Godfrey Frankel: Bocci Game East Houston St., 1947, printed 1990s, silver print, signed verso, Image size: 10"x13"; Sheet Size: 11"x14" . Godfrey B. Frankel, 82, a social worker and avocational photographer whose 1940s pictures of children at play in and around the alley dwellings of Washington portray a part of the city that no longer exists, died of congestive heart failure July 11 at George Washington University Hospital.
Mr. Frankel, a former newspaperman, was the nightclub columnist for the Washington Daily News during World War II when he began spending his afternoons and early evenings exploring the back alleys of downtown Washington, Capitol Hill and Southwest Washington by bicycle, carrying his camera with him.
Those travels led him into an all-but-forgotten world of poor and crowded communities close to but virtually hidden from the broad avenues and monuments of the federal city. For three years, he returned again and again to the alley neighborhoods, recording on film the lives of the people who lived there, especially the games and activities of the children.
During the 1950s, most of the alley neighborhoods that Mr. Frankel photographed were razed for large-scale urban renewal projects or lost to gentrification. Their thousands of longtime residents moved elsewhere.
After the war, he left journalism to work in programs to ease the return to U.S. communities of Japanese Americans who had been interned in wartime relocation camps. In 1950, he received a master's degree in social work at Columbia University
For 20 years until he retired in 1982, he was a program director for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, where his work included research and evaluation of programs and agencies funded by the institute. He also taught social work at the University of Maryland.