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Street Play

Introduction by MARE 139 (Carlos Rodriguez)

In the late 70’s, New York City was in the throes of bankruptcy. The Lower Eastside was a wasteland of boarded up buildings and unfenced vacant lots. Kids roamed the neighborhoods unsupervised, giving their imaginations free rein.

The city's poorer neighborhoods had the richest street life and Martha Cooper's favorite location was Alphabet City. Back in the 70’s the area was undergoing extensive urban renewal, a process still continuing some twenty-five years later. At the time, the neighborhood had more than it's share of drug dealers and petty criminals. To an adult's eye, the landscape seemed ugly and forbidding, but to a child the abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots made perfect playgrounds, providing raw materials and open space for improvised play. A crumbling tenement housed a secret clubhouse, rooftops became private aviary and a pile of trash might be a source for treasure.

Opening with a poignant memoir from Carlos MARE 139 Rodriguez, who remembers the excitement of growing up playing on the streets of New York City, STREET PLAY shows the creative and indomitable spirit of city kids determined to make the best of their inhospitable environment. Martha Cooper’s work attests to a transitional, post-tenement and pre-artist period on the Lower East Side when street culture held turf in Alphabet City. Today the neighborhood is transformed but where are the go-carts and skelly caps?

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SEPTEMBER 8 - OCTOBER 8, 2006: HIP HOP YOU DON'T STOP: MARTHA COOPER & MARE 139 EXHIBIT

Trains: F to East Broadway or Delancey. D, B or Q to Grand St. J or M trains to Essex St.

Photography / New York

Hardcover, 9.44 x 9.44 inches

120 pages, 100 duotone photos

ISBN: 3-937946-16-0