Brighton Beach is a community on Coney Island lying just east of Coney Island proper. Developed as beach resort in 1878, it evolved in the early 1900s as a multi-story apartment residential district, a home to many immigrant Jews from Europe and Tsarist Russia. As children of these immigrants moved on during the churning post-WWII era, the area went unto decline.

When I took these shots in 1987 – 88, a new influx of Immigrants, mostly Jewish, from the Soviet Union, was restoring the urban neighborhood quality of life. Brighton Beach Avenue, located beneath a NYC subway station, was back to life with Russian markets, restaurants, and nightclubs. Today, these nightclubs, according to the Brighton Neighborhood Association website, can “rival Manhattan clubs of the 1930s.”