Thirty-five years ago, Hoboken was a very different place. Instead of a waterfront walkway, the Hudson River was lined with vacant warehouses and decaying wooden piers. Where there are now trendy boutiques, drycleaners, and nail salons, there were butcher shops, live poultry markets, and mom-and-pop shops, with the proprietors living upstairs. Bars had no craft beers or TV screens, and restaurants catered more to families and factory workers than foodies.
Although the city had been hit hard by the departure of the shipping industry and factory closings in the 1960s and ’70s, what it had going for it was a close-knit sense of community, full of multigenerational extended families bound together by old-country traditions like the Feasts of the Madonna dei Martiri and St. Ann, or the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
New Faces
In the 1970s and ’80s, however, Hoboken’s low rents and easy access to New York City began attracting artists, musicians and other Manhattan refugees priced out by rising rents. A 1975 story in The New York Times quoted several of these newcomers raving about the friendliness of their adopted city, including Michael Flanagan, described as “a computer systems salesman who builds harpsichords in his spare time,” who moved here in 1973 from Park Slope.
“After 20 years in Park Slope, I knew six people,” he told the reporter. “After two years here, the number of friends I have is phenomenal. The feeling is that we all have the same problems, so the least we can do is be sociable.”
Sociable was an understatement, according to people who knew Flanagan. He was well known for sitting on his stoop on the 900 block of Bloomfield, engaging passersby in conversation. He often had an ulterior motive: Flanagan’s main passion, more than harpsichords, was photography, and he was always on the lookout for interesting subjects.
Lens Crafter
He was a photographer’s photographer, according to Steve Zane, a fellow photographer who met Michael in the 1970s and admired his work. Flanagan used a large-format Linhof camera—which requires a tripod, manual settings, and individual 4-by-5-inch black-and-white film plates—to capture hyper-detailed images of his neighborhood. He was also drawn to shooting the Hoboken waterfront, portraits of his friends and neighbors, and the mom-and-pop stores that gave his neighborhood its character.
When he died four years ago, he left his photo archives to Zane, who in turn donated the vast majority of Hoboken images to the Hoboken Historical Museum. A selection of about 75 images will go on display in late January, 2017, in an exhibition titled, It’s All in the Details: Photographs of 1980s Hoboken by Michael Flanagan. It will be on display for six months. Bob Foster, the museum’s director, is curating the exhibit, which focuses on one of Hoboken’s most turbulent decades. For context, the exhibition will feature artifacts, articles and posters drawn from the museum’s collections, similar to the museum’s 2007 exhibition From Another Time: Hoboken in the 1970s.
Transformation
By the 1980s, gentrification was underway in earnest. Those who lived in Hoboken then will remember the decade through their own filters. For many, it’s colored by the vivid emotions expressed in The Hoboken Reporter’s book, Yuppies Invade My House at Dinnertime, a compilation of letters to the editor, subtitled, A tale of brunch, bombs, and gentrification in an American city. For others, with less at stake, life in Hoboken in the 1980s was simply a rite of youthful passage, when Hoboken’s music scene rivaled that of today’s hipster Brooklyn.
Flanagan’s unflinching eye sees the city in stark black and white. He depicts some of its best features, such as the people and its beautiful architecture, and some of its worse, such as the decaying piers and the burned-out shell of an apartment building allegedly torched by greedy developers, a too-frequent occurrence in the wave of condo conversions. The photographs offer a rare view of a city and its people in the throes of gentrification.
First Person
The exhibition will also feature interviews with residents who were living here at the time, many of whom knew Flanagan. One family who lived near 10th and Bloomfield revealed how newcomers and locals learned to appreciate each other’s perspectives. For example, while the newcomers were entranced by the architectural details in their houses, many locals didn’t realize that their homes even had features like interior wooden shutters because they had been long since painted over. They learned a new appreciation for their own city.
Unlike other cities hit hard by the 1970s recession, much of Hoboken’s architectural charm had been preserved through a combination of homeowner tenacity and the Johnson administration’s Model Cities Program, which offered low-interest loans for repairs and restoration. Once restored, these architectural details lured the next wave of higher-income newcomers, who were less deterred by rapidly rising housing costs.
Grit to Green
Some of Flanagan’s portraits were of friends he met through the Environment Committee, a group of civic activists who challenged the city to enforce clean-air restrictions on local factories and to plant more trees, as well as rallying opposition to a proposed oil tank farm on the waterfront.
To raise funds for these civic improvement campaigns, the Environment Committee organized events like the annual River City Fair, a precursor to the city’s arts and music festivals, which featured live music, dance performances, and arts and crafts for sale. They also launched the Hoboken House Tour, to the genuine astonishment of skeptical Hobokenites. By the early 1980s, the tour was drawing more visitors than longer-running tours in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, according to one of the group’s founders, Helen Manogue.
Though not an activist himself, Flanagan was friendly with many of the group’s leaders and with the colorful reform candidate, Tom Vezzetti, who was elected mayor in 1987. Flanagan, who was also a businessman, had friends on both sides, joining a real estate investment group that restored properties around the city, enabling him to leave his computer sales career and spend more time perfecting his craft.
Thirty Years and Counting
The exhibition coincides with the 30th anniversary of the Hoboken Historical Museum, which formed as a nonprofit in 1986 with a board comprising newcomers and longtime residents, who were united by their appreciation for the city’s layered history. Before moving into its current home at 1301 Hudson St. in 2001, the museum offered exhibits in display cases in City Hall, hosting guest speakers in the backrooms of bars like the Shannon Lounge and Maxwell’s and publishing a magazine with long-form articles on Hoboken history.
The most frequently photographed subjects in Flanagan’s files were the four corner shops at the intersection of 10th and Bloomfield Streets. At the beginning of the decade, they were a butcher shop, a shoe store, a deli and a laundromat. Today, they are a yoga studio, an upscale restaurant, an art gallery, and a laundromat. Some things never change.—07030
Resources
For a sense of pre-gentrification Hoboken, check out the museum’s oral history chapbook series, “Vanishing Hoboken,” in which working-class Hobokenites share recollections of the Hoboken of their youth. (hobokenmuseum.org/history/oral-history-project). For another perspective on Hoboken’s struggles with gentrification, find a copy of Nora Jacobsen’s documentary film, Delivered Vacant, which debuted in the New York Film Festival in 1992 (offthegridproductions.com/delivered-vacant).