Clayton Patterson, ‘the godfather of Lower East Side documentary,’ seeks an angel to help tell the neighborhood’s story

Clayton Patterson is looking for an angel. He doesn’t figure on becoming one himself, but that’s not the point. He needs some help down here before he heads up there — or, he says, “wherever.”

“I’m playing the endgame”, he bluntly declares. “I’m 75, I just had pneumonia, I had cancer … and all of this needs to be preserved.”

“All of this” is an invaluable historical archive of the East Village and the Lower East Side which consists of, among other things, about 3,000 hours of video and more than 200,000 photos shot on film and who knows how many digital images over the last 40 years, as well as a collection of his own art and that of many others.

Patterson has been fearlessly documenting the area for decades, capturing the diverse universe that surrounded him — drag queens, skinheads, graffiti artists, gang members, neighborhood kids, outsider artists, Santeria priests, Orthodox Jews. And that’s just for starters.

The man who the late Anthony Bourdain called “the godfather of Lower East Side documentary” wants to turn his two-story home/gallery/studio/meeting place into a foundation that will live on after he’s gone, giving people a research center for what is essentially a lost world.

Though it’s still a vibrant community with its own character, much of its daily history would be lost if Patterson wasn’t dedicated to preserving it.

“I want it to be a gift to New York,” he says. “We’re looking to the broader society to try to find some people who are interested in the kind of obscurity, the kind of outsiders and people that I’ve been interested in. The remnants of the Lower East Side is almost like another lost tribe.”

“It’s really important to save these archives,” he stresses. “It’s a history of the forgotten ones, people who were out of the mainstream.”