In Photos: A decade growing up in pre-gentrification Lower East Side

When pho­tog­ra­ph­er Angela Cap­pet­ta moved into her own apart­ment on Manhattan’s Low­er East Side in 1991, the neigh­bour­hood was not the trendy area full of late-night bars and life that it is today. Rents were cheap, there were clus­ters of aban­doned build­ings, and, to out­siders at least, it was most­ly known as an area rife with crime.

After grow­ing up in New Haven, Con­necti­cut in the late 70s and ear­ly 80s, Cap­pet­ta knew to judge the area on more than just its rep­u­ta­tion. ​“When I was grow­ing up, New Haven had the high­est crime rate in the coun­try – it had more mur­ders per capi­ta than Detroit and Wash­ing­ton D.C. com­bined,” Cap­pet­ta says. ​“The Low­er East Side would get very dicey, but I felt com­fort­able in that kind of neigh­bour­hood because it was reflec­tive of my own child­hood. I would get up ear­ly in the morn­ings when it was safer – chil­dren were in the play­grounds and fam­i­lies were out, it felt more ​‘neighbourhood‑y’ in the morning.”

Cap­pet­ta would spend time pho­tograph­ing fam­i­lies she met out and about in the ear­ly hours. She found her­self par­tic­u­lar­ly drawn to a neigh­bour­ing Puer­to Rican fam­i­ly and their youngest daugh­ter Glen­dalis, whose life remind­ed the pho­tog­ra­ph­er of hers. ​“I grew up mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional­ly, very typ­i­cal of a Mediter­ranean fam­i­ly sys­tem – no bound­aries, no pri­va­cy, everyone’s on top of each oth­er – it’s kind of insane but also very joy­ous,” she recalls. ​“I’m the youngest daugh­ter and she’s the youngest daugh­ter in terms of their fam­i­ly sys­tem, and every pho­tog­ra­ph­er is look­ing to beau­ti­fy their own expe­ri­ences of who they are.”

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er struck up a close rela­tion­ship with Glen­dalis and her fam­i­ly, and she went on to pho­to­graph them over the course of a decade. Her new pho­to­book, Glen­dalis: The Life and World of a Youngest Daugh­ter, col­lates those images and presents them togeth­er. The work pro­vides an up-close-and-per­son­al look at the life of a work­ing-class Puer­to Rican fam­i­ly in the Low­er East dur­ing the 90s, doc­u­ment­ing them grow­ing up as the world changed around them.

The pic­tures high­light the tight-knit fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty that Glen­dalis occu­pies. With the bulk of the pho­tographs cap­tured inside her family’s apart­ment, Glen­dalis is rarely alone in her younger years. She’s found lean­ing across a back­rest that her grand­moth­er is sit­ting on as sun­light beams across them, hang­ing out with her father, or sit­ting on the floor while her sis­ter flicks through a teen mag­a­zine in the background.

But that changes through­out the photobook’s spreads. Glen­dalis grad­u­al­ly ages from a child to a young woman, and the lat­er pho­tographs see her in more soli­tary, inde­pen­dent sit­u­a­tions. There are increas­ing­ly delib­er­ate choic­es of cloth­ing, a phase with a blonde streak in her hair, and towards the end of the book are pic­tures tak­en from her ​‘Sweet Six­teen’ birth­day par­ty, where she sits in front of a huge pink cake wear­ing a pink dress to match.

They are relat­able images, but Glen­dalis: The Life and World of a Youngest Daugh­ter isn’t a com­ing of age sto­ry, accord­ing to Cap­pet­ta. ​“It’s about how peo­ple change in invis­i­ble ways,” she says. ​“And how a fam­i­ly marks their life, just through liv­ing a com­pelling life.”

Glen­dalis: The Life and World of a Youngest Daugh­ter by Angela Cap­pet­ta is pub­lished by L’Artiere

Buy your copy of Huck 81 here.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Insta­gram.

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck.