Stan took this picture at the Ninth Avenue Food Festival not long after we moved to New York in 1989. Ever since, it has never stopped talking to me. So I was thrilled when I was invited by Writers Read to be part of a terrific cast of writers reading true personal stories about the indelible images in our lives. Here’s the piece I read for “The Photograph” show at CPW in Kingston, New York, on 10/25/25:
The Three Graces of Ninth Avenue
You probably know my husband. Not because you’ve ever met him but because you’ve seen some of the pictures he took on 9/11. One is of a man in a business suit trudging through the rubble of the ruined trade center, still holding his briefcase. The other is of an elegantly dressed woman captured in the eerie yellow light of a building lobby, covered head to toe in dust. Ed Fine and Marcy Borders. Stan’s photographs of them showed up everywhere the day after the attacks and still do on the anniversary of the event.
But they aren’t hanging on the walls of our apartment for the simple reason that they’re a reminder of a singularly horrible day in our lives and the sad fact that we humans can’t seem to stop killing each other. Instead, I want to tell you about a picture that does hang on our walls, the image I love best, the one that illustrates another aspect of humanity—friendship, camaraderie, longevity, even love.
It shows three women standing in a circle in the middle of Ninth Avenue during the annual food festival in May. They’re in their late sixties or early seventies, all about the same height, with neatly coiffed gray hair and eyeglasses. All three are wearing mid-calf skirts, short-sleeve tops, tasteful jewelry, and sensible shoes.
The two closest to the camera have tote bags slung over their shoulders, one with a quilted starburst, the kind you might get at craft fairs, the other with the repeating logo of WNET Channel Thirteen. The woman farthest away is gesticulating with her finger as if making an important point about what she heard on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” the night before.
I don’t know how Stan picked them out of the crowd that day or why he thought they’d be a worthy subject. I was scattered, distracted by a million sights and smells—the fragrant food stalls, throngs of people, and jumble of restaurants, delis, bodegas, and bars lining the avenue as far as the eye could see, each storefront festooned with an eye-catching sign proclaiming the owner’s heritage: Caribbean, Korean, Filipino, Italian, Chinese, Peruvian, Argentine, and Thai.
He took the picture in 1989, the year we moved to New York. Those were the times when we were intent on exploring the farthest corners of every borough, avidly attending the very same street fairs we now do our best to avoid.
Since then, I’ve never tired of looking at it. There’s something about their faces, plus my presumption that they’re Jewish, that reminds me so much of the teachers in my synagogue and the older women who used to sit on high stools behind the counters of their sons’ clothing or camera or jewelry stores on Main Street, keeping an eye on whoever came in and out the front door. Now, it’s 36 years later and Stan and I are both about as old as those alteh kakers in the picture, a bit withered and wrinkled and slightly stooped over.
I’ve always thought there was something timeless about the photo though I could never quite put my finger on what it was. Until the other day, when we were walking through Central Park and saw a fountain adorned with the sculpture Three Dancing Maidens. It shows a trio of girls holding hands in a circle, their dresses clinging to their bodies as if they’d gotten wet from the spray.
That’s when it occurred to me that our picture was another example of an iconic female threesome like the godmother of them all, The Three Graces, the Roman work of art at the Metropolitan Museum representing Beauty, Mirth, and Abundance, the handmaidens of Aphrodite. Of course, the three matrons in Stan’s photo are no longer young or beautiful or graceful, and they certainly aren’t naked. But just like that marble statue group from the second century, they endure.
