As a Baby Boomer coming of age in Massapequa, Long Island, in the 1950s and 1960s,Meryl Meisler enjoyed the picture perfect suburban American childhood. Her days were filled with Girl Scout meetings, piano lessons, twirling practice, and ballet class; on weekends, her family would take trips to New York City to catch a Broadway show. Glamour and theatricality filled her youth, setting the stage for things to come when she moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1975, after receiving her MA in Art from the University of Madison in Wisconsin.
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Twenty-three of age, Meisler arrived in New York just as it was reaching the peak of decadence. The financial collapse of the city (as a result of the explosion in public spending), combined with the Sexual Revolution, the Gay Pride, and Women’s Liberation Movements to create the perfect storm: a playground for a new generation coming of age that could afford to work, live, and party in New York.
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Meisler sublet a room from her cousin Elaine on the Upper West Side, in Manhattan. “I fell right in,” she remembers. “I was freelancing as an illustrator, making sporadic money, and photographing. I set up a darkroom in the laundry room and that was that. I loved meeting different kinds of people from different backgrounds. My cousins had a gallery in East Harlem that brought together poets, artists, and musicians of all ages. Elaine’s older sister, Barbara, was friends with journalist Betty Friedan and all the famous feminists of the day. I was going to parties with movers and groovers, then out dancing at a Latin club. I felt at home. Whoever I was, this was where I belonged.”
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