The following series traces the shifting face of downtown New York City—a place of ghosts and grit, memory and reinvention. Born and raised in downtown Manhattan, artist-illustrator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman renders the city she calls home with quiet intensity, her delicate drawings capturing the rhythms of streets both remembered and imagined.

Some scenes emerge from lived experience—lingering with friends outside the now-defunct Spitzer’s Corner, a once-familiar outpost of youth—while others are conjured from archival photographs that evoke an earlier, rougher New York. Her focus centers on the East Village and the Lower East Side, neighborhoods near where she grew up and now works—places marked by their ceaseless transformation. Through drawing, she bears witness to the city’s layers: what vanishes, what endures, and what quietly settles in the margins.

Fragments of the East Village: A Slum’s Memory, 2020
(View of the East Village circa 1984)
Ink, graphite, colored pencil, and soft pastel on paper
9 × 14 inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

Whispers of LES, 2019
(Corner of Rivington and Ludlow, 2018)
Ink, graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper
9 × 14 inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

On the Bowery, 2020
(Portrait of a man on the Bowery)
Ink, marker, graphite, and watercolor on paper
14 × 9 inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

Lower East Side 1980 BCE, 2019
Ink and graphite on paper
8.5 × 11 inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

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Aurélie Bernard Wortsman is a New York-based artist, illustrator, and curator. A member of the Society of Illustrators, she is the illustrator of Odd Birds & Fat Cats: An Urban Bestiary (Turtle Point Press, 2025), created in collaboration with her father, writer Peter Wortsman, and currently shortlisted for an Eric Hoffer Book Award. An excerpt of their next joint work, Book Haven, Book Heaven—his text, her art—will appear in LitHub. She is the director of Andrew Edlin Gallery, where she has curated exhibitions including Beverly Buchanan: Northern Walls and Southern Yards (2023) and Agatha Wojciechowsky: Spirits Among Us (2021). Her forthcoming publications as author-editor include Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line and Ruination and Regeneration: The Art of Beverly Buchanan.