Enter the building at 161 Essex Street and you step inside the history of New York’s Lower East Side, in all its chaotic glory.
The decaying two-story building — covered in graffiti, stickers and a permanently drawn accordion gate — is the home, office and inner sanctum of Clayton Patterson, the street photographer and renegade journalist. Mr. Patterson, 76, has spent more than 40 years here, accumulating an exhaustive collection of photos, paintings and other paraphernalia from his beloved neighborhood.
There are portraits of gender-bending performers like RuPaul and Lower East Side gangs like Satan’s Sinners Nomads. There are photos and videos about the case of Daniel Rakowitz, who killed his roommate and girlfriend in 1989 and was rumored to have made soup from her body and fed it to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. (Mr. Rakowitz was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the cannibalism was never proved.)
The walls are decorated with graffiti by some of the famed taggers that Mr. Patterson has known over the years and paintings by Peter Missing, the musician and artist whose emblem of an upside-down martini glass was once ubiquitous in the East Village, carrying its implicit anti-Yuppie message: “The party’s over.”
There’s a thick black binder of empty cocaine and heroin bags that once drew Anthony Bourdain, who visited Mr. Patterson just before his death in June 2018. Mr. Bourdain, a former heroin user, found a bag of a specific type of heroin he’d once tried called “Toilet,” a moment he featured in the finale of his show “Parts Unknown,” quipping, “You knew you were doing something bad when you bought a product called ‘Toilet,’ you know, and shot it in your arm.”
Perhaps most well known, there are videos Mr. Patterson shot of the 1988 riots in Tompkins Square, footage that eventually led to his imprisonment — for defying a court order — and the indictment of six New York City police officers after police clashed violently with a group of protesters.
Amid all of it is Mr. Patterson himself, a graying Buddha in a worn wingback chair, sitting in an overgrown garden of his own creation, and preaching a sermon of the interconnectedness of all the subcultures he’s inhabited: the worlds of tattoo artists and visual artists, drug dealers and drug users, punks and protesters, Jews and Latinos, squatters and street gangs.
“What all of this is about, in the end, are the overlaps,” said Mr. Patterson, who has the letters “LES” inked on his belly and five Jack Sparrow-style dreads, running from his chin to his hips. “It really is the weaving together of a whole community. And it’s big.”
For students of the neighborhood’s — and city’s — history, Mr. Patterson holds a unique place, with admirers who call him “a legend” and “a unicorn.”
“In another time, Clayton would be mayor of the L.E.S.,” said Lucy Sante, the author of “Low Life,” a definitive history of early New York.
Now, however, after more than four decades of taking photos (though he rejects the title “photographer,” saying he’s “not trying to be Richard Avedon”) and collecting stuff, Mr. Patterson is in a jam: 161 Essex is falling apart, and its contents are endangered.
Once a Dominican wedding dress shop, his building needs repairs. Buckets catch water leaking from the roof, and electrical and other wires are taped to the walls. An old oil boiler sometimes seems overmatched by the cold leaking in through the storefront windows, and basic amenities are threadbare: rusted hot plates in a galley kitchen, a wooden sink in the shower, several unkempt toilets.
Unlike other local residents displaced by gentrification, Mr. Patterson owns his building and is in no danger of eviction. His plight, rather, is one of time and energy. He has survived prostate cancer, but is not sure how much longer he has.
“I’m fading,” he said, adding: “The old body starts to dissolve, you know? I just don’t have the juice I used to have.”
Mr. Patterson knows he needs to clear out and organize his “archives.” Ideally, this would mean emptying the building and having it redesigned as an open space — a gallery or a research center or some combination thereof. And while he could undoubtedly sell his building and make a large profit, Mr. Patterson does not want to leave, saying the building itself has a “place in our history.”
But it’s a project he admits is beyond him. “I can’t do it alone,” he said.
Mr. Patterson said he has tried to find a place to store his possessions while repairs are made, approaching foundations, cultural institutions and even local developers. There have been some promising developments — Mr. Patterson has discussed temporarily moving some of his archive to a space inside a nearby building, Essex Crossing.
But the task is a daunting one, a collection of every conceivable keepsake, crowding corners and running up the walls: piles of papers, racks of clothing, stacks of canvases, boxes of snapshots, walls of video, shelves of books, cabinets of cameras, caches of cassettes, crates of unknown contents and countless bins of miscellany.
