Most Likely to Persevere

On the corner of Grand Street and Pitt Street, just a few blocks from the FDR, the Dimes Square–ification of the Lower East Side can be felt, if only intermittently seen. Against the not-so-distant backdrop of natural wine bars and bakeries so Insta-famous they regularly sell out by 2:00 p.m., Abrons Arts Center cuts a tough but benevolent figure. The multipurpose gallery is part of the Henry Street Settlement, a larger complex of buildings that dates back to the late nineteenth century, when the social reformer and nurse Lillian Wald began attending to the neighborhood’s poor residents, most of them Russian Jews. Shocked by their lack of access to medical services, Ward developed a vision for high-quality, affordable health care integrated into the spaces where its recipients already lived. The Settlement opened in 1893 and, in the century that followed, catalyzed a chain of historic programming. To name only a few: a pilot initiative to hire nurses in schools (1902); a credit union to directly combat loan sharks (1937); one of the country’s first psychiatric clinics (1946), its first family shelter (1972), and one of its first battered women’s shelters (1977). The Settlement also recognized the value of the arts for communal well-being. Its Neighborhood Playhouse Theater (now the Harry De Jur Playhouse), established in 1915, staged works in Yiddish, hosted the first public performance choreographed by modern dancer Paul Taylor, and housed the New York production of Harlem Renaissance playwright Angelina Weld Grimké’s landmark Rachel (1916).

The Settlement’s communitarian, social-reformist spirit embedded itself in the Lower East Side, including in its architecture. Abrons Arts Center was designed in 1975 by Lo-Yin Chan of Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen as an addition to the Playhouse; its primary gesture, a southwest-facing second-story glass arc cradles an amphitheater, invites connection between exhibition space and sidewalk. From the gallery’s elevated position, it’s possible to see, as I did in early November, a phalanx of apartment towers (the LES is dense with public and cooperative housing), a Brutalist bank, and thick clumps of trees. And, farther away, One Manhattan Square, a symbol of the privatizing forces that, over the past few decades, have threatened to push out longtime residents from the place that has not only formed them but also set the standard of what a neighborhood can and should be.

These conditions were the impetus behind the Lower East Side Yearbook, an archival effort to collect images, mostly photographs, produced by residents of the neighborhood’s public housing. At Abrons, Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive gathers the beginnings of the project. The exhibition showcases the work of photographer Destiny Mata, a founding member of the Lower East Side Yearbook committee, alongside snapshots from the larger collective archive, a three-dimensional collage, a visual installation, and a short film. The names of NYCHA tenants—Cheryl Kirwan, Camille Napoleon, and TC Rosario among them—figure among the checklist. Mata’s Brick by Brick (2023) serves as an introduction, presenting an impressive rooftop photograph in which the Jacob Riis Houses (1949), the Lillian Wald Houses (opened in the same year), and a fragment of the Baruch Houses (1959) appear almost monolithic. Scanning the large-scale monochrome image, my eye landed on a small 1981 self-portrait by Kirwan, ebullient in a canary yellow shirt-and-pants set, a halo of green leaves framing a Coop Village building behind her. The juxtaposition stuns for its simplicity.

Upstairs, Aicha Cherif’s documentary short plays in front of a replica of a typical park bench (coat of green paint, red-sharpie graffiti) on which viewers are invited to sit. Twenty-three minutes long, HEAT (2025) brims with dramatic intensity: An immigrant woman prepares to see her brother for the first time in thirty years; a young woman laments being separated from her incarcerated boyfriend; cops shoo a mass of people from a park at night and a fight nearly breaks out. In its first and final scene, a protagonist sings Olivia Newton-John’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You” in the living room with her daughter. Here, the images are grainier than in the rest of the film, as if shot with a handheld camcorder, amplifying the song’s wistful lyrics—Guess mine is not the first heart broken—with a heady sense of nostalgia.

Already in 1938 there existed an organization called the Henry Street Oldtimers, suggesting that a starry-eyed disposition toward the area’s bygone eras has been a constitutive part of the local culture for nearly a hundred years. But the nostalgia channeled by Lower East Side Yearbook is not necessarily one for an idealized past; Mata, for instance, imbues her pictures with a distinctly spare, vérité quality that reinforces the testimony of the archival material. The wall opposite the gallery’s glass arc displays four entries in her series The Doors of NYCHA (2020), made while she was a volunteer at the Baruch Houses during the pandemic. The two pairs of photographs flank an actual door painted in the same maroon-garnet shade that recurs throughout the series; silver, hand-cut bubble letters encourage the viewer to “LOOK HERE!”—inside the peephole—toward a cycling slideshow, a literal peek into the lives of real people as they celebrate birthday parties or go to the playground. The intimate candor of such scenes, each gentle and tender, adds human dimension to the more polemical images that follow.

Of these, Welfare Queens No.1, part of an ongoing portrait series by Mata “that reclaims shame of public assistance as pride,” stands out for the styled, posed quality of its subject. Wearing a cape printed with collages of scanned food stamp booklets, a subject stares, steely-eyed, into the lens. But the image that has most stuck with me from this section wasn’t intended as an artwork at all. Depicting the warped pavement outside of 80 Columbia Street, the photo was snapped by area resident Manny Gonzalez at the request of a neighbor who had tripped over the offending hazard and broken her ankle and needed evidence with which to sue NYCHA. Even lacking this context, the subtle composition commands attention. As does the undercurrent of nostalgia that runs through the show as, here, it slowly slides into a sense of tragedy: Without efforts to safeguard it, the kind of community life envisioned by social reformers like Lillian Wald, and made possible by public housing developments and cultural venues like Abrons, inevitably falters—little by little—then cracks up.

The day after I visited Lower East Side Yearbook Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor. An early scene from HEAT resurfaced in my mind. In it, a different NYCHA tenant quips that every time the association appoints new management, “you gotta find out who the suits are contracted out to.” The statement teems with the anticipation of inevitable defeat. Yet Mamdani’s victory was fueled by a collective rejection of that anticipation—and, more boldly still, its replacement with the desire for a fuller, better life. I recognized that same desire at the show at Abrons. It might lend itself to nostalgia, or even heartbreak, but its yearning is not as romantic: Instead, it insists that our devotion to this city need not be entirely hopeless.