Bob Arihood

In the vanishing New York, people also disappear. People who made the city better because they loved some small part of it so well, or represented a piece of what's being white-washed away, or because they helped to preserve the often overlooked details. Photographer and blogger Bob Arihood did all three.

Bob was found dead of an apparent heart attack in his bed on the night of September 30, according to his friend Chris Flash, and may have been dead since September 25. There will be a candlelight vigil at Ray's Candy, tomorrow night at 8:00. Organizers Lindsay Wengler and Shawn Chittle say, "Bring photos of Bob, prints of Bob's photos, flowers, candles, etc."

memorial at Ray's Candy

Bob Arihood had long been suffering with severe back pain. According to Chris Flash, this was due to a police beating at the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot. Said Flash, "he was always in pain, sometimes mildly and other times badly. This poor guy was feeling the results of those blows for the past 23 years." Other friends have written in to say that Bob suffered from back pain even longer, well before the riots.

Now and then, I'd get an email from Bob telling me about the pain he felt, the exhaustion he battled, the feelings he had about quitting blogging and photography. He expressed surprise when strangers let him know how important he was to them. After an illness, he wrote, "A surprising thing has been that people have shown such concern for my well being . Strangers walk up to me on the street and ask how I am . they say that they had read about me somewhere and were simply concerned ."

After he shut down Neither More Nor Less and received so many comments and emails begging him to keep going, he said, "I didn't realize that what I was doing mattered to some as it seems to do."

memorial at Ray's Candy

But Bob did matter to many people.

Despite the pain and the lack of income-generating work for his photography, he was always in the trenches, up close with his camera to capture the action on the street. He spent many late nights haunting the park and Avenue A, camping out by Ray's Candy where he photographed the forgotten people of the streets and the startling juxtapositions between the culture of the old and new.

With his blog Neither More Nor Less, and later Nadie Se Conoce, he inspired many people, myself included, to follow in his footsteps. He encouraged bloggers like Melanie and Goggla to keep taking photos and sharing them, even as he often felt discouraged about the reception to his own work.

He championed the underdogs, like the Mosaic Man and Ray of Ray's Candy, whose beloved shop he certainly helped to save more than once by calling attention to it on his blog. He was the only one reporting on a rash of beatings of homeless people in Tompkins Square Park, including one incident that led to the death of a young girl named Lesia Pupshaw. His portraits of the East Village's most marginal men and women are unparalleled in their empathy and humanity. He introduced many readers to people they would otherwise never know--like the unsinkable L.E.S. Jewels, the philosophic Biker Bill, the Avenue A Groper, and wild-eyed Marlene, also known as "Hot Dog."

These people lived with us largely because Bob brought them to our attention. Forgotten, invisible, pushed to the gutter, they existed in some way because Bob conjured them into our lives with his camera and reporting, with his sensitivity and indefatigable dedication.

Where will they go in our imaginations now that Bob is gone?

by Hugh Burckhardt, More Than Usual

I heard from Bob just before he died. I had referred a schoolteacher named Rachel Birdsall to him. She wanted her class to learn about gentrification and Tompkins Square Park and I thought Bob would be perfect for it. He wrote me this email:

"Hello Jeremiah , I spoke to a group of kids from the Urban academy yesterday . we met in TSP near the chess tables . While they were asking questions some of the old neighborhood folks , winos , junkies and general park criminals walked by and said hello to the class . some even contributed answers to the kid's questions .A sort of total immersion event for the classand their teachers .

Thank you for directing Rachel and the class my way.I relearned that kids are different from adults.answering questions and explaing things to school kids is quite different from communicating with the park regulars .

Bob"

photo: courtesy of Rachel Birdsall (and her students)

Rachel Birdsall also wrote in and had this to say about that day two weeks ago with Bob on the corner of 7th and A:

"The students had lots of questions about the changes to the park and the neighborhood since the ’88 riots and Bob listened to them all with great interest. He took their ideas seriously, even when he didn’t agree with them, and gave them great stories to hang the history on to.

While we talked, so many people—some of them the homeless who live in the neighborhood, most of them locals to that corner—stopped to say hi and join in the conversation, that one of my students commented that 'he must have paid them something for this.' The student was joking. Bob obviously knew these men and women and they clearly had great affection and respect for him. The fact that Bob knew the individual stories of these people and shared with us how they were connected to the history of the neighborhood and the larger city was important for all of us to hear.

After the students left I spoke with him for a while longer. Bob had a lot to teach. He thought I had to read up on Hausmann’s brutal restructuring of Paris in order to understand what was happening here and he recommended a bunch of books on the subject (Walter Benjamin as well as official French court records). When I left him we talked about continuing the conversation soon. I am sorry we will not be able to."

Bob in the New York Times

In the end, Bob was teaching--and learning, as he had just started editing with Avid software and adding videos to Neither More Nor Less, lastly, of an interview with one of the young women protesters pepper-sprayed by the NYPD. There are no comments on that post because Bob was not there to approve them.

In other videos of that day, during the Occupation of Wall Street, you will catch a glimpse of Bob in the background, hunkered behind his camera or with it hanging on his shoulder. This is how I always saw him, sort of loping along the sidewalk or ducking into Ray's, dipping in and out of a crowd at a protest, always with camera in hand. He was just always there.

And there he is, again, in the background of this promo video for the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. You catch a glimpse of him. He raises his camera, for just a moment.

And then he's gone.