I exclaimed with sadness, “Are ruins, then, already here?”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
When my friends from home come to visit, I try to show them Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Metropolitan Museum, but they say, “Where is the South Bronx? Take me to the burning buildings! I want a lover from the ruins.”
A Swiss art critic in conversation, early 1980s
The big thing about any New York neighborhood is its relationship to the center. The city center in Manhattan, with its spectacular cluster of big buildings and bright lights, has a magical aura. It is the focal point of every New Yorker’s primal dream. This dream unfolds itself like a giant panorama. The picture’s foreground is the dreamer’s neighborhood. This is usually across the water (where four-fifths of the city’s population comes from), but it could just as well be on the Lower East Side or in Hell’s Kitchen or Little Italy or Chinatown or Harlem. In the dream, our eyes reach longingly over our tenement or brownstone or rowhouse roofs, and the smooth roofline (most New York neighborhoods have uniform rooflines) looks like a road.
Over the roofs, over the water, at the picture’s center, our eyes meet the prize: Manhattan’s skyscrapers and skyline, bathed in sunshine or radiating electricity and neon light. The big buildings are framed by an infinite day or night or twilight sky, which gives the picture a vanishing point and embeds the dream in the cosmos. This cityscape has the chutzpah of the biblical dream of Babel: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens.” As it reaches for the sky, this complex of buildings beckons us to a life of passionate striving, feverish intensity, and expressive fullness, and it seems to deny that there are any limits on what human beings can do. (In Genesis 11, God worries about this: If people can build and maintain such a city, then “nothing will be restrained from them, that they imagine to do.”) Can it be real? Can it be as close as it looks—we could almost reach out and touch it—or is it, like Kafka’s Castle, some sort of existential trap or mirage? Can we get there on the subway? Can we stay? If we go, can we come back? And if we do make the leap, if we make a life inside those buildings, if we make ourselves into authentic New Yorkers, what will it do to us as human beings? For more than a century, these have been New York’s overwhelming questions. The most luminous visions of New York are views from the bridge.
In the 1950s, when I was growing up in the Bronx, the act of crossing over into Manhattan seemed like a smooth and easy flow both ways. When our relatives from Brooklyn went to a Broadway theater or Madison Square Garden, they would say they were going to “the city”; but for us, going to those same places, even to meet them there, was going “downtown”: We took it for granted that we and Manhattan’s wonders were part of the same town. But in the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx’s view from the bridge was radically impaired. Imagine yourself dropped into the Bronx around 1981, enjoying the familiar view downtown. You will spot the difference right away: The foreground is broken. Now many tenements and apartment houses are cracked, burnt, split apart, caved in. Whole blocks have vanished or disintegrated into wreckage and debris. On other blocks, only a single house is left, with rubble all around; the building may well be far more striking, now that it is all alone, and if you examine its curves and details, you can often see that once, maybe not long ago, this sole survivor was quite grand. Some apartment houses are split by their courtyards (the Bronx was once known for its splendid courtyards), lived-in on one side, burnt-out on the other. Some blocks that not long ago were claustrophobic, perpetually shadowed, packed too tight with people, are sun-drenched now, wide open and empty as deserts. Sometimes there is a whole new zone, a kind of a fore-foreground, that stands between you and the buildings: a blanket of cracked and burnt brick and wood and stone and tile and marble and steel and fabric and paper and plastic, shards of thousands and thousands of lives. Maybe the city has sealed it off with a steel fence or maybe it is wide open and you are welcome to take whatever fragments you want. On the horizon, you can see that the towers of Manhattan’s Oz are still there, as alluring as ever; but close to the ground, the Bronx’s yellow brick roads have crumbled into craters and minefields.
In the late 1970s, the New York Times had a little box, on page two or three of the Local Section, that listed all the buildings burned or destroyed the previous day or night. People called it the Ruins Section, and I knew many people who, like me, read the Ruins Section first of all. It was uncanny how the ruins ran on, building after building, block after block, mile after mile. On Bronx walks I met people from camera crews, sometimes from the local news—working on the latest disaster—but also from Canada, England, Italy, Sweden; I missed the one from the USSR. The people most visible on the South Bronx streets were kids, and lots of those kids looked startlingly hungry—hungry like kids in turn-of-the-century photographs by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, hungry like American kids weren’t supposed to be any more. (I was teaching in Harlem, and the kids on the Harlem streets looked a lot better fed.) For several years, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, more than a thousand Bronx buildings each year were destroyed by fire. The Fire Department listed the great majority as “suspicious fires,” which left behind traces of fire accelerants.
