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“Dusting Off a Police Trove of Photographs to Rival Weegee’s”
by Michael Wilson

“The picture, of a coat and a hat, was one of seven taken that afternoon at the Latin Lounge. But why?

Hours earlier, someone had fatally stabbed a man identified as Edward Curbreia, 32, in the bar, on Broadway at West 100th Street in Manhattan. It was Feb. 1, 1959, and two detectives arrived at the scene — in car 1514, according to a meticulously kept logbook — with their big, tripod-mounted camera. They took a picture of the busy block (a sign in a neighboring grocer’s window advertised a special on smoked tongue: 39 cents a pound) and others inside the bar and its bloodstained bathroom. The detectives carried various flashbulbs that would have popped as they lit up the dark room.

The coat check closet must have caught someone’s eye. Inside were a single hat and coat, each one with a chip, No. 38.

The detectives set up the camera. Pop.

The Latin Lounge photos were among thousands taken from 1914 to 1975 by officers assigned to the New York Police Department’s photo units. Later, when the cases were closed, the photos were boxed up and stored in various places, including, most recently, a basement room at 1 Police Plaza.

Many of the photos will soon be available for public viewing for the first time. On Monday, the National Endowment for the Humanities will announce a $125,000 grant it has awarded to the Department of Records and Information Services for the digitization of 30,000 of the pictures. The photographs will be scanned starting in July and will be available for online viewing sometime after that.

The images recall those taken by the famous tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and at some crime scenes, the police photographer who took them and the night-crawling newsman may have been standing just a few feet apart.
[Hello, cake box murder, etc.]

“The police photographers more than held their own,” said Michael Lorenzini, deputy director of the Municipal Archives. “These guys are well-trained photographers.”

Mr. Lorenzini recalled the day he entered the crowded basement storage room — “the smell,” he said. When old film begins to break down, it smells like vinegar. Archivists working with the collection have labeled and stored most of the negatives in a freezer at a facility in Brooklyn to stop further decay…

But the collection also lays bare the workaday jobs that officers were called upon to investigate, like a stickup in a pool hall on Broome Street in 1942: A detective photographed the inside of the bare-bones hall, the cue sticks lying where they had been abandoned on a pool table, and, outside, the body of the dapper robber himself, who had been shot and killed by a patrolman…
[Sounds like a Weegee photo.]

“The film size was 8 inches by 10 inches,” he said Friday in a telephone interview from his Long Island home. “The camera was set up on a tripod. It was a bellows-type camera — you know, the bellows on an accordion?”…

[We recommend The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger.]

NY Times: “Dusting Off a Police Trove of Photographs to Rival Weegee’s”

When we have more time, we will compare and contrast the NYPD’s photos and Weegee’s…

Weegee’s Traditional Fish and Chips (photo from Yelp, photographer is Robbie B.)

Street view of Weegee’s Traditional Fish and Chips on a Google map is here.

Weegee’s Fish Bar and Pizzeria on Yelp and Yelp.

Screen shots from Google street view of Weegee’s Traditional Fish and Chips and/or Weegee’s Fish Bar and Pizzeria…

Weegee Hair Studio!

What

Where

“Welcome… In the past two decades, Weegee has become one of the most respected brands in hairdressing in the greater Ann Arbor area…”

We fully endorse and recommend the Weegee Hair Studio!

“I think the writer I most identify with isn’t a writer, it’s a photographer, Weegee.” Mr. [Richard] Price owns several photographs by Weegee, the photojournalist who captured stark scenes of urban life and crime in Manhattan in the 1930s and ’40s.
From The New York Times, 02/11/2015

Weegee

1,2,3… 44th St. French Bistro…

Screenshots of season 19 of the Antiques Roadshow in NYC, which aired on January 19, 2015

At 30:10 into this video two very good Weegee photos, one great photo of Weegee at work and the underrated, amazing book Weegee’s Secrets are discussed…

“Pictures of my husband when he was about two years old, taken by photographer Weegee… He worked alongside my mother-in-law Sophie… She was the reporter, he was the photographer… they went on many excursions together… That picture was taken during the sitting and it was taken by Francis Avery who was Weegee’s girlfriend at the time…”
Francis Avery!

Mr. Flashbulb on the T.V…

Video can be seen here, Weegee at 30:10: pbs.org.