“This place,” he admits, “is chaos.”
And despite a large coterie of friends and near-daily visitors, his closest ally is unavailable to help: His wife and professional partner for the last half-century, the artist Elsa Rensaa, has dementia and lives in a nearby assisted living facility.
Those who have been inside 161 Essex said it holds reams of evidence of the diverse crosscurrents that have swept through the area since the late ’70s, when Mr. Patterson arrived in New York from his native Canada.
“What’s in that building is as close to a priceless archive of Lower East Side history of the last 40 years as you’re ever going to see,” said John Strausbaugh, the author of “The Village,” a history of Greenwich Village, as well as of a book of portraits with Mr. Patterson. “A lot of it is about the Lower East Side that has disappeared, and that exists, kind of only, in that one building on Essex Street. And that makes it really, really important.”
161 Essex Filled Up
Mr. Patterson is part of a long line of New York City street photographers, a roster that runs from Jacob Riis, the famed 19th century journalist and reformer, to Ricky Powell, who shot the likes of the Beastie Boys, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Run-DMC. Unlike Mr. Powell, however, Mr. Patterson rarely found famous subjects; rather, he sought to capture ordinary people.
“That’s the beauty of what Clayton does,” said Crystal Field, the artistic director of the Theater for the New City, the venerable company on First Avenue.
And for his supporters, Mr. Patterson’s predicament is symbolic of the larger changes in the East Village and the Lower East Side, on the southeast flank of Manhattan.
“They will put a plaque one day where Clayton’s archives used to be,” said Phoebe Legere, a painter, filmmaker, composer and writer. “A sentence or two, right? You can just see it. A bronze reduction of his epic life and work. And meanwhile, the actual art, it’s going to be ash in the wind. Unless somebody does something.”
As Ms. Legere and others suggest, the area has seen a steady disappearance of cherished venues and hangouts, and with them the grit that once defined the neighborhood. Places like the Pyramid Club and Theater 80, CBGB’s and Mars Bar, King Tuts Wah Wah Hut and Sin-é have all shuttered. Cheap eats have faded alongside cheap rents: restaurants like Leshko’s and Odessa, both on Avenue A, are gone, as is the Life Cafe, where composer Jonathan Larson was said to have written “Rent.”
The print edition of The Village Voice — once landing, every Wednesday, heavy with rental possibilities and futon ads — is no more, and many of the neighborhoods’ characters have died off. The Hell’s Angels, who used their muscle to keep East Third Street the safest street in the East Village, roared out of the neighborhood in 2019, as big-box stores have moved in (there’s a Target on 14th Street, and one on Grand Street, too).
Of course, the only thing more common than New York City neighborhoods “dying” from gentrication is neighborhoods being declared past their prime.
Ada Calhoun, the author of “St. Marks Is Dead,” about St. Marks Place, one of the East Village’s central corridors, said that while it was “excruciatingly painful to lose things that we love,” the neighborhood still vibrated with energy.
“You go out there any night and there are teenagers and they are having their moment,” said Ms. Calhoun, who still lives on St. Marks Place. “It is teeming with life.”
Mr. Patterson often found that life right outside his door. Raised in Calgary, Alberta, Mr. Patterson met Ms. Rensaa in art school, and the couple moved to New York in 1979. In 1982, they found the building and approached 42 different banks, as he tells it, before finally getting a mortgage. (Mr. Patterson will not say what they paid, but the building is his, free and clear.) Mr. Patterson began taking photos of people who passed in front of 161 Essex, sometimes tracking generations of local residents: from children to parents to grandparents.
“I was just interested in documenting the neighborhood,” he said. “And this way, they were all coming to me. And my door was the background.”
But it would be video that eventually led to what is perhaps Mr. Patterson’s most significant journalistic endeavor. On the night of Aug. 6, 1988, hundreds of people had descended on Tompkins Square Park, the major public space in the East Village, to protest a city curfew at the park, where some homeless people had been encamped.
Police, mounted and on foot, were dispatched to disperse crowds, a plan that devolved into a violent riot, with officers bloodying protesters, some of whom threw bottles and blocked traffic. And Mr. Patterson filmed it all, using a hand-held Panasonic to capture the riot as it unfolded.