But there were even better accelerants at work in the social stereotyping process. “What’s wrong with these people?” Howard Cosell barked on national television, during the 1976 World Series at Yankee Stadium, as the camera from the Goodyear Blimp showed a building on fire less than a mile from the field. Cosell asked, in a tone that supplied its own answer, “Don’t these people have any self-respect?” What a relief it must have been to think of the fires as something “these people” were doing to themselves: then you wouldn’t have to worry about whether the Bronx’s troubles were somehow your troubles. One thing that gave this situation an especially sinister twist is how many Bronx people came to see themselves as “these people,” how many victims of suspicious fires came to think of themselves as prime suspects. On the local news, you could see families weeping in front of their smoking buildings, and asking, “What did we do?” There were plenty of journalists and pseudo-social scientists (often subsidized by right-wing foundations) only too glad to tell them their character flaws. A surprising alliance of the Fire Department, the Mayor’s Task Force Against Arson, the insurance companies, and the urban Left (the Village Voice, City Limits, and so on) focused instead on the character of the South Bronx’s landlords. Lloyd’s of London was said to have lost $20 million in the 1970s on Bronx insurance pools. Early in the 1980s, insurance companies stopped paying claims on Bronx fires, and the burning of the Bronx came to an abrupt end.
During the troubles, the Bronx lost over three hundred thousand people, and the South Bronx plummeted past census tracts in backwoods Louisiana and Mississippi to become, so the media said (I haven’t been able to document this, but it could be), the poorest congressional district in the country. For people who stayed, life was hard. In the course of the 1980s, as public services kept shrinking, with gang violence and AIDS killing the young, it would get even harder. But many people found it easier to protect themselves from the flames than from the carpet bombings of invective that blamed them for the ruin of their world. (Looking for a way to evoke the full horror of this process, in 1984 I invented a word, urbicide, the murder of a city. I thought this word would be my contribution to the American idiom, but although I’ve seen it used a couple of times, it hasn’t really caught on. Yet it may, down the road, because urbicide keeps happening all over.)
When the Bronx, after decades of peaceful anonymity, finally made it into the mass media as a symbol of all that could go wrong in city life, it wasn’t just the buildings in the Bronx that were breaking down: It felt like a rupture in both New York’s everyday reality and its archetypal dream. Our neighborhoods, including the poorest ones—maybe especially the poorest ones—were supposed to be roads and bridges leading to the city’s heights. They were supposed to fuse their kids’ energy and desire with the city’s primal sources of energy downtown. And, to an amazing extent, they really did. For generations, they held the city together, gave it much of its distinctive flavor, and produced millions of authentic New Yorkers—wise guys and sophisticates, close to the streets but also to a global culture. What would be the wider ripples of neighborhood collapse? It was to dread.
Images change their meanings over time. The first time you see a landscape of ruins, it is terrifying but magnificent, sublime. But when you see it day after day, year after year, it gets to be a drag. Was it really true that nothing could be done? The persistence of the ruins became embarrassing to public officials, and their embarrassment produced unconscious comedy. Stanley Simon, Bronx Borough President during the worst troubles, proposed covering the miles of broken buildings along the Cross-Bronx Expressway with decals that portrayed curtains, plants, and peaceful domestic scenes. Alas, even expensive decals still looked like cartoons; the Carter Community Employment and Training Act program, which could have paid unemployed artists to camouflage broken buildings, expired under Reagan; and Bronx graffitists, violently banned from the subways, found a new life covering broken buildings with enormous inscriptions: “This is a decal,” “This is a fake,” “This is a ruin.” Then Simon went to prison for bribery and extortion, and people laughed about the politician’s new clothes and wondered what his decals would cover now.
But the Bronx did not have to hide its light under a decal. Even in its greatest misery and anguish—and in some sense, I think, because of its misery and anguish—the Bronx became more culturally creative than it had ever been in its life. As a Bronx character in Grace Paley’s short story “Somewhere Else” put it, “The block is burning down on one side of the street, and the kids are trying to build something on the other.” In the midst of dying, it was busy being born.
