Nick Zedd, East Villager.
The Lower East Side archivist and photographer Clayton Patterson outside the front door of his building.
If you have attended any public gathering on the Lower East Side or in the East Village over the last 25 years - a punk rock gig, a community board meeting, a poetry slam, a Santeria service, the infamous Tompkins Square Park riot in 1988 - chances are you're somewhere in Clayton Patterson's archives. He was the bearish man with the billy goat beard and the biker fashion sense mingling with - but never blending into - the crowd, observing everything through a still or video camera.
As obsessive as he is ubiquitous, Mr. Patterson has taken hundreds of thousands of photographs and thousands of hours of videotape in his adopted neighborhood. Where Jakob Riis and Weegee photographed the area "as a project or a job," Mr. Patterson said with a smile in a recent interview at his home on the Lower East Side, "I do it as a disease."
He can't stop, even after more than a dozen arrests by camera-shy police officers. He has amassed a huge day-by-day visual history of the area, told mainly through unpretentious portraits of its myriad and diverse faces: tenement kids and homeless people, poets and politicians, drug dealers and drag queens, rabbis and santeros, beat cops, graffiti taggers, hookers, junkies, punks, anarchists, mystics and crackpots.
"It's not an archive of the rich and cool," Mr. Patterson noted. "It's about the tragic, glorious, sometimes depressing history of the Lower East Side."
A number of Mr. Patterson's snapshot-casual portraits appear in a hefty book, "Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side," published this month by 7 Stories Press. Edited by Mr. Patterson, Paul Bartlett and Urania Mylonas, the collection of 100 interviews and personal essays documents the neighborhood's long and vital role in avant-garde and independent film and video.
Born into a working-class family in Calgary, Alberta, in 1948, Mr. Patterson studied printmaking and came to New York City in 1979 to take a job in a commercial print shop. He and Elsa Rensaa, his partner for more than 30 years, came first to Brooklyn, "where we lived for probably three weeks," he recalled. "We just found it too suburban."
They moved to Broome Street near the Bowery, where their neighbors included a pre-fame Keith Haring, then to the Bowery itself. In 1983, "after applying to 42 banks," they managed to secure a mortgage on 161 Essex Street, a small building between Houston and Stanton Streets. They moved into the second floor, over a Hispanic dressmaker.
"Our first night here we looked out the window and saw a guy get shot across the street," Mr. Patterson said. "Very few white people came below Houston Street. It was about at the level of Avenue D in terms of who lived here, the drugs, the violence."
Drug dealers and their crews ran the streets in those days. Mr. Clayton's archive includes a large collection of empty heroin bags he found as he walked the neighborhood, each stamped with a logo and brand name identifying the dealer who sold it - evocative names like Body Bag, Redrum, China Cat and Hellraiser.
In 1986, Mr. Patterson opened the storefront Clayton Gallery, where he demonstrated little affinity for the nearby SoHo art scene. "I found it too conformist and careerist," he said. "I've always been more interested in visions and ideas that are outside the corporate art mainstream."
Over two decades, he has shown work by a Hasidic Jew and a Hell's Angel, tattoo artists and a Santeria priest, the leader of the Satan Sinner Nomads gang and an occasional underground celebrity like the Beat writer Herbert Huncke or the Warhol superstar Taylor Mead.
Probably of most interest to locals was what neighborhood kids called the Wall of Fame. Every day for years, Hispanic youths from the tenements and public housing came by to have Mr. Patterson snap their photos and display them in the gallery's window. There was always a gaggle of kids out front, tapping the window and laughing: "Mira! Mira!" Despite the roughness of the neighborhood in those years, Mr. Patterson's building was never vandalized (though he cheerfully agreed to have the front door tagged with graffiti), and he and Ms. Rensaa were never bothered. They were the Wall of Fame couple.