I first walked into the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx because I was told not to. I was told it was too dangerous, too poor, and that I was too white. I was told “nobody goes there for anything other than drugs and prostitutes.” The people directly telling me this were my colleagues (other bankers), my neighbors (other wealthy Brooklynites), and my friends (other academics). All, like me, successful, well-educated people who had opinions on the Bronx but had never really been there.
It was 2011, and I was in my eighteenth year as a Wall Street bond trader. My workdays were spent sitting behind a wall of computers, gambling on flashing numbers, in a downtown Manhattan trading floor filled with hundreds of others doing exactly the same thing. My home life was spent in a large Brooklyn apartment, in a neighborhood filled with other successful people.
I wasn’t in the mood for listening to anyone, especially other bankers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadn’t been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending the company I worked for, Citibank, into a spiral stopped only by a government bailout. I had just seen where our—my own included—hubris had taken us and what it had cost the country. Not that it had actually cost us bankers, or my neighbors, much of anything.
I had always taken long walks, sometimes as long as fifteen miles, to explore and reduce stress, but now the walks began to evolve. Rather than walk with some plan to walk the entire length of Broadway, or along the length of a subway line, I started walking the less seen parts of New York City, the parts people claimed were unsafe or uninteresting, walking with no goal other than eventually getting home. Along the walk I talked to whoever talked to me, and I let their suggestions, not my instincts and maps, navigate me. I also used my camera to take portraits of those I met, and I became more and more drawn to the stories people inevitably wanted to share about their life.
The walks, the portraits, the stories I heard, the places they took me, became a process of learning in a different kind of way. Not from textbooks, or statistics, or spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations, or classrooms, or speeches, or documentaries—but from people.
What I started seeing, and learning, was just how cloistered and privileged my world was and how narrow and selfish I was. Not just in how I lived but in what and how I thought.
This was a slow and shocking revelation to me, one I kept trying to fight. I certainly already knew I was privileged. I had a PhD in theoretical physics. I worked as a bond trader at a big Wall Street firm. I lived in the best part of Brooklyn. I sent my kids to private school. But like most successful and well-educated people, especially those in NYC, I considered myself open-minded, considered, and reflective about my privilege. I read three papers daily, I watched documentaries on our social problems, and I voted for and supported policies that I felt recognized and addressed my privilege. I gave money and time to charities that focused on poverty and injustice. I understood I was selfish, but I rationalized. Aren’t we all selfish? Besides, I am far less selfish than others, look at how I vote (progressive), what I believe in (equality), and who my colleagues are (people of all races from all places).
I also considered myself to be different from those immediately around me. I hadn’t grown up wealthy. I had grown up in a tiny working-class southern town. Sure, my father was a professor of international relations, my mother a librarian, but we didn’t have much money, certainly not by the standards of the NYC I was now part of. I hadn’t gone to boarding schools, or private high schools, and then to Harvard or Yale. I went to the local public high school, and then to the state college, paid for by money I had made working jobs since I was thirteen. Of course, I had ended up getting a PhD in theoretical physics from Johns Hopkins. But, I told myself, that is physics—it is rational and erudite. That is different. It isn’t Harvard Business School.
But I began to realize I hadn’t ended up much different at all. I had done pretty much what successful Americans do, regardless of their politics. I had removed myself from the realities of the majority of Americans. I was a member of an exclusive club, one requiring an elite education to enter. I was sitting in my expensive home, in my exclusive neighborhood, forming opinions and casting judgments about what was best for others largely just from what I read.
After a few years, the walks, the pictures, the people I met along them, started becoming more important to me than my job. I began spending less time at the office, taking the odd Friday off, or leaving early in the afternoons, something I was able to do because I had reached a level at work that gave me flexibility. And honestly, I just didn’t care much anymore.
The Hunts Point neighborhood is on a tongue of land jutting into the East River from the South Bronx. It is a neighborhood of thirty thousand cut off from the rest of the Bronx, isolated on three sides by water, and where it connects to the Bronx by a six-lane elevated expressway (the Bruckner), running next to a half-block-wide trench filled with railroads.