Anyone coming to New York for the first time in the 1970s, or returning here, had to be struck by thousands of subway cars saturated with luminous primary colors. The first wave of graffitists were at work, coming from all over the city, but from the Bronx most of all. These kids, mostly (though not entirely) black and Latin and male, were denounced and repeatedly arrested, but in the course of the 1970s their work developed a bold and adventurous visual language. They infused a drab and dilapidated transit system with adventurous graphics and youthful exuberance. Some of them showed obvious artistic talents—Revolt, Futura 2000, Daze, Crash, Sonic, Phase II, the United Artists, Fab Five Freddie, Dondi (who died this past April) and others I’ve long forgotten. They differed in aesthetics and sensibility: some playful and nonchalant, others existentially desperate; some projecting spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling, others tending toward elaborate patterns of design; some emphasizing pure visuals, others blending images with texts (IF ART IS A CRIME, MAY GOD FORGIVE ME); some conveying instant entertainment, usually through parodies of Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons, others more ruminative, abstract, even hieroglyphic; some addressing their audience with respect and esteem, others driven by an in-your-face punk disdain. My favorite was Lee Quinones, whose murals fused surreal landscapes with provocative texts: STOP THE BOMB, WAR IS SELFISH DEATH, MAN IS ALMOST EXTINCT. Lee was one of many who liked to incorporate “views from the bridge” in their murals, thus carrying on a dialogue and interplay between uptown and downtown. This interplay is the subject of the movie Wild Style, where Lee is a star.
Some of these kids developed careers as designers; some wound up with MTV; some went to Hollywood. Looking at their life stories, we can see their graffiti years as first steps up a ladder and admire their resourcefulness in finding markets for themselves. But when the graffitists of the Bronx began, they had more than self-marketing in mind: They saw themselves as citizens and insisted on the civic and public meaning of their work. Their shared desire to communicate with a large public all around the town, and beyond it, set the stage for a brutal, grueling, vastly expensive, materially and humanly destructive conflict with the arrogant and unresponsive bureaucracy of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). In 1980, in the midst of this conflict, Daze said:
If the MTA really understood graffiti, they would know it’s one of the best things subways have going for them. If the city would back us up and treat us as artists instead of vandals, we could contribute a lot to the beauty of New York.
“If the MTA really understood.” But Daze, who had worked with the relatively sympathetic school and park bureaucracies, must have known what an implacable fortress he faced in the MTA. Later on, when he and other graffitists got a chance to make money, they took it and ran. In the commercial sector, some did very well. But it’s important to recall that behind the private success there was a public failure. And it wasn’t the kids who failed.
Alongside these graffitists, sometimes the same people, were the Bronx rappers. In the poorest congressional district in the United States, rap was an exemplary musica povera. Some early rappers came from musically sophisticated families, with strong backgrounds in jazz and R&B. Others had grown up too poor to take music lessons or have their own instruments, but had strong feeling for rhythm, powerful voices, and sharp wits. In the late 1970s, at the City College of New York (CCNY), where I taught, up in Harlem, every Thursday during Club Hour somebody brought out turntables, and a DJ scratched and collaged dozens of records together while kids in the audience took turns playing MC, rapping over an open mike. I was delighted: What it meant for me was the power of the word, which was what I’d been trying to teach all along. At the end of the 1970s, wherever blacks lived, rap was busting out all over, but a concentration of the first great DJs came from the Bronx—Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash—and they vied with each other, in dozens of small Bronx clubs, parks, and school auditoriums, with thousands of participant young listeners, to create a distinctive rap sound of samples, beats, and rhymes.
The spirit of early raps tended toward dancehall and party music, with funny, shallow lyrics like these from “Live Connection ’82,” by The Grand Wizard Theodore: “The people in the back, you ain’t the wack / The people in the middle, let me see you wiggle / Young lady in the blue, I’m talking to you / but don’t you stop that body rock.” Rap’s first great hit, when it finally came, was heavy, dark, and deep. This was “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, released by Sugar Hill in the Reagan summer of 1982. “The Message” showed that there was not only a national but an international audience for rap.
In “The Message,” Melle Mel chants in a rich and intensely dramatic voice:
Don’t push me, ’cause
I’m close to the edge,
trying not to lose my head. Hah!
It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder
how I keep from going under.
(Huhh huh huh Huhh
Melle Mel then takes us on a Bronx neighborhood tour: Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the streets like they just don’t care; the narrator can’t stand the pain, can’t stand the noise, but “got no money in my pocket, so I got no choice.” Myriad horrors are compressed into a couple of minutes. Rats in the rooms; junkies in the alley with baseball bats; predatory repo men; nice girls turned into addicts and whores; kids, cynical before the age of ten, who want to grow up to be drug dealers because those are the only people they know who command respect; their big brothers, who go from unemployed to killers to dead. The rapper addresses a handsome corpse, asks him how he could be so dumb: “You lived so fast and died so young.”
