Painting Long Beach In Positive Perspectives

Long Beach has a distinctly vibrant art community, and one of its members who emerged there during the 1970s played a significant role in putting it on the aesthetics map.

Franklin Perrell employed his paintbrushes and cameras to capture exclusively Long Beach scenes — mainly the hotels and Playland amusement park that once lined the boardwalk — and his paintings and photographs have adorned walls at City Hall and art galleries from the West End to Manhattan.

A Valley Stream native, the young Perrell frequented Long Beach with his relatives, but it wasn't until he studied history and art at Hofstra that he started to view the city through a fresh prism.

“My eyes were opened to the aesthetic appeal of the architecture and site combined with what I would call the incipient sense of historical preservation, which ultimately became my profession,” said Perrell, now the executive director at the Roslyn Landmark Society. “I recognized that Long Beach had this incredible treasure trove of mostly art deco architecture.”

Art deco, a multifaceted school of geometric-themed art and design, prevailed during the 1920s and ’30s, when Long Beach development took off. Around the mid-1970s, a few years before he moved to Lafayette Towers on the boardwalk, Perrell obtained a state grant for a photo documentation project on Long Beach that showcased many art deco homes. Then, Newsday wrote a story on him during his first exhibit at the Walker Street Gallery on Madison Avenue, which also garnered a mention in the New Yorker.

Perrell got involved in the Long Beach Historical & Preservation Society during its infancy in the early 1980s, when he lectured on Long Beach architecture and gave tours that have remained popular activities for natives and outsiders alike. “That’s when more people became aware of the unique character of Long Beach architecture,” said Perrell, who later teamed up with the Long Beach Island Landmarks Association.

LBILA President Alexander Karafinas often crossed paths with Perrell when she biked on the boardwalk. “There was Franklin, someplace painting,” she recalled. “I used to stop and talk to him about his paintings.”

After he moved from Long Beach, Perrell worked from 1989 to 2009 at the Nassau County Museum of Art as either curator or co-curator of more than 50 exhibits, many with historical themes, including the American Revolution and the Holocaust.

Today Perrell resides in Huntington Bay but still visits Long Beach during summer. In October 2009, Karafinas called him to contribute to LBILA’s exhibit “Architectural Style of Long Beach,” at the now defunct Evers Place gallery on West Beech Street. It evoked an historical perspective on the city’s development since the 19th century and featured photos of homes and buildings, many of them that Perrell provided, which illustrated its diverse architectural styles, from neo-classical to Mediterranean to bungalow.

“Long Beach architecture is never pure, it tends to be eclectic,” Perrell said at the exhibit’s opening reception. “... Long Beach, because of the presence of the water and intense sun and the flatness topographically, has a tendency to influence the way certain styles are articulated. So whether it’s Georgian or art modern or deco or art revival or Tudor, Long Beach has its own distinct qualities.”

Perrell always hoped that his art would bring positive notoriety to Long Beach. He recognizes that the city has produced many artists, but he believes his work was distinct and widely known enough to establish him as the official painter of Long Beach. “To my knowledge I’m probably the only one who specialized consistently in Long Beach subjects,” he said.

Roberta Fiore, a Long Beach historian and Historical Society co-founder, attended his early walking tours that she called the first of their kind. “Franklin’s tours helped bring documentation of Long Beach history and art to the fore in the city,” she said. “We owe a debt of gratitude to his tours.”