Weegee's Naked City

No one captured New York City in its noir 1930s and 1940s better than the photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. Ceaselessly roaming New York's streets, often at night while his competitors slept, Weegee took thousands and thousands of photos that visually defined what he called the Naked City. An exhibition of his work is on view at the International Center of Photography on the Lower East Side until May 2025.

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Transcript

Weegee's Naked City

It was late on the night of Feb. 2, 1942. The war was on and Manhattan was dark and quiet at night. Andrew Izzo and three armed accomplices slipped into the Spring Arrow Social & Athletic Club on Broome Street in downtown Manhattan. Some guys were inside playing cards, shooting some pool. Izzo and his boys pulled out pistols and, not displaying an abundance of imagination, said, "This is a stick-up."

Unfortunately for them, an off-duty cop was in the club buying a pack of cigarettes at the bar. He yanked out his service revolver. Guys dove behind the pool tables, hitting the floor as deafening shots rang out.

A moment later Izzo staggered out to the sidewalk with one or more of the cop's bullets in his gut. The street was dark and deserted. He turned away from Bowery and stumbled down the block toward Elizabeth Street. He was not far from the corner when his head began to spin, his knees buckled, and he fell flat on his face on the sidewalk. His gun skittered out of his hand. Just another dead hoodlum in the Naked City. 

But this particular dead hoodlum happened to be lying just a couple of blocks from Police Headquarters, where a crime photographer was hanging out, waiting for news to happen. Minutes after the shooting, he arrives with the first cops on the scene. He's a short, frog-faced man with a boxy Speed Graphic camera dangling from his hand and a cheap cigar – a Robert Burns Panatela – stuck in the corner of his mouth. He gets a great shot of Izzo lying there dead on his face, the pistol not far from his limp fingers. It's been reproduced countless times as a classic image of New York in the 1940s.

The photographer's name is Arthur Fellig, but he's better known as Weegee.

He was born Usher Fellig in 1899, in a Jewish shtetl in an eastern province of Austria that's now Ukraine. Fleeing the pogroms, his family came to the Lower East Side in 1910. Usher's name was Americanized to Arthur. 

He left home by 1917, and over the next few years often slept in Bowery missions and flophouses, inside Penn Station, or on park benches. He began his career in commercial photography assisting a street photographer who shot cheap tintypes of children on his pony. Through the 1920s, he worked as a darkroom assistant at the New York Times and at Acme Newspictures (later UPI). 

His peak period as a street and crime photographer was a whirlwind of constant motion that lasted from the 1930s into the post-war years. Ceaselessly roaming New York's streets, often at night while his competitors slept, Weegee took thousands and thousands of photos, which he sold to the many daily newspapers in the city back then. Crime scenes and criminals were his meat and potatoes, but he captured much more than that. Tenement families sleeping together on fire escapes on sweltering summer nights. Transvestite hookers flashing a little leg as they step down out of the paddy wagon. A million sweaty bodies jammed together like a vast colony of seals on the beach at Coney Island. Dazed survivors of apartment house fires, drunks collapsed on early morning sidewalks, summer lightning stabbing at Manhattan's mid-century skyline. 

Starting in 1934 he lived in a single room over the John Jovino gunshop on Centre Market Place, behind the grand old police headquarters building, today a luxury residential address. In the early mornings the whole block would be lined with paddy wagons (Weegee called them "pie wagons"), bringing in the night's arrests for booking and processing. Newshounds crowded the sidewalk for the morning "perp walk," when cops paraded their handcuffed catch for the cameras.

At night, Weegee haunted the lobby of the police building, waiting for something to happen. When it did, he'd rush off to the scene with the cops, and was often the first or only photographer there. 

"The easiest kind of a job to cover was a murder," he once explained, pronouncing it moida. "Because the stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn't get up and walk away and get temperamental. He would be good for at least two hours, so I had plenty of time."

Weegee was an enthusiastic promoter of his own legend, stamping the backs of his photos "Weegee the Famous" and "Weegee -- The World's Greatest Photographer" long before he could credibly claim to be either. 

Still, he did have an almost clairvoyant knack. Hanging out in the lobby of Police Headquarters helped, of course. It also didn't hurt that he installed police and fire department shortwave radios near his bed in his room. He got permission to install them in his '38 Chevy, in which he raced all over the city to beat his competition to fires, car accidents, and dead hoodlums. In the trunk he carried photo equipment, a typewriter for photo captions, clothes, salamis, and a steady supply of those Panatelas, of which he smoked as many as twenty a day.

When he went to the scene of a fire, he didn't shoot the fire, the way all the other newsmen did. He turned his back to the fire and shot the faces in the crowd the fire had attracted. You can feel the heat reflected off their glassy-eyed, rapt stares. 

By the end of World War II, Weegee was in fact "Weegee the Famous." After the publication of his books Naked City (1945) and Weegee's People (1947) he was recognized throughout the city and, increasingly, the country. His book inspired the classic noir film The Naked City. Weegee makes a fleeting, Hitchcock-like appearance in it. 

That taste of fame prompted a surprising move to Hollywood, where Weegee hobnobbed with stars and got tiny acting parts in a few more films. But he never really fit in what he called "the Land of the Zombies." He was too much a New York character himself. After a few years he moved back to Manhattan at the end of 1951. 

His crime photography days were over. Until his death in 1968, he toured the US and Europe, giving lectures and enjoying his fame. On a trip to England, he was invited to visit Stanley Kubrick's set for Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers met him, and imitated Weegee's voice and accent in his portrayal of Strangelove. 

When Weegee died, his small apartment on W. 47th St. was crowded with thousands of photos and negatives. Much of that material went to the International Center of Photography, which is hosting a Weegee exhibit in its Lower East Side space until May 2025.