This rapper’s attitudes here are complex and hard to keep in any sort of emotional balance. He insists on the self-destructive idiocy of the people in the slum he lives in, but also on their human dignity. He, too, asks, “What’s wrong with these people?” But he doesn’t settle for any cliché answer—not even the answer that they are victims, though he makes it clear that they are. Moreover, his voice reveals that he sees himself as one of “these people”: The story is about “us,” not “them.” This complex of feelings forces him to walk a thin line. His refrain warns us, “So don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge / Trying not to lose my head.” Then, once more, the concrete jungle. Then, by surprise, a burst of wishful thinking. He identifies with two people maimed by violence who get help and somehow survive:
They pushed a girl in front of a train,
Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again.
Stabbed that man right through the heart,
Gave him a transplant and a brand new start.
Then the chorus again. Then a collage of street sounds, culminating in a police siren, a (black) voice ordering everyone to freeze, motors taking them all away. In the end the street is empty, the rap and the rapper both disappear, only the beat goes on.
“The Message” became an instant classic, endlessly quoted, parodied, and sampled. And it made a breakthrough for the whole genre: Suddenly, all over America, South as well as North, and all over Europe as well, there were a lot of people out there who wanted to listen to rap. What was “the message”? Maybe, We can be home in the middle of the end of the world. Or maybe, We come from ruins, but we are not ruined. The meta-message is something like this: Not only social disintegration, but even existential desperation, can be sources of life and creative energy. Even as the fires and violence were wrecking the Bronx’s old roads downtown, a great outpouring of cultural energy was forging new connections with downtown. The capacity for soul-making in the throes of suffering lit up the Bronx with an aura all its own.
Turn now to the visual art that was made by people from downtown who came uptown, who worked and sometimes lived in the South Bronx in its fire years, and whose work was shaped by being there. These men and women worked in very different styles, with radically different (and sometimes inwardly contradictory) imaginative visions, but there are human contexts they had in common. They all were (and still are) part of the sixties generation: They grew up, and defined themselves as artists, during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. That history filled them with a high seriousness and a sense of human urgency. When they came to define themselves as artists, they were all committed to making art that would mean something. But in their connection to New York’s downtown art scene, they were also products of a radically skeptical modernist culture that put all traditional and conventional meanings in doubt, so that, circa 1970, although they wanted to mean something, the meaning of “meaning” was not at all clear. Another theme they all absorbed from modernism was the idea that authentic art could be created only by experiment, constant experimentation not only on raw material (paint, canvas, plaster, bronze, paper, wood, steel, plastic, and so on), but on the artist himself, on his or her whole being.
Modern history is full of people, and groups of people, trying to find truth and meaning by going to places where life is a lot harder and more dangerous than the life they live, and trying to connect with the people who live there. These enterprises include Christian missionaries in Africa, China, and all over the world; Russian intellectuals in the 1870s “going to the people”; Gauguin going to Tahiti, and Van Gogh going to peasant sharecroppers and coal miners; the whole anthropology profession, from its beginnings in remote islands and valleys to its current embrace of inner-city neighborhoods; American civil rights workers of the 1960s, going from the North to the South; but also, in the news every day for years, the American armed forces going to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people and destroying their villages in order to save them. Artists working in the Bronx were aware of these very mixed examples, recognized the potential for exploitation—as in, “Take me to the burning buildings! I want a lover from the ruins”—and hoped that endless self-criticism could help them avoid it. (But sometimes the self-criticism was so corrosive as to bring on paralysis.) They were united by empathy for people who, as “The Message” said, were living “close to the edge.” They felt they were different from, and better than, missionaries or imperial troops, in that they were not trying to enforce a system of meanings whose truth was pre-established, but rather to work with the people of the Bronx to create new meanings that could light up the whole world. And, although different artists responded differently to graffiti and rap, they all felt inspired to be working with a generation of kids who not only knew how to be active and creative in the midst of great pain, but knew how to be citizens, seeking a public meaning for their lives. They all hoped to learn something from the people they encountered and also to give something back.
This was the context in which Stephen Eins, an artist from Vienna, established Fashion Moda, a gallery and “alternate space” in a storefront on Third Avenue, just below “the Hub” of 149th Street in the South Bronx. For a decade or more, Fashion Moda brought “downtown” artists, musicians, and writers together with “uptown” graffiti painters, rappers, breakdance crews, and curious neighborhood people. (Sculptor Rigoberto Torres is the most important artist who found his calling by walking off the street and into Fashion Moda out of sheer curiosity.) Eins was immensely resourceful at working various government bureaucracies and helping artists get space to mount innovative installations in schools and parks, in abandoned apartment buildings (there were so many), and on the streets.