At the tip of Hunts Point, enclosed behind gates, is a massive market for meat, vegetables, fruit, and fish. Almost any food served in New York City first passes through this market, brought in by semis, trucks, and vans and brought out again by semis, trucks, and vans. The route to the market is lined with warehouses, scrapyards, junkyards, and auto body shops, many leaking fluids into the streets. When there is a lull in traffic, seagulls flock into the street to pick at food scraps spilled from trucks out of puddles of oil. At night, when most of the warehouses close, the seagulls compete with feral cats, dogs, raccoons, skunks, rats, and others who feed off the food thrown away or bumped off a truck.
Most of the residents live in a small section of the neighborhood on a slight hill filled with brownstones, co-ops, barbershops, bodegas, more auto body shops, more auto repair shops, schools, and a few nonprofits. This residential part is surrounded on all sides by truck routes to the market, filling it with the rumble of shifting gears. The neighborhood is poor (roughly 40 percent beneath the poverty line) and almost entirely black or Latino.
On my first walk into Hunts Point I was immediately drawn in. Although it was loud, dirty, and filled with exhaust, it also had a strong community and sense of place. It was a small town of thirty thousand, and everyone seemed to know everyone else.
There was also a lot beauty and creativity in Hunts Point, cobbled together from things other parts of New York saw as junk or useless. When I stopped and looked, I saw people making the best of what was available and doing so in a way that not only elevated life but also provided a community.
The auto body shops and junkyards were lined with colorfully painted tin fences, or walls filled with murals, or parts of cars assembled in beautiful arrangements, creating industrial artwork.
There were flocks of pigeons flying in swirls, their loops choreographed from below by men on rooftops that were filled with handmade coops. On the weekends, small parks filled with bike clubs of adults riding lovingly cared for old Schwinn bikes—the bikes wealthy New York had moved beyond, thrown out, or grown out of.
It wasn’t just bike clubs and pigeon keepers—in the back of the bodegas, on the sidewalk, in empty lots, or really wherever, people set up dominoes tables to play. While the game might have been the excuse to get together, it was the connections and community formed that maintained them. The same was true of barbershops, which were spaces to gossip and just hang.
This part of Hunts Point wasn’t what I was told I would find—it was welcoming, warm, and beautiful, not empty, dangerous, and ugly. The depth of that difference kept bringing me back, and all my walks became devoted to Hunts Point.
Hunts Point does have the things people said to stay away from, the things that the media focused its attention on. It does have a market for drugs and sex work, neither hidden. The drugs are sold openly on various corners, or out of various auto shops, or out of the lobbies of various buildings. The dealers are well-known and not shy. They all have nicknames—Simple, Escrow, Heavy, $Mere (Cashmere), Bishop, Sexy, Black Widow, Mosquito—and some even come with business cards advertising “Street Services,” with Microsoft clip art of dice, or pigeons, or tires.
The sex work is also open, but unlike the drugs, it takes place in only a few locations. One is outside a corner bodega nicknamed Hero City and the other along a truck route heading into the market nicknamed the Track, or the Hoe Stroll, or just Stroll for short.
Being in the neighborhood means regularly seeing and dealing with both. I had initially chosen to ignore them, partly out of respect for their business, partly from the stigma attached to them, and partly because of who I was. I was a gate-crasher, an outsider, a white guy, a banker with a camera. This wasn’t my neighborhood, and I wasn’t going to just jam a camera in someone’s face who didn’t want the camera jammed in their face.
I also understood that the neighborhood had long been unfairly stigmatized, and even glamorized, for the drugs and sex work. HBO had done an early and salacious reality show called Hookers at the Point. Others had also focused only on the drugs and sex work, not the lived realities of the bulk of the residents.
So for the first half year in Hunts Point I focused on the bike clubs, pigeon keepers, graffiti artists, and the work of the nonprofits. On how the community coped with being stigmatized. Yet that focus wasn’t fair because it wasn’t a full picture of the neighborhood. Most of all it wasn’t fair to those caught up in the drugs and sex work, who were portrayed simply as cartoonish losers and not as members of the community.
