Scene Setting

Late afternoon in the East Village: a skater glides past punks with safety pins, a saxophone hums from the benches. Tompkins Square Park: Forty Years lies open on a picnic table—its pages flicker with four decades of rebellion and rhythm.

Tompkins Square Park: Forty Years — by Living Proof

A love letter to Manhattan’s most unruly square of green, Tompkins Square Park: Forty Years gathers four decades of photographs that map the park’s eccentric gravity. From riot police in 1988 to the “Save Tompkins” rally in 2019, the images chronicle a rare place where art, protest, and skate culture orbit the same trees.

Shot by Clayton Patterson, Cheryl Dunn, Alain Levitt, Adam Zhu, and Nolan Zangas, the collection reads like a living scrapbook—raw, radiant, and stubbornly human. Each frame hums with New York’s contradictions: beauty beside decay, anarchy beside poetry. It’s not nostalgia, it’s documentation done right.

Product Highlights & Technical Notes

• Published by Living Proof, 2025

• Collection of photography spanning 1980s–2020s

• Featured photographers: Clayton Patterson, Cheryl Dunn, Alain Levitt, Adam Zhu, Nolan Zangas

• Printed in North America

• Archival-quality photographic printing

• Bound in heavy stock with matte finish cover