One Fashion Moda artist, John Fekner, used the walls of abandoned apartment houses to create what in effect were giant billboards, with captions like BROKEN PROMISES and LAST HOPE. Fekner’s billboards often dominated their environments and provided ironic commentary on some of the photo ops that various politicians grasped in front of the ruins. Jimmy Carter was there in 1976, appeared moved, and promised to rebuild the South Bronx—only, as with many Carter initiatives, it wasn’t supposed to cost the federal government an extra dime. His plan turned out to be that, for several years, all of the city’s share of federal community development money would be channeled here, while other city neighborhoods would get nothing at all. When City Council representatives of those other neighborhoods protested, Carter’s aides said, in effect, “What’s wrong with these people?” and were glad to wash their hands of the promise.
David Finn’s work featured life-size figures sculpted out of garbage bags, old newspapers, and street debris, arranged and displayed provocatively in buildings or on streets, in ways that suggested political prisoners (the South Bronx was full of Latin Americans and Africans who could tell stories), massacred victims of the drug gang wars (there were plenty), or (this was the kids’ favorite idea) space invaders. Finn’s work was visually striking and beautifully realized: It evoked Picasso in his African mask and his “Guernica” periods. Like much exciting public art in the Bronx (and everywhere else), it elicited enthusiastic support from children and anger from many of their parents.
Many outstanding photographers appeared in the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, not only documenting the horrors, but portraying powerful visions of the human condition and putting together impressive bodies of work. The two I know best are Mel Rosenthal and Camilo Jose Vergara. Both of them have done serious work outside New York—Rosenthal in Puerto Rico and Central America and Vergara in Detroit and Los Angeles—but it was in the South Bronx that they came into their own. Rosenthal works in the tradition of humanist snapshots developed by Europeans like Henri Cartier-Bresson and by great war photographers like Robert Capa. An archetypal Mel Rosenthal shot is kids playing in broken buildings, or families passing by the ruins, or the last old man or woman (whose face looks centuries old) in a building that looks about to collapse, or looks like it already has collapsed. These children won’t be robbed of their childhood: They don’t stop playing just because their playground has been destroyed. Women dance in the street, and don’t stop dancing just because there’s no more street. His people use the rubble as sites for new dances and new games. Rosenthal understands how people can make themselves at home in negative spaces; they are not only survivors but pioneers.
Vergara feels a special empathy for architecture, for buildings. He especially loves the aspiration toward Renaissance and Baroque grandeur that makes Bronx apartment houses so special. He grasps one of the glories of the Bronx, for which it will go down in history: its ability to deliver real grandeur to the working classes. His serial photographs of buildings in the 1970s and 1980s dramatize, year by year, the disintegration of that glory. Because he really feels it, and makes us feel it, the process of its destruction is so heartrending. A few years ago, he displayed one of his grandest series: the gradual disintegration of an apartment house on Vyse Avenue into nothingness. It was a magnificent spectacle but, I felt, somehow too cruel: The destructive process seemed too much like cosmic entropy. (In Rosenthal’s photos, it looks more like heavy artillery.) Vergara said Wait, the story wasn’t over, he was sure he would be back. Indeed, his recent work shows Vyse Avenue inhabited again. The building is on a smaller scale, two-story row houses, as against yesterday’s vanished palaces. But now there is a new trajectory, going upward after decades of coming down. It is as if the people of the Bronx have begun building the Tower of Babel again, reaching for Vergara’s luminescent blue sky.
One of the most striking art initiatives in the recent Bronx has been Tim Rollins’s studio, which he named “K.O.S.,” Kids Of Survival. Rollins began in 1981 as an art teacher in Junior High School 52, working with about forty teenagers who were classified as learning disabled and at risk of dropping out. His work with these kids and his emerging love for them crystallized into a distinctive sort of art workshop. Rollins worked the system to develop a splendid art library and art studio, where kids could learn and experiment with every material and style. Then he read to his kids: some books that were in the curriculum, others that were modernist masterpieces. They would discuss the books together and try to imagine how they might be represented. I visited some of these classes on Longwood Avenue a decade ago, and I don’t know what his kids’ standard reading test scores were, but I can testify that they were there. They gradually developed a signature form, the literary mural. The mural’s background was always a reproduction of the text; the foreground, exquisite variations on the common theme. For Scarlet Letter, it was variations on the red letter “A”; for Franz Kafka’s Amerika, it was variations on a golden horn. Doing Amerika together at once bonded and inspired them. In a short time, working fervidly, they created a number of gorgeous and inspiring horn murals.
