University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 6, 2005

By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor

For Douglas Levere, the idea to document changes in the New York cityscape began with the view outside his SoHo apartment.

Levere, a photographer in the UB Office of Creative Services, had taken photos of fellow UB alumnus and photographer Ellen Carey in 1996 and, over time, she became his mentor. Carey, who earned an MFA from UB in 1978, encouraged Levere to find a photographer whose work he admired, and build on that.

At first, "I thought of it as copying" and he resisted her advice, he recalls. "It wasn't until about a year later that I stumbled across an image at an auction viewing."

The image captured the corner of Broadway and Broome street—which was, at the time, the view outside Levere's apartment. But this photograph had been taken in the 1930s by acclaimed photographer Berenice Abbott.

"I couldn't take my eyes off that image," Levere says.

Years later, his homage to Abbott's work has led to a book, "New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott's New York," and an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, which will run through Nov. 13.

Photographs in Levere's series also were featured in a Spring 2001 exhibition in the UB Anderson Gallery.

In a way, Levere began working toward this project in the late 1980s, when he earned a bachelor's degree in design studies, a planned special major, from the School of Architecture and Planning at UB, and developed an appreciation for architecture and the built environment. He says he was somewhat familiar with Abbott's work, but seeing the Broadway and Broome image inspired him.

Abbott, he explains, had lived in Paris for eight years when she returned to New York City for a visit during the 1930s and was stunned by how much the city had changed in the short time that she had been away.

She took about 350 photos of various landscapes in the city for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, seeking to capture the city as it was at that moment.

Levere decided to retake those photos, eventually shooting 115. He recreated much more than the locations, finding a camera like Abbott had used 60 years before, and doing his best to mimic the time of year and day so the lighting would be the same. Her photos were dated, so time of year was easy, but finding the exact location, angle and hour proved to be a challenge.

"I went through a huge effort to photographically create something where you could compare the two images," he says.

His photographs are displayed alongside Abbott's in both the book and the exhibit, so New York City residents and enthusiasts can see the changes for themselves. Levere began taking the photographs almost 10 years ago, and New York has changed again since that time.

The most dramatic of those changes appears on a photograph of a Lower East Side street, Levere notes. In Abbott's New York, the neighborhood housed working-class Irish immigrants. In Levere's New York, it had evolved into more of a Chinatown, with the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming in the background. Today, of course, those towers are gone.

Levere said that his and Abbott's photographs of a Bleecker Street bakery revealed that the bakery, Zito's, had survived for generations. In 1997—when Levere took his photograph—that was true. But the store closed just as his book went to press.

"They complained about the low-carbohydrate craze and rising rents," he says.

A few years after taking the photographs, Levere is reliving Abbott's project in a new way. Having left the city to settle in Buffalo, he's begun to view changes with the eye of a person who doesn't see them happen gradually.

"Now that I don't live in New York, when I go back the changes are glaring," he said. "It changes so fast."

Changes in New York, coupled with changes in his personal life, led Levere to move back to Western New York this past April. He and his wife had a daughter about a year ago.

"We wanted to own a home," he says. "We wanted to have a place we could afford to raise our child in. New York has become really unreasonably expensive and with a child, it changes everything."

He says that if he and his wife really had to stay in the city, they could have made it work. But for him, it felt like the right time to go.

"I was there for 12 or 13 years and that was enough," he says. "I left my mark."

While Levere says he's not ready to detail his next project, he does have some things in the works. In addition to his job with Creative Services, he's caring for his daughter and has just rented photographic studio space on Exchange Street in downtown Buffalo.

Levere's book features 81 photo pairs; 40 can be viewed at http://www.newyorkchanging .com.