sweeper.'” But a plan was one thing; inducing the target to remove his clothes in a nearby alley and hand them over to a total stranger was another.

“My father has a very nice way about him and is a very gentle man, so people were not intimidated,” Ron Dubin says. “Still, the strongest memory I have is of being somewhat embarrassed by all this. When my father would approach them, I’d be hiding behind a car or a tree, hoping that it would all be over quickly.”

The men needed varying amounts of persuasion. Harry Dubin remembers that the street sweeper was particularly resistant. “He said, ‘Listen, sir, you want me to lose my job? I can’t give you my uniform. I’m being paid by the city.’ I told him he was sabotaging our big undertaking for the city. We got the picture.”

The hansom-cab driver agreed, but only on the condition that he get to play the passenger. “He was afraid Dad would run away with his horse,” Ron says with a laugh.

To heighten the realism of his role as a hurdy-gurdy man, Dubin taught himself a few lines of “O Sole Mio!,” earning some coins. The hurdy-gurdy man “invited me home for a true Sicilian dinner. He wanted me to meet his niece. When I told him I was married, he said come anyway, ‘but leave the boy home.’”

The photographs are impressive for many reasons, not the least of which is they were shot by Dubin’s son, Ron, when he was between fourteen and sixteen years old. But most important, the pictures resurrect in pristine color an era that has long since disappeared. Street sweepers have been automated out of business. The hurdy-gurdy man’s organ is now a boom box, and no taxi driver will take you anywhere for twenty cents a mile.

BUT THE PICTURES’ CHARM IS NOT ONLY IN their subject matter or in Dubin’s antics but also in the details picked up by young Dubin’s camera. Note the theater marquee in a shot of Dubin selling notions on the street, the haircut price on Dubin’s sandwich board, the styling of the Shell gas pumps, and the sign on the mail truck welcoming returning soldiers.

Eventually, Ron shot nearly thirty poses. They were developed as slides and shown to friends. When Ron went to college, he put the slides away in a tin box, where they stayed for more than forty years. A few years ago, he came upon them accidentally and had them reprocessed and placed in an album as a Christmas present for his father. Last year, the Museum of the City of New York heard about them and added them to its permanent collection.

“They were just something that was fun for us to do. I never thought they would have any historical value,” says Harry Dubin. He still has the acting bug, and over the years he and

Ron have talked about a series of pictures based on the children’s rhyme “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.”

“We might do it yet,” he says.