Margaret Morton, photographer, dies at age 71

From her apartment on East 10th Street in Manhattan, New York, Margaret Morton had a frontrow view of the homeless encampments that engulfed Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s. As she walked to work at Cooper Union, where she was a professor, she began to photograph these improvised structures, showing the ways people were moved to make themselves at home even when they had so little.

When the city bulldozed the park in late 1989, scattering those who lived there, Morton followed them and spent the next 10 years documenting their world and that of others on the margins, not only telling their stories but also advocating for their welfare. The author Philip Lopate, who described her as “our modern-day Jacob Riis,” said recently that “she pulled off a rare combination of socially engaged photography that was also formally exquisite.”

Morton died June 27 at her home. She was 71. Her sister, Judith Orsine, confirmed the death and said Morton was being treated for a form of leukemia.

A slight woman who her gallerist, Jay Deutsch, said in her youth resembled singer Emmylou Harris, Morton scrambled through open manholes, shinnied under fences and made her way to the edges of the city — and society — to her subjects’ habitats.

For years, she followed a community living in a railroad tunnel under Riverside Park. The Mole People, as they sometimes called themselves, found privacy, protection from the elements and fellowship in their dim, dank world, pierced by shafts of light from above. They scavenged clothes, furniture and water, and turned cinder-block storage units into cozy dwellings. Their unofficial leader was Bernard, who served “tunnel stew” at weekly potlucks and tended a lemon seed that sprouted into a plant in a single column of sunshine in front of his home.

In 1995, Amtrak, which owned the tunnel, sealed off the entrances and threatened to evict the Mole People, whose numbers had grown as homeless camps in the park above were razed. Morton, Bernard and the city’s Coalition for the Homeless rallied to find alternative housing through federal subsidies.

Not all the tunnel folk were willing or able, but there were some victories. Jose Camacho, a man who decorated his plywood home with a Seurat poster and made his bed every day for the 13 years he lived underground, secured a sunny one-bedroom in the Bronx.

Yet housing officials initially claimed Camacho and others were not “housing ready,” as Nina Bernstein reported in The New York Times — a charge that infuriated Morton, who brandished her book about the tunnel dwellers to administrators as she argued on their behalf.

“These people have completely built a home, furnished it, with books on the nightstand,” she said. “How could they not be housing ready?”