Debbie Nathan

For three or four years after 9/11/2001, working-class New York abounded with a new take on old Christian symbols. From the tourist shops of Canal Street to street vendor tables near Chambers, and on to shlock stores in the Bronx’s Marble Hill and Elmhurst in Queens — then to restaurant and barber shop exteriors in City Island, Inwood and a thousand more of those nothing places of which the mystical-materialist urbanist Marshall Berman once said (more or less): “We New Yorkers like our dirty, crummy neighborhoods.” These communities were a mouse museum of 9/11 mourning, whose imagery invoked ancient icons of Western civ. Mary Magdalene, the Pieta, the stations of the cross. It was all there in street murals, snow globes and wall clocks that shone and winked and blinked in the sun, or in the dark if you put AA batteries in back.

Now this stuff is disappearing: victim to the natural elements, and to declining consumer demand (click here for squib and photo I contributed the other day to New York Magazine about the demise of the WTC postcard).

To commemorate the passing of a folk art genre, here are a few artifacts I’ve collected and photographed in the past six years.

(1) (above) Angels and ambulance, WTC mural, City Island, Bronx

(2) (above) Detail from post 9/11 snow globe. Looks like famous Iwo Jima photo, sure, but note deeper resemblance to

(3) (below) The Procession to Calvary, by Ridolfo Giarlandiao, 1505.

(4 Calvary snow globe in situ in Upper Manhattan. Purchased in Bronx in 2003

(5) Mural, City Island, with Statue of Liberty as the Magdalene of the Pieta

(6) End of an era: peeling mural on Mexican restaurant, City Island, summer 2007