Artist Statement
On an isolated peninsula at the far edge of New York City there lives a close-knit community of impoverished social outcasts who, bearing the stigma of mental illness and the perception of moral turpitude, have found themselves exiled to a forgotten corner of Queens known as THE LAST STOP – ROCKAWAY PARK.
While it is less than twenty miles from Manhattan, Rockaway Park is another country. It is a place that many financially strapped mental hospitals and nursing homes have for years used as a dumping ground for some of their indigent patients. This famed Irishtown in the last remnant of hope for many elderly and low income families living in fear of homelessness.
For the last five years, I have traveled for four hours round-trip on public underground transformation from Jersey City, New Jersey to the Rockaways in New York City. During that time out there, I have developed close personal ties with the community. “Last Stop: Rockaway Park” is a photo book of intimate portraits, interviews, and environmental shots.
My purpose is to reveal a society of the disregarded. Marginalized and dysfunctional, many have severe disabilities, and are besieged by chronic illness and addiction. They inhabit a hazy twilight world of ramshackle bars, boarding houses, single room occupancies and frayed social services that teeter just beyond the last stop on the New York subway system’s “A” line.
There is a deep sense of loneliness here. The people in my images, many of whom I have come to know and feel great affection for, have revealed to me something about the perseverance of the human spirit amid isolation and decay. Here one still finds friendship, laughter and even love.
If there is an additional level of melancholy in these images, it may be due to the fact that this world, such as it is, is on the verge of disappearance. Already demolished by politics and economics, Rockaway Park is now facing a new threat: gentrification. Luxury condominiums are springing up, speculators are investing, businesses revamping, and the ongoing real estate book will soon condemn its dilapidated pubs to the past along with yesteryear’s Playland Amusement Park.
The result is the displacement of the displaced. Caught between these two forces – the grand and colorful history that some of the old timers still recall, and the shiny new future that will certainly exclude them – the subjects in these images live in a precarious present where whatever stability they’ve managed to carve out among the bars and boardwalk is itself under siege. Perhaps this reflects all too well the extremely transient nature of their lives. In the four years I have been photographing Rockaway Park, several of my subjects have died, mostly from drinking and drugs. Many others have simply disappeared.
Rockaway Park is transforming quickly which makes my purpose even the more valuable – to document the people here with dignity, compassion and as part of urban social history, before they die or are priced out.
Largely uneducated and unaware of their rights, the men and women I photographed are not always privy to the social programs that could help them. Yet ironically, despite being at the bottom of the pecking order in American hierarchy, Irishtown remains a stronghold for conservative attitudes, where some of the greatest resistance to offered social reforms comes from those who might most benefit from it.
“Last Stop: Rockaway Park” will be presented as a series of photographs sized 24”x24”. I will include a listening station of interviews with various subjects from the project.
Captions
Juliana Beasley, Miss Reingold, Chromira Print, 2003, 24”x24”
Juliana Beasley, Charlie 2 AM, Chromira Print, 2003, 24”x24”
Juliana Beasley, Socks and Vodka, Chromira Print, 2003, 24”x24”
Juliana Beasley, John Trainer as James Dean, Chromira Print, 2003, 24”x24”
Juliana Beasley, Portrait of Unity, Chromira Print, 2003, 24”x24”
