NEW EXHIBITS: Hoboken Historical Museum Set to Unveil Pair of Evocative Photo Collections

The Hoboken Historical Museum invites the public to the opening reception for their next Main Gallery exhibition, “Hoboken People & Places, 1976-1994: Photographs by Michael Flanagan,” on Sunday, Jan. 22, from 2 – 5 pm.

Featuring dozens of black-and-white photographs shot by Michael Flanagan in the 1970s and 80s, the exhibit reveals a city seemingly trapped in an earlier time. The images will be supplemented with posters, articles, videos and artifacts from the turbulent decades that changed the city dramatically. The exhibition will remain on view through July 2.

Opening on the same day in the Upper Gallery is “On the Waterfront, an Insider’s View: Photographs by Donald ‘Red’ Barrett,” a posthumous exhibition of photographs of Hoboken’s working waterfront from the vantage of a working longshoreman, taken by Donald “Red” Barrett, longtime friend to the Hoboken Historical Museum.

“Red” was a longshoreman for 34 years, working on piers in Brooklyn, Newark, and Hoboken. From 1955 until 1970, when the shipping companies abandoned Hoboken, “Red” documented the hiring hall (“the shape-up” on the top floor of City Hall), the docks, the cargo ships, and his fellow longshoremen—day by day amassing a vital record of the city’s working waterfront.

This exhibit will be on view through February 26.

The Hoboken Historical Museum is open six days a week, Tuesdays – Thursdays, 2 – 7 pm; Fridays, 1 – 5 pm; and Saturdays and Sundays from 12 – 5 pm, at 1301 Hudson Street, in the Machine Shop building of the Shipyard complex. Admission is $4, and three hours of free parking is available with validation.