930s and 1940s. The building has been gutted and renovated.
The original front facade was replaced.

corner of Centre Market Place and Grand.
Centre Market Place is only one block long.

Weegee's apartment building at 5 Centre Market Place was gutted and renovated several years back, along with numbers 1, 2, and 4. (see the article "BIG DEAL; Found Treasures From All Over To Adorn Redone Town Houses" from September 26, 2004 in The New York Times). Now a rather post-modern looking townhouse and no longer a worn-looking tenement building, the current structure makes it difficult to imagine Weegee living in humble circumstances there. Using information from a photograph, the ICP exhibit attempts to do just that by recreating the interior of Weegee's apartment.

recreation of Weegee's apartment on Centre Street on exhibit at the ICP.

Weegee CSI

Leave it to Weegee (1899—1968), our flashbulb-flashing late night freelance crime photographer of New York's most noir era, to make a picture of Macy's balloon of Santa Claus look like a crime victim. But there he's done it. On November 21, 1941, in the wee hours of pre-parade inflation, Weegee climbed to a high vantage point on a nearby building and snapped the happy floating symbol of the holidays stretched out flat, bloated, and face up, open eyes looking dead as it hovers over a New York street. The image is only one of at least a hundred unexpected photographs by the inventive photographer, and several with real dead bodies, displayed in a stunning new exhibit titled Weegee: Murder Is My Business at the International Center of Photography.

Weegee, Line-Up for Night Court, ca. 1941. © Weegee/International Center of Photography.

Medium: Gelatin silver print

Weegee's brand of tabloid journalism during the years 1935 and 1946, the focus of the exhibit, casts him in a singular role as the city's biggest photo hustler on the shady late night streets. Living on the Lower East Side in a small flat on the one-block long Centre Market Place directly across from Police Headquarters, Weegee was privy to the first reports of a fresh crime scene, allowing him to quickly grab his 4 x 5 Speed Graphic press camera and be among the first to arrive. The resulting photographs often dramatized a sequence of street tableaus in black and white - a victim bleeding on the street corner, the nonchalant witnesses, the shocked face of a relative arriving by motor car. After taking the pictures, Weegee went back to Police Headquarters and read the early file reports, just so he could properly write his captions.

Beyond the crime scenes, Weegee (b. Arthur Fellig) took his camera to movie theaters, parades, the theater district, tenement houses, and beaches. When he was not snapping photos of victims and perps, he was training his eye on the everyday spectacle of the city. The "Naked City," the title of his first collection of photographs from 1945, pulls back the illusion of New York movie fantasy to reveal and illuminate vulnerable moments in the life of a sleep-deprived city. Weegee stays up through the morning to witness the absurd spectacles. Naked City opens with Weegee's prose description of a Sunday morning in the city, a peaceful time with "no traffic…and no crime either," followed by his photographs of early morning scenes. These include children sleeping on the fire escapes of tenement houses, sailors passed out in an open air canteen, and homeless curled up on the streets. Not strictly tabloid news images, these images also point to the social uses of photography, the kind practiced by New York's Photo League.

Weegee, [Installation view of "Weegee: Murder Is My Business" at the Photo League, New

York], 1941. © Weegee/International Center of Photography.

Medium: Gelatin silver print

The title of the exhibit at ICP takes its title from the exhibit Weegee self-curated at the Photo League in 1941, and a partial reconstruction of the original show is here among the many artifacts that contextualize Weegee's photography. ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis has chosen to highlight a particularly fascinating time in the history of photography, an era when working stiff newspaper photographers began to feel threatened by photojournalists. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, photographers like Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Henri Cartier-Bresson ushered in a new photo age with the publishing of fabulous magazines. The Photo League included many well-known members of the so-called "golden age" of photojournalism. Weegee not only earned a relationship to all the working types of his photo peers, but he may have been one of the most influential. His stark images of New Yorkers prefigure the work of Lisette Model and Diane Arbus.