Two Girls with Matching Outfits © Christine Osinski
In 1982, photographer Christine Osinski and her husband experienced the first wave of gentrification that would come to destroy New York. A real estate developer bought the downtown Manhattan building that they called home and priced them out, forcing them to move to Staten Island – a place which has long been considered the city’s “forgotten borough.”
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“When you take the ferry, it’s like you are leaving the city behind,” Osinski says. “Staten Island was a place you weren’t noticed and people left you alone. There was a sense of being surrounded by water and being far away from things.”
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To acclimate to her new environment, Osinski set out to take photographs of locals on the streets during the summers of 1983 and ’84. The photographs, now on view in Summer Days Staten Island, capture a chapter in New York history that has all but disappeared.
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Young Man Pulling a Go-Kart © Christine Osinski
Two Girls with Big Wheels © Christine Osinski