And suddenly, the whole world wanted them: Colleges wanted K.O.S. to give a workshop; towns all over America and in Europe wanted horn murals for their Town Halls; Charles Saatchi and Mary Boone wanted all the work they could get; suddenly the kids were big shots in Soho and all over town; New York magazine did a headline piece that suggested Rollins was exploiting the kids’ native genius, and they should go solo and become superstars. (The vita of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who could have been a character in “The Message”—an art star before he was twenty-five, dead from a drug overdose before he was thirty—must have cast a long shadow in their lives.) Many of these kids had hardly ever been out of the Bronx, and they weren’t ready for celebrity. For that matter, Rollins himself, who had been out of the Bronx plenty—he had grown up in Maine, graduated from the School of Visual Arts, worked for Joseph Kossuth—wasn’t ready for it either. (Is any of us ready for fifteen minutes of American fame?) Some of the kids went on to art schools and began artistic careers, and even those who didn’t stay with art learned some things about life that have surely helped them grow up. But the company imploded. Rollins is a great teacher of the wonder of art and the discipline of art; he lacks the inner cynicism to be a guide through the circus of art. K.O.S. was a splendid fusion of uptown and downtown, and it was sad to see it mangled by its own success. But Rollins says reports of its death are exaggerated: He is still there on Longwood Avenue, the workshop is still open, they are still doing murals all over the country, his senior class had 100 percent college acceptance last year. K.O.S. lives.
Another brilliant initiative, with a more tragic denouement, was launched by the painter John Ahearn. Ahearn is a native of Binghamton, a graduate of Cornell; his twin brother is the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, director of Wild Style. John has gone farther than any downtown artist I know in “going to the people”: He didn’t just work in the South Bronx, but lived in it, all through the 1980s and into the 1990s; like virtually everybody there, he became the victim of both random and intentional violence. Around 1980, he moved from downtown Manhattan to Walton Avenue near 171st Street, a dilapidated but lively neighborhood about a mile from Yankee Stadium. There he began to work with Walton Avenue native Rigoberto (Robert) Torres.
Together they developed what became a signature style. First they would take polaroid photos of people, to fix the details of what their subjects looked like. Then, after placing their subject on a pallet, they would pile on layer after layer of plaster, while the model breathed through a straw and prayed that it wouldn’t break. (It never did.) From the cast they would make a bust or full-body sculpture, which one of them would paint. There are differences in their styles: Torres’s faces are more monochromatic, Ahearn’s more layered; Torres’s faces suggest folk art, and (like much modern art) seem to want to look more primitive than they are; Ahearn’s faces seem to want to look more archaic than they are (also a great tradition in modern art), time-travelling toward the Christian anguish of Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. In some ways their work evokes the Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s, but the murals and frescoes of Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and others tend toward aggressive flatness, while Ahearn’s and Torres’s works are especially striking in their exploration of depth. Together they cast and painted hundreds of figures, mostly neighborhood people, individually and in groups, posing or hanging out, talking or kissing, and many environmental friezes that adorn South Bronx walls. Among the most famous and most beautiful are Double Dutch, Back to School, and We Are Family. (Full disclosure: They also did me, while they were in residence at CCNY’s art department in 1985. I’m part of a frieze of CCNY People, painted by Torres, mounted above the entrance to the college cafeteria. On bad days I go and look at my effigy, and I feel better.)
The catalogue of their 1991 Houston–Cincinnati–Honolulu show, entitled South Bronx Hall of Fame, contains many photographs of Ahearn and Torres working out on the street, in a festival atmosphere, caught up in creative rapture, at home at last. It’s as if Ahearn is telling us, “Behold! I went to the people, and it worked.” Look at the pieces, and the pictures, and you can see that, at least for a while, it did. Some of the images suggest even more: There is a series of photos of a multiple casting of what looks like a Walton Avenue block party on a lovely summer day in 1985. Look at the faces in the crowd, yearning to be cast or just marveling at the work, and you could almost be in a Renaissance painting or a movie scene where Jesus performs a miracle. Water into wine? Or maybe loaves and fishes: The power of art creates enough for all.
