Greenwich Village and Environs  

In 1932 Ben Shahn, his first wife, Tillie (Ziporah) Goldstein, and their young daughter, Judith, moved from Brooklyn Heights into a Greenwich Village apartment on 23 Bethune Street, two blocks east of the Hudson River. The photographer Walker Evans, the painter and photographer Lou Block, and the film critic Jay Leyda intermittently occupied the street-level workshop, and the painter Moses Soyer lived in a flat above. Although Shahn moved his family to 333 West Eleventh Street by November 1934, he continued to maintain a studio with Evans and Block at 20–22 Bethune Street.

Shahn had been drawn to the Village by its reputation for social tolerance and progressive politics; there he had easy access to the city’s radical art organizations, as well as to Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, where his work was frequently exhibited. Shahn’s photographs palpably evoke the action of walking through the neighborhood streets, where he courted unexpected perspectives and used the area’s eclectic architecture to frame his subjects. Shahn focused his attention on residents gazing out their windows or sitting on stoops, children playing or reading comics on the sidewalks, and merchants and shoppers of Bleecker Street (the heart of Little Italy). These working-class residents interested the artist far more than the neighborhood’s historic sites or bohemian activities.