Couple with five children

On the left is Tiffany, sitting with her partner Michelle. They have five children between them. Tiffany does not want to give Newburgh a chance. She is worried about how to bring up her children there, "To be good citizens, to be good people, to do the right thing. To go to school, to treat others how they want to be treated, to have positive attitudes. To make something out of life because you only get one." Tiffany would like to leave Newburgh. Michelle wants to stick it out. "If we just have a little bit more faith in us, in the community, we would make it."   

Gathering of friends on Lander Street, Newburgh, NY

 
A very hot day in September. Friendships, teasing, frayed tempers, thirst and criticism of Newburgh run high.

Man's best friend

Here is Travis and his very dear friend Vegas. Vegas did not like the look of either the camera tripod nor the nine foot microphone boom pole when we were setting up to film. He barked and danced about but Travis gently calmed him down explaining that he was perfectly safe and that we needed the equipment to film. As can be seen from this picture, Vegas understood this and sat still and alert, allowing his master to speak his mind about the plight of Newburgh without interruption.

Father and daughter on Lander Street, Newburgh NY

The bulk of the filming of Newburgh: Beauty and Tragedy is complete. If we are lucky with the weather we shall be able to finish it and start work on the editing in November.

At the end of our interview with Point, we asked if we could see his daughter. He spends a lot of time looking after her and he has a particularly gentle way with her. Amongst the violence and hardship that Point experienced during his childhood, he suffered as much, he said, from his father's absence. He does not want that to happen between him and his daughter.

Survivors

Two of the fine house on the south end of Lander Street in Newburgh NY. Built in the days when materials and workmanship were of the highest quality, it is not surprising that some, like these two, have survived being unoccupied for forty years, and could still be saved.

South end of Lander Street

This popular and extroverted girl sat with her friends on the stoop of a house on the south end of Lander Street in Newburgh NY. Here stand doomed houses ready for execution by the wrecker's ball.

She had words to say about the terrible food in her school, and the mice that ran free. 

Twilight on Broadway

I stop people on street corners always by a corner store so that I have light to illuminate them. I ask them to stand stock still.  The world whirls around them, shadowy figures and tearing cars.

Mother with one of her nine children

Mother and daughter on Dubois Street. One of nine children.

Finely dressed Vietnam veteran

Driving home from the City Terrace block party (outstanding Jamaican disk jockey and dancing from 50 year-old mothers), we passed three men in the bus shelter on the corner of Broadway and Liberty. Tavares said, "Did you see them?" We stopped and walked back. Two of the men said no to photographs but the third said yes.

He is a Vietnam veteran. I asked him if he had seen Full Metal Jacket. "The only one," he replied. After a pause he added, "And Apocalypse Now." 

Later I asked Caroline if she thought the three men were waiting for a bus. "Oh, no, the bus shelter is the senior citizen center."

August on Broadway

 

                                                                                                                                                Photograph by Caroline Kasterine

Our sound crew crossing Broadway in Newburgh to film Amina. Amina is a librarian who collects books that are donated by libraries and parents. She loads them on to wagons and gives them away to children on the streets of Newburgh. 

The Fullerton Cultural Center are helping by allowing books to be dropped off at their carriage house. Amina and her two children are seen in the video below on a recent 93 degree day on Lander Street, distributing books from one of their wagons donated by a Newburgh resident. The success of this endeavor is one example of the generosity that  exists in Newburgh.

My two sound recordists, Veronica, age 18 and Tavares, aged 23, are both Newburgh residents whom I trained from scratch. Not difficult; Veronica is a singer, and Tavares a music lover who has experience with studio recording.

 

Advice to the city council

Two sisters of Liberty Street give their views on what must be done with the city they love.

Remembering a tragedy, Newburgh NY

A young woman looks down the street where her brother crashed his car into a tree as he was being chased by the police. He died on the way to hospital.

Harlem comes to Newburgh

Harlem: a man comes to rest in Newburgh. Where better?

