Joana Avillez Illustrates 1959 Harbor Classic After 6 Years Revisiting Lower Manhattan Waterfront
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Jun 1
Joana Avillez Illustrates 1959 Harbor Classic After 6 Years Revisiting Lower Manhattan Waterfront
1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 1
Six years of work led Joana Avillez, 39, to complete illustrations for a new Modern Library edition of Joseph Mitchell’s 1959 “The Bottom of the Harbor.”
Lower Manhattan’s South Street Seaport shaped the project: Avillez grew up near the East River and said she still remembers Fulton Fish Market fishmongers, crabs underfoot and the district’s rougher final years.
Walking Water Street and Peck Slip, she retraced both Mitchell’s reporting routes and her own childhood geography, describing the vanished waterfront world that once stood where promenades, bookstores and tourist plazas now sit.
The project ties a personal memory map to a literary one, reviving Mitchell’s old New York through drawings rooted in a neighborhood Avillez says she saw in its last breaths.
How does an artist illustrate a city's ghost, chasing a past that no longer exists?
Can New York save its waterfront's soul from its 'utterly lackluster' present?