Shops Come and Go. But 2 New York Photographers Don’t Want to Forget.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/nyregion/lower-east-side-katzs.html

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In the late 1990s, James and Karla Murray started photographing storefronts in New York after visiting a candy store in Bedford-Stuyvesant whose colorful sign caught their eye. When they went back a few months later, the store was gone.

“It changed the neighborhood,” Ms. Murray said. “So we started to document shops.”

The Murrays have lived in the East Village for 22 years. And they have highlighted some of the family-owned stores they frequented in “Mom-and-Pops of the L.E.S.,” a mixed media art installation recently opened in Seward Park on the Lower East Side. All of the storefronts represented, except for Katz’s Delicatessen, have shuttered.

The Lower East Side has long been a favorite of photographers — from Jacob Riis in the late 1880s to Bud Glick a century later — who documented the shifting culture as immigrants moved in and, later, out to different neighborhoods. Like so many other parts of New York, rising rents have driven out local residents who called it home for decades.

Ebony Pace, a dance movement therapist who has lived in the neighborhood for three years, recently walked past what she thought was a kiosk selling sodas. Instead, it was one side of the installation: a photo illustration of a deli and grocery where the Murrays once shopped. The other three sides of the structure show a luncheonette, a newsstand and a delicatessen.

“It’s very cool,” Ms. Pace said. “It reminds me of the community. People have their staple places they like to go to.”

To create the installation, the Murrays received a $10,000 grant from the New York parks department and Uniqlo. They also raised $6,657 through Kickstarter to buy materials. The installation will remain up until July 2019.

In recent years, the Murrays used to walk from their apartment to Cup & Saucer, a tiny luncheonette at the corner of Canal and Eldridge Streets. “We’d go for the $5 breakfast, which included orange juice, coffee, two eggs, potatoes and toast,” Mr. Murray said. “Plus, John and Nick would always throw a doughnut in the bag for regulars.”

John Vasilopoulos and Nick Tragaras took over Cup & Saucer in 1988, but shuttered its doors last year after the rent was set to nearly double to $15,800 a month from $8,200. “It would be nice if we stayed another five years, but it happens,” Mr. Vasilopoulos told The New York Times then. The diner had been around since the 1940s when nearly half the population of the Lower East Side were foreign-born immigrants, mostly from Russia, Central Europe, Italy and China.

Cup & Saucer was crowded many mornings with students who went to the nearby Pace High School, Ms. Murray said. (The Murrays took the photograph in 2012.) “They kept prices low so people in the neighborhood and the school kids could eat there,” she said. “They knew how you liked your coffee. You’d hear all the neighborhood gossip.”

After the diner closed, the actress Emma Stone filmed scenes from her coming Netflix series, “Maniac,” there. Now there is Canal Pizza, where a sidewalk display advertised two slices of pizza for $5 and a hamburger for $5.99. On a recent Tuesday, a man sat in the empty restaurant eating a slice of cheese pizza. He said he was waiting to catch a bus out of town.

The Murrays based this panel on a 2009 photograph they took of Fares, a deli and grocery across the street from Tompkins Square Park that they frequented until it closed. “We knew we wanted to build a homage to Fares,” Mr. Murray said.

He used Photoshop to combine photographs he and his wife took of other such neighborhood stores that were ubiquitous before large grocery stores moved into the area. In the panel, Mr. Murray swapped the beer bottles and cigarettes originally in Fares’s window with rows of potato chips and cookies.

“More kid-friendly,” he said.

So much so, a man recently approached Ms. Murray in Seward Park, offering her $1 to buy a bag of chips for his grandson. “He was trying to open the door of the bodega,” she said.

The original Fares store on Avenue A has been replaced by a brightly lit market; “Ma Deli Grocery Corp” is printed on the red awning. A man stood behind a high counter there, the shelves below stacked with candy bars and other sundries. “We understand that things change,” Ms. Murray said.

Of the neighborhood’s remaining stores, she said, “We hope that people go shop there. You don’t have to buy everything online.”

At the corner of Hester and Bowery Streets, a metal gate was rolled down at the former Chung’s Candy & Soda Stand. A giant green heart with the words “Love Wins!” was painted in neon against black metal, brightening a corner crowded with tourists and women hauling groceries in shopping carts. Chung’s, which was photographed by the Murrays in 2001, later became C&L Sunrise Grocery, which closed last year. Neighbors say the storefront has not reopened.

Across the street is a hotel, which advertised a beer garden and an oyster happy hour. “The neighborhood is more frou frou,” said Serge Dalton, a bike messenger who was unlocking his bike nearby. “It’s a lot like Brooklyn.”

The move by consumers to online news has affected newsstands like Chung’s, which mostly sold lottery tickets, drinks, candy, snacks and, of course, newspapers and magazines. In the 1950s, there were about 1,500 newsstands in New York City. That tally has dwindled to a few hundred.

The Murrays wanted to include a typical Lower East Side Jewish delicatessen in their art installation. So they highlighted a neighborhood stalwart, Katz’s Delicatessen, where a famous scene from “When Harry Met Sally” was filmed. A purveyor of hot pastrami sandwiches, brisket and matzo ball soup, Katz’s opened its doors in 1888.

The city’s Jewish delicatessens have been disappearing for some time. They began popping up in the late 1880s, were ubiquitous by the 1930s and were “emblematic of both New York and Jewish life,” according to “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli” published in 2015 by the author Ted Merwin.

Delicatessens, Mr. Merwin wrote, became a second home for “the children of immigrants, who had begun to define their Jewish identity in a secular rather than religious fashion.”

Jake Dell, a third-generation owner of Katz’s, said in an interview, “Being a part of the community is the most important thing.”

The Murrays know Mr. Dell and used to go to Katz’s on Friday nights to buy a hot dog before wandering down the street to another shop, Yonah Schimmel, for a knish. The original photo was taken in 2008; Mr. Murray used Photoshop to get rid of all but one reference to Katz’s, so it was not prominent.

Ms. Murray said there used to be a number of Jewish delis near Seward Park, but they are now long gone.

“We wanted to represent them,” her husband said.