My focus changed during a rare quiet moment in the industrial part of Hunts Point on a Sunday afternoon. The truck traffic was light and most of the shops closed. Takeesha was standing alone by a trickling fire hydrant, washing her face. She was working, wearing thigh-high faux-leather red boots, leopard-print tights, waving at whatever car or truck passed by. I had seen her before, and she had always smiled at me or waved, but I had never stopped to talk to her. This time she looked over at me, and with a big smile she yelled, “Hey, take my picture!” When I asked why, she said, “Because I am a sexy, beautiful prostitute.”
We talked, and over the next half hour she told me her life story. She told me how her mother’s pimp put her on the streets at twelve. How she had her first child at thirteen. How she was addicted to heroin. I ended by asking her the question I asked everyone I photographed: How do you want to be described? She replied without a pause, “As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.”
I spent the next three years being guided by Takeesha and the street family she was a member of—roughly fifty men and women who lived under bridges, in abandoned buildings, in sheds, in pits, in broken-down trucks, on rooftops, or, if they scored enough money, in per-hour motels. Some had grown up in the Bronx, some elsewhere, but all had fled abuse, dysfunction, or stigma and ended up in Hunts Point for the comfort of drugs.
They took me under bridges and into abandoned buildings, drug traps, burned-out apartments, basements filled with raw sewage, courtrooms, jails, prisons, police stations, rehab centers, detox units, emergency rooms, per-hour motels, and many trips to McDonald’s. I heard gut-wrenching stories of abuse, helped some find homes for a night, and helped others find drugs and then a safe place to shoot up. I watched as friends disappeared, died, or bounced between hospitals and prisons.
It was three years of seeing just how messy life really is. How filled with pain, injustice, ambiguity, and problems too big for any one policy to address. It was also three years of seeing how resilient people can be, how community can thrive anywhere, even amid pain and poverty.
Most of all I ended up finding what is often overlooked in stigmatized neighborhoods: dignity.
Roughly three years after entering Hunts Point I am sitting in a McDonald’s late at night with Takeesha and Steve, who are taking a break from looking for drugs and looking for a hotel. They are married, legally for a year, but by the measure of the streets for more than a decade, and they have been arguing like a married couple for hours, fights over logistics that swelled into fights against each other. Now they sit in a booth, nuzzling, laughing, swapping sweet talk, making up.
There is no music, no TV. This McDonald’s in the Hunts Point neighborhood is, in Takeesha’s words, “cheap ass and skimpy.” The only sounds other than theirs is the bling-bling warning of a deep fryer left unattended and the yelps of a table of teens flipping from one jarring YouTube hit to another.
We sit for about an hour. I mostly leave them alone, listening to them, taking a few pictures, slipping out of my role as friend and into my role as photographer/documenter. For the last few hours I have been a mixture of the two, driving them around as they look for place to stay, which for them means finding money, which means finding work for Takeesha, or a “date,” which means finding drugs first, because “you can’t do that work without being fucked-up.”
This—hustling to find money, to find drugs, to find a place to crash, to find a man who will pay her for sex—has been Takeesha’s life for close to thirty years. She started this at twelve, or thirteen, or eleven, or fourteen, depending on when and who is doing the telling, working beside her mom, who did it until she died before forty. Helping her hustle, lifting crates of soda or beer from unattended semis and trains, breaking into and fixing up boarded-up or abandoned homes, and keeping Takeesha from doing too many drugs has been Steve’s life for about a decade. He is sober—“I quit that stuff long ago”—but that doesn’t stop him from dealing now and then. In his mind it only makes him a more natural dealer: “You can’t let a monkey sell bananas, and I am no longer a monkey.”
They work, Steve and Takeesha. Viewed at night from afar in McDonald’s, they don’t seem to. They look a mess. Takeesha is between hits of heroin and on methadone, so she is nodding at times, but now and then a hit of crack, smoked outside with a friend passing through (there is always someone passing through this McDonald’s) brings on a manic energy, or the heroin wears down and she is just a giddy girl happy to be having a Big Mac, something she is OK to shout out to the McDonald’s.
