NYC 00s
NYC is a city of many epochs — the Gilded Age, consolidation and the Progressive Era, the Harlem Renaissance, the Wall Street boom years of the 1980s, the Golden Era of Hip-Hop — each of which has left its mark on the city. In comparison, the period examined by this book, 1999 to 2003, is short, but despite its brevity those few years had an impact on the physical, material and cultural landscape of the City as meaningful and enduring as its predecessors. 1999, the last year of the twentieth century, also marked the last gasps of the “old New York,” the pre-gentrified NYC. Times Square was still sleazy, there were still vacant lots and abandoned cars, and stores in Soho that didn’t sell designer purses. Mom and pop businesses were still the norm, and oddball bars and lounges like LES staple Max Fish and Passerby, the curator Gavin Brown’s Chelsea spot with the Saturday Night Fever light-up dancefloor, abounded. It wasn’t yet the homogenized, branded city of today. It was a fun place to be, especially for the creatives who thronged downtown and in Brooklyn. Then of course, came the tragedy of 9/11. It changed the world, of course, but it at once shattered NYC and drew the city together as never before. We who witnessed it at first hand were forever changed, but we loved our city with a redoubled passion in the gruesome aftermath. And in the ensuing years a kind of brittle hedonism came over the city. A survivor’s mentality settled over my generation, post our trauma. I believe it’s no surprise that so many influential bands emerged in that moment. So many had died but we had not. We were young, we were alive, and we went all-in to prove it, as much as to ourselves as to anyone else. To paraphrase A Tale of Two Cities, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The best times dragged out of the smoking ruins of the worst time. The smell of the towers’ carcass lingered downtown, and the horror of the missing person flyers remained a saddening presence for months, but my generation still determined to go out, to listen to music, to dance, to flirt, to live, to be alive. To me that is the spirit of the next few years. They were giddy, hyper-real, supercharged. Perhaps it’s the coincidence of age, but in my view things were never again as intense as those last years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first. It was a great time to be young in New York City, ripe with potential and bursting with joy. These images capture the very essence of that feeling, of that epoch. They make me delightedly happy and suffused with sadness at the same time. There can be no higher commendation than that. Eddie Brannan, December 2020
