Reichert’s Tea Room, ca. 1940. The Reichert’s Tea Room likely opened around 1931 and was a well-known hangout in the neighborhood. A 1931 ad for the shop stated: "Meet Me at Reichert’s’ has become such a familiar phrase among young people in Bay Ridge. It is hardly worth mentioning here. The point we like to make is this: If Reichert’s didn’t make the best ice cream sodas in town would they meet at Reichert’s?” The storefront became Hinsch's in 1949 and continued to serve ice cream and diner-esque foods through 2011. In recent years it has been converted into a Stewart’s (a fast-food restaurant franchise first established in 1924!)

Over the years, as I’ve photographed the city, I’ve amassed a collection of loose typologies—those omnipresent features like storefront churches, split houses, and dead ends that create a throughline across the different neighborhoods and boroughs of New York. One of the first subjects I began to document somewhat systematically was handball walls. These large concrete monoliths, pockmarked, peeling, and painted-over slabs, preside over playgrounds like oversized Rorschach tests. A standard wall is 16’ by 20’, mirroring the proportions of the 8x10 camera I was working with. They are everywhere.