Personal Surveys

Providence

The Photo Comp

Little Essex Street

Personal Calibration

2001: 52 Sundays

The Crosses of the
Northern Neck

The Wild Dogs of
Jersey City

The Wild Dogs of Jersey City

Is it possible that I used to live in a surreal and magical place, on the fringe of a great city, in the shadow of two great towers, where wild dogs ran? It must have been, because I have pictures to document, what would have otherwise, been lost to the fog of memory.

These images were taken in the 1980s at the base of Essex Street, in the Paulus Hook neighborhood of Jersey City. The Goldman Sachs tower now occupies what was an empty lot strewn with broken glass, by the old Morris Canal and the mouth of the Hudson: the home of the wild dogs.

There was no agenda in my taking these images. The original two and a quarter inch negatives, taken with a Hasselblad 500C/M, sat, enclosed in archival sleeves, for decades in my closet. Can an agenda present itself after the fact? In this case, yes. The events that took place on that beautiful late summer morning make it so:

To remember both the extraordinary and the mundane: the men and women that fell on that day, and the wild dogs of Jersey City. Both now dust in the ground.

Click to see images.