One of the first things I did after moving into my first-ever apartment, in the then-frontier neighborhood of SoHo, was to buy myself a serious camera. It was 1973, the time of “Ford to City: Drop Dead!” The best place to shop for photography equipment was on Essex Street in New York’s Lower East Side—an overcrowded, cluttered, chaotic store run by Hasidim—now gone. It was jammed between Gus’s Pickles, now gone, and shops where they made and sold Judaica and assorted religious apparel, now also gone. I rented darkroom space at a below-sidewalk-level warren run by a guy called Captain Borst, an eccentric, blustery character who scared me. His place on Prince Street is gone. I used to shoot in Ecktachrome. It’s gone. Befittingly, the camera that started this cautionary tale, a Pentax Spotmatic, which they don’t make anymore, was a victim of urban crime. It was stolen, and so now it’s gone.  

   

Not gone are the memories attached to the photos I’ve taken over the years.