Father, mother and daughter, Newburgh NY, 1997

With a view to interviewing or recording conversations with some of my subjects from my book Newburgh: Portrait of a City, I recently asked Veronica, our production assistant and fixer, to look at a number of photographs in the book to see if she knew any of the people in the photographs, or their whereabouts. Below is one of the pictures I showed her. She recognized the 13 year-old (now 31) and knew where she lived although she did not remember her name.
Yesterday we went round to her house but she was not there. While we stood outside talking to the neighbors, a car drew up and a middle-aged woman climbed out followed by a younger woman. "That's them," said Veronica. The mother's name is Jacqueline Burnett. Her daughter is Natalie.

Mother and child on Liberty Street, Newburgh NY

Fearing an accident I have relinquished the driving in Newburgh to Caroline so that I can look for subjects with both eyes. But it was eagle eyes herself who spotted this mother and child. (They were on her side of the street and she had stopped at a light.)

Street fun

The young man looks as though he is in imminent danger, but in fact it is the end of a failed flirtation.  He had spoken to both girls in an attempt to woo them, but had no success.  The girl on the left is telling him what-for, her finger pointing accusingly and silencingly:  she's not going to hear any more from him.  Yet she was amused, as was her friend on the right.  The back-and-forth was, in the end, all in jest.

85

Beauty but trouble. I have the horrible thought that one day downtown Newburgh NY will be a cluster of condos. The wrecker's ball will have swung for the last time and the resplendent Victorian architecture will be dust and smithereens.

Roald Dahl

I recently gave a print of this photograph to the Garrison Children's Education Fund where it was auctioned at their Spring Thaw fundraiser. The winner, Kyoko Gelber, gave it to the Desmond Fish Library because, "We (including our girls, who LOVE Dahl) feel that it belongs in the library where many more people can enjoy it." 

I took the picture in the mid 1970’s at Roald Dahl’s house in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, 35 miles north west of London.  The exact location of the photograph is the indoor swimming pool. 

I was still living in England when I wrote to Roald asking if I could photograph him. Although I received commissions from British magazines to photograph writers, I tried to avoid being commissioned to take my favourite writers, because, under such circumstances, there is always an element of collusion with either the magazine, the agent, the publisher or the author himself. It is a rare magazine that leaves you alone. I was lucky with one or two who did leave me alone.

The purpose of photographing the writers was to publish a book. After I photographed each one I wrote to him or her enclosing the photograph I had made. I asked for a short comment on the photograph in respect of themselves. Roald’s reply after I sent him his picture was that 30 degrees from the vertical was his attitude to life. I never found a publisher for the book.

We became friends and went to France together to do an article about Romanée Conti, the 4.0 acres vineyard in Burgundy, which produces the most luscious red wine (Napoleon’s favorite). It is now rarely drunk, only traded in. A good vintage goes for $25,000 a bottle. We were not offered a glass of either Romanée Conti or its sister estates La Romanée and La Tâche.

Roald wrote a scathing piece and was threatened with lawsuits. He did not budge from his opinion of the proprietor or her behavior and the lawsuit was dropped.

Roald himself had an outstanding cellar of Bordeaux wines that he never failed to share with his friends. I remember many a dinner with bottles of his favourite Chateau Cos D’Estournel, nearly always with tarragon chicken, tarragon that he grew himself.

Roald was remarkably tall — 6’ 6”. During the Second World War he had to crash land his fighter plane in the Libyan Desert, after being given the wrong directions by his commander. He was severely injured and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. I never heard him complain.

Shay Sellars

We first saw this conspicuously elegant woman at one of Michael Green's gatherings at the Fullerton Mansion for Culture & History in Newburgh. Shortly after that we met at Martha's Café, not before Caroline had nudged me and said that I should photograph her. 

Shay lives in a recently restored house on Chambers Street where she also runs her property developing business. She had first read about the opportunities in Newburgh in a  New York Times article and was immediately interested. She needed only a glance to know it was where she wanted to be when she drove to Newburgh from her home in Bedford- Stuyvesant. So beautiful and so much opportunity to launch her redevelopment project. Her website explains this venture: http://www.sasreproperties.com/ click on current projects. 

Restaurant Les 5 Portes

What is it about a restaurant that draws one to it? It is never the food. The people who go  there head the list. Then comes the look and feel of the place. The welcome is important—it must be short, genuine and warm. Then the service—speedy, quiet and without cheeriness. This place, Restaurant Les 5 Portes, only a step from the center of Geneva, has all those ingredients. Good simple food too.