The Lost City of New York: Stories of Growing Up in the 1950s and 1960s

In 2014, a box of negatives belonging to Frank Larson, a New York City bank auditor who had died in the 1950s, was discovered by his grandchildren. An amateur photographer, Larson’s pictures revealed a world of intimate midcentury life—snapshots of private moments on full-display in a city where you’re never really alone, as people worked, ate, and commuted. Prompted by live projections of Larson’s portraits, five NYC expats and storytellers—Harris Cooper Philip Costanzo, Iris Tillman Hill, Peter Lange, and Benjamin Reese—will recount stories from their childhoods, mixing in photographs from their own family archives. Of course, while the troubled romance of a John Cheever-esque NYC may have come and gone, the magic of the city still lives on; you need only ride the subway once to be reminded of this. This Center for Documentary Studies event, though, is meant to capture the snowglobe of a specific moment in time, and with Larson’s artful, populist pictures as backdrop, the task of being drawn into that snowglobe is not hard. The panel will begin at 6 p.m. but will be preceded by a 5:30 p.m. cash bar, and followed by a reception. —Sarah Edwards