We first met Hedy Page (also known as Hedy Pagemanski) one fall afternoon in 2014. She had set up a folding chair and easel across from 400-402 Grand St., twin century-old tenements where Trader Joe’s and Target are now located. The painting she was working on that day became Hedy’s 86th urban landscape, one of the last in a series documenting a part of New York that has faded away.
On February 4, Hedy Page died at the age of 96. Ken Page, Hedy’s son, told the Long Island Herald, “She was an amazing mom, wife, mother-in-law and grandparent… She was all about love.” Hedy was a longtime resident of Long Beach, but often found herself drawn to the Lower East Side.
One day in 1973, Hedy positioned herself on Orchard Street in front of Sol Moscot, the eyeglasses shop, and started painting. It didn’t take long for Joel Moscot, who was leading the family business at the time, spotted her, asking if the painting was for sale. The answer was, “yes!” Soon enough, Hedy was in demand. She painted the Second Avenue Deli (when it was still in the neighborhood), Yonah Schimmel, Katz’s Deli and many other streetscapes not only on the Lower East Side but across New York City.
For the Austrian immigrant who fled the Nazis with her family at the age of 8, the paintings were not simply tributes to old buildings but also to the people who lived in them. Every single scene — from the old Fulton Fish Market, to Times Square to Orchard Street’s former “bargain district” — was a celebration of real New Yorkers.
When Hedy decided to paint 400-402 Grand St., she had not undertaken a new project in the city for about a decade. As she had gotten older, the trip from Long Island and the act of sitting on the sidewalk for hours at a time had become too grueling. But when she heard these buildings were about to be demolished to make way for the Essex Crossing mega-project, Hedy was determined. Passersby told Hedy their neighborhood stories, and she included them in the finished painting.
They also told her what else was happening on the Lower East Side. One day, an agitated man approached Hedy (the Lower East Side-based artist Nathan Hilu), telling her emphatically that she should turn her attention to his synagogue, Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, on Norfolk Street. The building, once home to one of the most consequential congregations on the Lower East Side, had suffered years of neglect and was very much endangered. Hedy rushed to paint the exterior of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, and although it wasn’t possible at that point to include the people whose lives had been touched by the synagogue, she finished the painting in 2014. Three years later, the building was ravaged in an arson fire and destroyed.
We asked Hedy a few years ago why she was so committed to depicting the lives of real people in New York City. The point, she said, is that, “We matter. Each one of us matters. Somebody has to speak up and say ‘We exist.’”
