Lower East Side

	"The people loved their children and, no matter how poor they might be, they managed to dig up the money for my pictures. I would finish the photographs on the contrastiest paper I could get in order to give the kids nice, white, chalky faces. My customers, who were Italian, Polish, or Jewish, liked their pictures dead white." Weegee by Weegee: An Autobioography, 1961
Summer, the Lower East Side, c. 1937
The hot weather last night took Weegee, the photographer, to the Lower East Side, where he found these children sleeping on a tenement fire escape at Irving and Rivington Streets. Weegee says he gave the kids $2 for ice cream. But their father took charge of the dough. PM Photo by Weegee     Heat Spell, May 23, 1941

Photographic images ©1994, International Center of Photography, New York, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox.
Text ©1997 International Center of Photography, from Weegee's World by Miles Barth, A Bulfinch Press Book, Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.