« Home | The Crappiest Footbridge » | To the Faraway Land of Tottenville » | The Lure of the Stamp » | Drink Locally, Be A Good Person Globally » | My Kind of Book Club » | Seafood from Long Ago and Far Away » | So You Backed That Thing Up » | 'May I Barge In?' » | The Floating Pool Lady in Waiting » | Fields, Ho! »

Girl in a Lion’s Den

Our Town downtown
April 16, 2007


A young photographer spent four years amongst mobsters and ex-con fishmongers. What was she thinking?

Barbara Mensch is a mother now. If she had had a child back in 1979 when she moved into her loft on Water Street, there’s no way in hell she would have done what she did.
“South Street Story,” a recently released collection of Mensch’s photographs and accompanying text, is the fruit of the four frightening, lonely, frustrating years she spent wandering the docks with her camera, back when the Fulton Fish Market was the biggest wholesale fish market in the country.
Among the book’s opening photos is a series taken inside the Paris Bar, an all-night establishment frequented by waterfront workers. In one photo a white-bearded man is staring at the camera with a look that seems to be saying: Are you fucking kidding me? It was a look Mensch would get used to.
The first time Mensch went down to “the old Paris” it was 4 a.m. on a winter night. (Mensch would also get used to going out at that hour, the fish market’s equivalent of noon.)
She writes: “I could make out faces of the toughest-looking men I had ever seen. They were leaning over the bar, drinking and eating. The group sported heavy jackets; most wore pea caps or wool hats. Metal grappling hooks dangled from their worn jackets, and some of the men leaning over the bar wore blood-encrusted aprons… Suddenly, a large man stepped forward and advanced within an inch of my face. Fixing me with an icy stare, he said, ‘Get the fuck out.’”
Most people would have taken that as a standing order, but Mensch doesn’t set much store by orders. That characteristic of hers became evident as we were looking for a quiet place to do our interview at the seaport. She unhooked a chain and we walked past the DO NOT ENTER sign onto the gangway leading to the Circle Line dock. It was quiet here – no tourists – until the yacht’s intercom made us jump: “One, two! One, two,” and a few minutes later: “Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome aboard the Zephyr, and welcome aboard our first harbor cruise of the day!”
Mensch laughed, a little bitterly, at yet another example of how the seaport had turned into “Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”
Back when this was the workplace of the hopeless and criminal, Mensch acted with the same disregard for convention. So she wasn’t wanted at the Paris – well that was too damn bad, because that’s where the pictures were. “The following night, I couldn’t sleep and decided to go back to the Paris,” she writes. This persistence in the face of disdain is what allowed Mensch to get her pictures even when she was getting the cold shoulder, and eventually, to earn a little trust from men who didn’t like having women, or cameras, around.
But that would take awhile. For a long hard year or so, she was shut out.
“I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t do it. It was off limits,” she recalls. “It was a man’s world. It was like the minute I walked into… I called it the Lion’s Den, I had to have eyes behind my back. I had to have my guard up, be totally alert.”
Being a woman meant not only that Mensch was afraid for her physical safety, but also that she was seen as a sexual play thing.
“I had to bundle myself up so they couldn’t see what I looked like. All those clothes, so they couldn’t see my figure.”
Sometimes, she would play the game, like when she bribed a boatful of men to pose for a picture by offering to do a strip tease (which she never did). But the game never ended. “You had to prove yourself, and keep proving yourself… If they decided to allow a man into that world, I don’t think they would have given him half the bullshit they gave me.”
“It’s hard for me to express,” she says as we walk back to the Water Street loft where she still lives. She is frustrated at the limitations of speech; how to convey the courage it took to walk down this street that now looks like it belongs in Universal Studios? “The men, their arms… You’ve never seen such big arms! You,” she gestures at me, “you couldn’t walk down the street here, no way. You’d be gobbled up.”
Suddenly, she is coming at me, leaning in, arms raised in what would be an intimidating posture if she weren’t slighter and shorter than me. “You gotta camera?” she says, imitating a heavy Italian accent. Her face is not an inch from my face. “Lemme see that camera.” I can’t help but laugh, but she’s not joking.
“How often did you feel fear?” I ask her.
“Fear, fear…” she says aloud, turning the word over. “All the time.”
In the early phase of her project, Mensch felt invincible, like she could do this with or without the men’s cooperation or consent.
“As the sun rose over the Brooklyn Bridge, I came face to face with a group of grizzled-looking men smoking cigarettes while standing next to their hand trucks. Looking like a pride of lions, they huddled around flames rising from large oil cans,” she writes.
“Still feeling triumphant from my victory in the Paris Bar, I started to take pictures. At that moment a chunk of ice about the size of a baseball hit my face.”
She had been warned.
Many of the photos that portray the “hate” half of Mensch’s love-hate relationship with the seaport – backs turned to the camera, paranoid stares – were edited out in favor of more commercially appealing shots. As a result, the book is more picturesque and less tough than the world in which Mensch actually lived.
But that story is there, if you look for it – especially in the early photos, like the one of the white-bearded man at the Paris.
What drove the young photographer to keep coming back? She’s fiercely competitive, for one. “I wanted to show these tough guys I could do something,” she says. But it’s not easy for Mensch to put herself back in her younger shoes. That self almost puzzles her now.
“I was just obsessed. And maybe you have to be obsessed to do something. I just could not get any peace until I got this story.”