By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down and wept
When we remembered Zion.
Psalm 137
THE afternoon sun dipped low over the empty lots around Charlotte Street. There in the long shadows stood three boys against a backdrop of smashed bricks, crumpled beer cans and a busted bike wheel. Behind them, past the tall weeds of this urban prairie, loomed decrepit apartment buildings.
Yet the trio were grinning, their faces friendly, even goofy. Look closer at the picture and you can see why they smile:
A scrawny mutt’s snout peeks out from their huddle.
Thirty years ago this summer, I returned to the South Bronx, where I grew up, with a Yale diploma in one hand and a beat-up Pentax camera in the other. Raised to get a good education, become a doctor and escape, I had instead come right back to teach photography — on Charlotte Street, no less, the world’s most famous slum.
In the four years I had been away, the South Bronx had gone from anonymous to notorious, a brand name for urban decay and despair. The landscape of my childhood had vanished, its buildings abandoned, stripped and incinerated.
Private tragedies became public humiliation in 1977. Howard Cosell damned the place, declaring, “The Bronx is burning,” as the cameras showed fires flickering beyond Yankee Stadium. Looters picked clean Tremont Avenue’s stores during that summer’s blackout. President Jimmy Carter made an obligatory pilgrimage — as Ronald Reagan would during his campaign in 1980 — for a photo-op amid the rubble.
The only way I could even try to confront this confusion was to slice it up into snapshots, each frame giving the illusion of a neat answer to inexplicable questions. For five years, I wandered from Fordham Road to Mott Haven, taking thousands of pictures in parks, street fairs, stores and even empty lots.
The negatives ended up stuffed in a closet. And the South Bronx was quietly transformed in the late 1980s by community campaigns that created new homes, community gardens and smaller schools. I became a journalist and traveled to Latin America, where I confronted poverty that made New York’s worst look tame.
But I always came back to the Bronx. I have spent much of my professional life chronicling the same streets I photographed as a young man. Six years ago, I moved back for good, with my wife and son. Some people thought I was crazy; cynics swore it hadn’t changed much from the Bad Old Days of 1979.
This year, I dug out the old pictures. The images may be black and white, but to look back upon them now is to discover that their secrets are revealed in shades of gray. In a landscape that was written off as uninhabitable — if not unsalvageable — you can see creativity, faith and even a kind of innocence.
Click. In the middle of a Mott Haven street, a lone couple hugs tightly and twirls to the music of an unseen orchestra. Squeegee boys dart out among the land yachts rolling off the Deegan to cadge a quick quarter.
Click. A couple with faces etched by lines depicting a tough journey rest for a moment, she with her groceries and he with a beer. An artist fills an abandoned building with lithe torsos made from the charred wood that had choked its apartments. A blind guitarist sings boleros from a faraway island. Read more..
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Gyan Riley to shorts from Harry Smith’s “Early Abstractions,” 8 p.m. at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 W. 67th St., $40-$45. Part of the New York Guitar Festival.
