The Mudd Club Parked Car Heist or Life is a Carousel

Sep 15

As a recent arrival to the New York City area (Hoboken, back when it was a perfectly affordable dump) from Boston in the early 80s, I started out with a little help from my friends in the photo community. One trusting and generous soul gave me the keys to his small studio in the Flatiron District (the “Photo District” back then) along with a slide projector and a stack loader. Over several late nights, dazed by the whirring hum and slide advance clicks of the Kodak Carousel, I slowly filled a repurposed soft suitcase with newly edited and organized 35mm color slides. It was one tedious eyeball-burning editing trek towards the making of a color portfolio of my work; and sure to make me an overnight sensation in the Big Apple. Because I didn’t want to overstay my welcome at the studio, when I finished editing on the last night, I took the suitcase and tossed it in the back of my ’78 Ford Fiesta. I did not go directly home. I drove downtown to Tribeca with a couple friends and parked a few blocks from the Mudd Club, a popular underground disco on White Street.

I had a few drinks, observed the humanity, endured the disco music, didn’t dance, never really liked to anyway, no approachable girls by the bar, music too loud for talking, my LL Bean wardrobe didn’t blend, uff, it was the wrong scene, so I left. It was probably 3 AM. And the suitcase was gone. All air-and-fluids-drained-from-my-body GONE. A rough few weeks went by. No, quite a bit more, while trying to wrap my head around losing a decade or more of color work. I put up flyers, went door-to-door in the neighborhood, contacted the NYC sanitation department, police, etc. I got my hopes up for a minute when someone who claimed to “know the street” answered my flyer, then asked for a hundred bucks to get people talking.

I’m sure there were museum worthy gems in that two by three, expandable to one-foot-deep, kelly-green soft polyester suitcase with possible side-pockets, and a tan vinyl handle (in case you find it someone’s attic). Funny thing is, it didn’t take long before I could not recall a single image that I’d lost. Thank the gods for motivated forgetting.

Decades later, shuffling through boxes of random projects quickly packed during one move or another, I find a lone 2&1/4 color negative strip of four images taken at Paragon Park in Hull, Massachusetts (see gallery of B&Ws from the early 70s): three of the carousel (no relation to Kodak), and one of the Grim Reaper wielding a scythe atop a ride I can’t remember.

By the markings on the film, I know they were shot on my first Hasselblad camera that I bought in the early 80s. They were saved from obscurity in the above-mentioned suitcase either because they were filed separately (different camera & film type), or they were pictures taken after the Mudd Club incident.

Which makes me think there had to have been some 35mm slides of Paragon Park from that time, brilliant ones, of course, among those lost in The Mudd Club Parked Car Heist.

Forty years later the Grim Reaper image now conjures up a death in my photography and is now insisting that I work with what I’ve got, him/her included: scan ‘em and do what I meant to do all along. Of Course.