
Terminal Bar
Terminal Bar sits across the street from the Port Authority in Times Square, and for ten years, from 1972 to 1982, Sheldon Nadelman worked its stick and photographed the people who drank there. He shot over 1,500 black-and-white portraits, and his son Stefan Nadelman animates them into a short film narrated by Tom Clifford, turning still faces into a moving record of a single room. The bar was owned by Sheldon's father-in-law, Murray Goldman, and its clientele changes as the neighborhood around it does: hard-drinking Irish dockworkers and porters give way over the decade to a coiffed gay Black crowd, each group leaving its mark on the same stools and jukebox. There is no reenactment and no outside interview, just the photographs, the animation built from them, and a bartender's memory of who came through the door and why. The film won the Sundance Jury Prize for short film in 2003, and its portrait of the block is as much about Times Square's decline and change as it is about the bar itself.