A New York Times investigation after the clashes found that “officers wore no badges or hid their badge numbers, clubbed and kicked bystanders for no apparent reason and without arresting them, and streamed through the streets of the East Village in uncontrolled rage.” Reporters used Mr. Patterson’s footage to document their findings.
A month after the riot, Mr. Patterson was jailed for contempt after defying a court order demanding he surrender his videotape, led away in handcuffs even as supporters chanted his name. He was released 10 days later, after going on a hunger strike and turning over a copy of the video. (It was just one of a passel of arrests Mr. Patterson had over the years, usually in the course of shooting news events.)
The riot earned Mr. Patterson a degree of fame, though he and Ms. Rensaa continued to sell custom-made baseball caps — fashioned using an old Singer and an equally ancient button maker — with wild designs (skulls, horned devils, Batman characters) circling the dome and inside the bill. Mr. Patterson also made money helping a local landlord manage his buildings, though Ms. Rensaa had a more lucrative calling as a “chromist,” hand-separating colors for fine-art printing.
While Mr. Patterson would sometimes sell his photos and footage to mainstream news media outlets, much of his work was unpaid, as he roamed the streets most days and nights, filming and interviewing his subjects, asking blunt but probing questions.
As decades passed, he dabbled in a dozen different worlds: he was a founder of the Tattoo Society of New York. He self-published a three-volume history of the Jewish presence in the Lower East Side — though he is not Jewish — created anthologies about the area’s film and social history, and a book on the denizens at the Pyramid Club, the gloriously grimy music bar on Avenue A.
He established a culture award — the N.Y. Ackers, originally named for the experimental writer and performance artist Kathy Acker — and was the subject of a documentary, a graphic novel, as well as of features everywhere from Vice to The New Yorker.
As he did all that, 161 Essex filled up.
One of the Last Old-Timers of the Lower East Side
Organizing Mr. Patterson’s belongings would be a monster, friends said.
“You could have graduate students working on that for the next hundred years figuring out what he’s got in that collection,” said Mr. Strausbaugh.
Ron Magliozzi, a curator with the film department at MoMA, which previously acquired 14 of his video works focused on the club scene and AIDS protests, said others could be valuable if cataloged. “My admiration for Clayton’s video is boundless, as were his interests when he was shooting in the ’80s and ’90s,” said Mr. Magliozzi.
Alexander S. C. Rower, the president of the Calder Foundation, echoed this, calling Mr. Patterson’s collection “quite substantial,” and in need of sorting. “Currently, they’re inaccessible,” he said. “Which is the same as saying nonexistent.”
Much of Mr. Patterson’s video and photo work has been digitized, with the help of Ms. Rensaa and Teddy Liouliakis, a local marketing professional who has become a friend. Other efforts to help are also underway; the local city councilman, Christopher Marte, whom Mr. Patterson photographed when he was a boy, plans to start a capital campaign — and his re-election bid — at an event in early June, to raise money to renovate 161 Essex.
Mr. Patterson can be found most days sitting in his wingback chair, looking out at Essex Street at the traffic and people passing by. Filmmakers, journalists, artists, old friends all stop in regularly, pilgrims to see one of the last old-timers of the Lower East Side.
“I could never come here and be me again,” he said, adding, “I’ve seen things that I thought were really historic and important just disappear.”
Indeed, Antony Zito, an artist known for painting portraits of everyday people on discarded coffee cups, described a certain melancholy to Mr. Patterson’s current pursuits, saying “he struggles with this sort of constant hunger for substance and culture and the underground.”
And are those elements gone, or just harder to find?
“Both,” Mr. Zito said.
Mr. Patterson still photographs visitors in front of his door, posting some of those snaps on Instagram. He asks everyone to sign his guest book, and a select few venture into the back rooms, where the “extremely valuable clutter” — as Mr. Zito put it — collects dust and dirt and the occasional raindrop.
After countless stories and hundreds of thousands of photographs, Mr. Patterson said his legacy depends on saving his archives — one last assignment.
“It’s a job, and I should be alive to do it; otherwise nobody will know,” Mr. Patterson said. “Nobody is going to know.”
Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.
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