In 1986, Ahearn, here working without Torres, won a city competition for bronze sculptures to adorn a plaza in front of a new Police Station, under the Jerome Avenue ‘L’ (the IRT Number 4), a couple of blocks from where he lived. The figures he chose for this plaza, all neighborhood people he knew, were named Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha: Corey with a boom box and a basketball (he was configured as a homage to Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing; he may have configured himself this way), Raymond kneeling with his pit bull, and Daleesha on her roller skates. The ensuing debacle has been vividly described by Jane Kramer in her 1994 book Whose Art Is It? Ahearn didn’t seem to realize that some people wouldn’t want statues of Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha around because they didn’t like them. Alcina Salgado, a retired housekeeper who agitated against his work, described Ahearn’s subjects as “roof people.” She offered an arch definition: “There are people who go to school and people who go to work, and then there are the people we find on the roof.”
Meanwhile, other people surfaced within the city bureaucracy who had nothing to do with the neighborhood, but who attacked Ahearn for having politically incorrect skin. Arthur Symes, an assistant commissioner in the Department of Cultural Affairs, delivered this verdict: “He’s not of the community because he’s not black—it’s simply that.” On September 25, 1991, the bronze figures were installed. Salgado, along with her daughter (B.A., Sarah Lawrence), stood on the plaza and denounced Ahearn, his models, and his art. In Kramer’s reconstruction of the day, Ahearn tried to engage them in dialogue, but the more he tried to talk, the more angrily they condemned him. Meanwhile, none of “the people” from his block stepped up to help him. (On the other hand, he didn’t make any moves to mobilize defenders, though the South Bronx always was and still is full of them.) What seems to have happened next is that Ahearn decided that if “the people” could be so mad at him, then he was failing to communicate, and he must be in the wrong. He paid to have the statues taken down, and soon after he left the Bronx. Seven years later, the large pedestals are still empty.
Ahearn himself seems to have lived through this affair by framing it in starkly Christian terms: suffering, trial, ordeal, sacrifice. As he told the story to me on the phone in the early 1990s, this is the way he saw it: He believed that anyone who truly loved “the people” had to be prepared to give up everything else. His burden, but also his call, was to sacrifice something he loved nearly as much as he loved the people: his art. Now John has paid plenty of dues, and if a belief in the holiness of sacrifice helped him get over, then anybody who cares about him has to be glad. But anybody who cares about the Bronx has to see that a sacrifice of noble and dedicated people and their work is the last thing the Bronx needs.
One thing that magnifies the trouble here is misunderstanding of some big ideas: “the people,” “the community.” In many versions of this story, including Ahearn’s own, there’s a slippage between “people” and “the people.” If even a few people are mad at Ahearn—and there’s no evidence it was ever more than a few—he blames himself for trampling on a whole community. But this vision of the people’s wholeness has more to do with mythology than with demography. In fact, like every modern city, the South Bronx is deeply divided within itself. In cities that have become poor and broken by urbicide, the divisions have become radical polarizations. When Salgado offers an instant analysis of the class structure that cleaves the South Bronx in two—“the people who go to school and the people who go to work” versus “the people you find on the roof”—this grim dualism rings true. You can see, from both his friezes and his Walton Avenue photos, how much John Ahearn loves the street and the people who spend much of their lives on it. So do I, and it’s right to celebrate the modern city street as a primary source of creativity. But it’s also true that cities today are full of people like the Salgados, who feel it’s a matter of life and death to protect their children from the street—and they’re right, too.
Another important fact of life that this sad affair reveals is the culture war among American blacks. John hoped to strike a friendly chord by casting Corey, the wannabee Raheem. He didn’t grasp how terrifying a presence this large street person is to the people who live on Spike Lee’s street. Arthur Symes may be able to help us see this. Symes, remember, was the black bureaucrat unearthed by Kramer who said John was the wrong man because he had the wrong color skin. But Kramer finds something else he says (she cites it on the same page) that may be more relevant here: “He saw John’s pieces as monuments to everything he’d been trying to save his community from.” Nobody seems to have asked Alcina Salgado her opinion of the rap music that would be the most likely sound to come out of Corey’s boom box (as it came out of Radio Raheem’s); but we can be pretty sure what that opinion would be. Spike Lee cuts corners a little when he has Raheem’s boom box smashed by the one white man on his block; on any real block he would find plenty of black volunteers. For many black Americans, especially (though not only) kids, rap, and the street life that rap celebrates, is part of the solution; but for many others, especially their parents, it is part of the problem.
