Reassessing American “Ruin”

Reviewed by Pedro A. Regalado

During the 1970s and 1980s, the South Bronx was the epicenter of American “ruin.” In the popular imagination, flames engulfed acres of developed cityscape; poverty and violence mingled with the remains of abandoned buildings; and a crack epidemic degenerated entire neighborhoods.  

Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin
By Peter L'Official
Harvard University Press, 2020
320 pages

The South Bronx became the archetypical “inner-city.” Whatever its reality was actually like, Pete L’Official’s new book, Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, considers the images and texts that constituted its enduring legend, demonstrating how its symbolism was most often developed from the outside. (In some instances, artists, writers, and thinkers offered audiences new ways of looking at the borough’s ruin; in other moments, they reinforced its image of dereliction.) The result is a culturally erudite record of how the South Bronx came to stand in for the US urban crisis.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, real estate speculators erected dense multi-family buildings that had already begun to deteriorate by the time African Americans and Puerto Ricans arrived at mid-century. They settled in neighborhoods that, as L’Official writes, were “hardly constructed with the idea of building a coherent community in mind.” He continues, “Neither were they allowed the kind of maintenance or indeed top-to-bottom renewal that mortgage loans provided by the Federal Housing Authority or private lending might have offered to large-scale redlining of areas of the South Bronx.”[1] By the 1970s, residents in Morrisania, Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Longwood, and elsewhere in the South Bronx suffered from high poverty and unemployment just as New York’s fiscal crisis limited the city’s ability (also its desire) to address the problems that burdened its community.

Concepts like “slum” and “blight,” which matured in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and East Harlem, reached their apotheosis in the Bronx. “Time and time again,” L’Official observes, “reports and reporters referred to an abandoned building’s ability to ‘infest’ an entire block and ‘cause wholesale abandonment in short order.’” By the time that President Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street in 1977, the borough had become shorthand for urban ruin, which to Carter, Reagan, and others “might as well have been anywhere—except that, to Bronx residents, that site was nowhere else but home.”[2] L’Official rightly notes how Bronx residents bore the burden of corporal metaphors that imputed discourses of blight onto them while rendering Bronxites invisible in the process.

What outsiders did see of the South Bronx was often intended to deceive them. During the 1980s, motorists speeding through Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway could glance up at the area’s buildings and, for a fleeting moment, discern painted flowerpots applied to sealed openings of their facades. These painted vinyl decals that also depicted shades, shutters, and curtains were the product of the Department of Housing and Preservation and Development’s (HPD) “Occupied Look” program.[3] Seeking to, as L’Official writes, “both deceive and delight the eye,” program administrators affixed hundreds of window decals onto buildings across the city. As one city planning official noted, “The image that the Bronx projects—and projects to potential investors—is the image you see from that expressway, and our goal is to soften that image so people will be willing to invest.” In the end, the program responded to perception as much as it did to any actual danger in the neighborhood.[4]

As an example of the paradoxical images that defined the South Bronx, L’Official offers readers a unique pairing. He sits Occupied Look’s decals beside artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s own trompe l’oeil (an artistic technique intended to create an optical illusion). In a visually stunning endeavor titled, Bronx Floors, Matta-Clark dissected sections of floors and walls in Bronx buildings. The result, according to L’Official, “amounted to accreted layers of information, of history, and of a past seemingly hastened by the threat of the present.”[5] If Occupied Look “presented its view with temporal contradiction—stasis alongside entropy—then Matta-Clark’s Bronx cuts both exaggerated and complicated this framework.”[6] In their drive to deceive and astound, we learn that both works functioned as visual tools that forced spectators to look harder, confront ruin, and notice the social conditions surrounding it. They placed representation alongside reality. This insight illustrates the contradictory narratives that L’Official is committed to uncovering: objects disrupting our perception of what we think we see.

In one of its most fascinating chapters, Urban Legends turns to New York City’s “tax photographs.” A precursor of sorts to Google “Street View,” the photographs captured over 800,00 images encompassing the entirety of Gotham’s streets between 1983 and 1988. Even though their goal was to assess the condition of every parcel for the purpose of property tax appraisal, these bureaucratic records reveal how physical decay was but one of many realities. In one tax photo, a fedora-wearing man strolls across the street against an overgrown empty lot ahead of towering housing projects. He drifts away from the frame. Taken a few seconds later, the following photograph captures him again. This time, the figure proceeds to climb a low hill against a similar landscape — though we’re now presented with traffic lights, a public-school building, and a nearby horizon which seem to be his destination. L’Official asks,

Is the subject of the photograph the twinned corner of vacant properties owned (most likely reclaimed) by the City of New York (according to the accompanying parcel information)? Or is it the micronarrative spanning two photographs that illustrates a man encountering his photographer and promptly going about his business that is created by their consecutive appearance in the collection—a narrative essentially authored by the archive?[7]

Tax Photograph of 2901 Third Avenue in the South Bronx. From 80s.NYC

The two photographs, L’Official argues, demonstrate a continuity of human life that eschews one-dimensional narratives of desolation (or revival). His use of visual tension — objects fully within their social context and often in conversation with each other — shines bright here, adding texture to our understanding of the South Bronx and recovering it from uncritical stereotypes.

The second half of the book takes us to Germany and back with Fashion Moda, a Bronx-based art space founded by Stefan Eins in 1978. L’Official considers how the Bronx became a hybrid of site and symbol, one that could be portable and vendible. L’Official also examines films like Fort Apache, the Bronx and novels including The Bonfire of the Vanities that trafficked in subhuman depictions of those who called the borough home. Here, he invites us to meditate on the relationship between the built environment and popular culture, and the economic and social marginalizations that result from the collision of the two. Moreover, Urban Legends does not lose sight of the fact that the ostensible wreckage of the era sat atop actual real estate. The book weaves material histories and discourse in ways that require an approach to “looking” at real estate that is more expansive than many historians practice. The resulting insights, L’Official concludes, are as important to understanding the South Bronx of the 1970s as they are to wrapping our heads around the Bronx of today, as real estate developers scramble to purchase land and rebrand the borough to suit their bottom lines.

Urban Legends speaks to a broad audience: historians, geographers, artists, architects, literary scholars. In the process, the book offers brief snapshots of the histories and traditions that inform these disciplines, from the architectural history of Roman floor design to the work French neoclassical painters. That L’Official pays more attention to outsiders projecting and negotiating their conceptions of place, and not often of Bronxites themselves, might dissatisfy some readers —though they certainly form part of his story. For this New Yorker, his approach feels essential to undoing the long-held narratives that have relegated the South Bronx to mythical ruin.

Pedro A. Regalado is a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he researches the history of race, immigration, and capitalism in U.S. cities. His book project, Latinx Gotham: Work and the Origins of Modern New York, examines the history of twentieth century New York City through the lens of Latinx workers in the city’s rapidly-evolving industries. His writing has been featured in the Journal of Urban History, Boston Review, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

[1] Pete L’Official, Urban Legends: The Bronx in Representation and Ruin (Harvard University Press, 2020), Ibid., 20.

[2] Ibid., 129.

[3] Ibid., 38.

[4] Ibid., 41.

[5] Ibid., 59.

[6] Ibid., 66.

[7] Ibid., 91.