AT THE END of the street, or the beginning actually, if it is entered from the south where the numbers, if there are any, run upward, the buildings are unoccupied.
Uninhabited is a better word.
The doors are gone; the windows long ago shattered and smashed.
The roofs expose jagged patches of blue, and most of each floor has been eaten away, leaving only a vast crosspatch of beams and two-by-fours spliced with the knuckled slime of broken and crumbling plumbing, so blackened they look charred.
Occasional kids play in and out if the smell is tolerable—faint enough to wrinkle a nose in quick disgust and forget it.
More often the stench is unbearable.
Bums and drunkards and wandering derelicts stumble in to piss or bend down and shit in the shadowed corners.
Starving cats, sometimes a dog or two drag in carrion to munch on slit-eyed and growling in the dark, while an army of rats, often crazed with hunger and disease, fight among themselves, eat their dead, leaving what remains to rot until the stink is so strong it would gag you as easily as if it were being fogged out into your face from a canister of teargas.
Time, decay, neglect, indifference; lack of feeling and of love: these create a bomb as deadly as the atom, and indeed, ruins that are far more beautiful.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, or on the fringes of Black or Spanish Harlem, block after block, sometimes mile after ragged mile of these hideous buildings, viewed from a distance, say on a clear and moonlit night, have all the ghastly, ghostly beauty of Berlin, or Dresden after the holocaust.