I’ve described this tragic conflict as a Bronx problem, a black problem, an art problem. But it’s really a human problem. Are there any artists out there who can embrace both Corey–Raymond–Daleesha and the Salgados? Are there any people out there with the largeness of vision and spiritual depth to embrace them all? That would mean embracing not only the work-and-school people, and the street-and-roof people, but also the art people who try to embrace them both. Now, everybody loves Shakespeare, even four hundred years later, because we know he loved them all. After that, it’s a pretty short list. (Should Jesus be on it? Karl Marx? Martin Luther King, Jr.? We could have interesting discussions about this, in the Bronx or in Manhattan.) Can we live in, can we even imagine, a city that includes them all? You can’t hurry love, no, you just have to wait. But it helps if you have an idea of what you are waiting for.
If you walk or drive around the Bronx today, after a few years of being away, it looks like miracle or magic; if you didn’t recognize streets and buildings, you could almost feel you were on a different planet. Many blocks are still empty and fenced off, but that expressionist dreamscape, those jagged haunting forms of ruins, are nearly gone. On block after block of the South Bronx, it is clear that Mayor Ed Koch’s five-billion-dollar, ten-year plan for housing rehabilitation has been a tremendous success. (It is strange that Koch, so often a boastful man, never boasts about his housing rehabs. Has he moved so far to the right that he is embarrassed to be identified with the lives of the poor? Whatever the reason, these thousands of effective rehabs are his greatest political accomplishment, and he deserves credit, whether he wants it or not.)
The rebuilding of the Bronx has been incremental, but enormous. This overall feeling seems to be confirmed in sharply diminished crime—even those who are reluctant to admit that anything has changed finally concede that a lot fewer kids are shooting each other—and in improved public health and AIDS statistics. Political boss Raymond Velez is still bleeding the Bronx from his ever-thriving Hunts Point Multi-Service Center, just off Westchester Avenue; but, no thanks to him and his friends, the Bronx today seems to have a lot more blood than it did. Compared with the radical dualism that haunted Alcina Salgado, there seems to be a far more complex and highly differentiated social structure in place today. Almost insensibly, in barely a decade, the South Bronx has gone through a great leap, from apocalyptic horror to ordinary city life. There are no monuments of transformation; but after the nightmarish monumentality of the ruins, the absence of monuments may be a relief. Two of the short stories in “The Message”—the girl pushed in front of the train, the man stabbed through the heart—turn out, a decade later, to be stories of the Bronx itself. Like them, it has got “a brand new start,” and it isn’t so close to the edge anymore.
As the twentieth century ends, it looks like the South Bronx’s seasons in hell are over. (We can’t say for sure, but that’s how it looks now.) Ironically, as the fires have abated, and the ruins have been rebuilt, it has become a less compelling subject for art. It isn’t in the news very much. It doesn’t signify the way it used to. You could say the Bronx has lost its aura. Should we be sad? I don’t think so. For years, the Bronx existed in an urbicidal hell, over the edge. Art and artists were among the forces that helped it up and helped it get back into the flow of normal, ambiguous modern life. A great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx’s ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration.
What art is being created in the Bronx today? I can’t say very well. It’s hard to see, it’s not on the street, it’s not in your face. But don’t doubt it’s there. Although plenty of terrific art springs from desperation, I think most great art grows out of normal life. As the Bronx starts a new millennium, it will have a chance to nourish less desperate modes of creativity, and we can look forward to celebrating those.
Meanwhile, we can think about the Tower of Babel again. In Genesis 11, God is frightened by people’s powers and undertakes to “confuse their language” so they won’t be able to understand each other. Devoid of mutual understanding, they fight, the Tower crashes into ruins, and they “scatter … over the face of all the earth.” But now, in the great cities of the modern world, they have come together again. What would happen if all the peoples who make up a modern city could understand each other? Then maybe, as God said, “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Would it be the Garden City of Eden? That was how some people imagined the Bronx a hundred years ago. The urbicidal ruins that came to afflict American cities, the Bronx worst of all, felt like a savage destruction of that dream. And yet, its city of ruins turned out to be a place where, thanks to art, people coming from very different places started to talk together and work together and recognize each other in ways people had never quite done before. It will be a time before they can do all they imagine. But the power to imagine was itself an achievement. The ruins of the Bronx became a place where people could imagine modern life together afresh. We have to remember to celebrate that.
An earlier version of this essay was published in the exhibition catalog, Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999.