Viewed up close, though, sitting across from them and having known them for three years, they work. They complement each other. Steve’s sobriety (“not so much as a beer”) is the guardrail Takeesha needs to stay alive, and Takeesha’s smarts, humor, and volatility are the attention and drama Steve needs to keep himself sober. They have almost always been there for each other, able to understand the depth, complexity, and craziness of each other’s problems.
This night they almost have everything set up. Takeesha has her date, a regular, a “white guy from Queens” who is a sanitation worker and the best possible date—“Yo, he likes it straight up, nothing weird, no fetish, no foot thing, nothing kinky”—and the dealers are around and have stuff to sell. It is set up to be a good night, but they can’t find a per-hour motel that will have them. They need the room for at least nine hours, for her to entertain while Steve waits nearby and then for both of them to shower and sleep. All the usual hotels—the Sheridan, the Days Inn, the Capri-Whitestone—are either closed for renovation or have banned them.
Earlier in the evening I had picked them up from the Hutchinson-Whitestone Motel, which had kicked them out. Well, kicked Takeesha out, for running men and drugs out of her room. In her mind she had kicked herself out, and it was not a loss: “Yo. Look at these sheets—thin, scratchy, and filled with cigarette holes. I’m not giving them my money.” I had taken them to the Sheridan and at their request had gone in alone to try to book a room for nine hours. “They don’t know you with us, and you are a respectable white man.” I pointed out that they probably saw through that, saw them and me together in the van on the security camera’s monitor, but went in anyway. The clerk, a well-dressed South Asian man behind plexiglass, sat flanked on either side by monitors flashing security camera footage. One showed Takeesha pacing outside smoking a cigarette.
I place $109 in small bills in the tray. “I would like a room for nine hours.”
“We are filled.”
“Your sign says vacancies.”
“The sign is not working.”
A young couple walks up with no luggage. They are giggling and tipsy. I step aside as they put cash in the tray. They get a room.
“What about that couple?”
“They have reservations; they booked ahead of time.”
“How could they have? They paid in cash and didn’t even give you a number.”
“You leave, or I call the police.”
I go outside and talk Takeesha into the car. I don’t need her causing a scene, bringing the police. She is carrying drugs, and we just don’t need the police.
We get back in the car and head to McDonald’s. I turn on the radio, which starts the usual bickering between Steve and Takeesha over which station to listen to. Steve is a classic rock fan—Pink Floyd, the Who, the Stones—which Takeesha teases him over: “You white inside—no rhythm.” I let them choose, having long ago given up. Early on they had gotten in the car when I was playing a compilation of classic blues music, and Takeesha immediately ripped into me: “What the hell is this music? Sounds like some weird African shit.”
As we drive, she calls her dealer, Mosquito, and puts him on speakerphone while she fiddles with the radio, trying to find a station. She pivots between yelling at her dealer: “Yo, I told you, Faile and Hunts Point. In five minutes. I need two cat foods and one dog food. You hear me?”; yelling at the radio: “Can’t you play anything but sorry-ass music?”; and yelling directions at me.
“Yo. I told you right. Right, motherfucker.”
“The GPS says left. I am following that.”
“Fuck your GPS. It ain’t hood.”
She takes another call, from a friend who just finished eight months of rehab. Takeesha stops talking for a few minutes, this time just listening, before saying, “You get abused that much as kid, you create different personalities to deal with shit.” She listens again, before screaming a shout of joy into the phone. “I am so proud of you! Now hug the phone! Hug it! I can’t hear you hugging it. You need to be hugging it so hard you out of breath.”
Fifteen long minutes later we are at the McDonald’s, and she and Steve are in the booth eating Big Macs.
I leave them. They go back to their lives, Takeesha to buy drugs and then wait for her sanitation worker to pick her up. Where they will end up finally sleeping is unknown. Maybe they will find a per-hour motel, maybe under the bridge (but that is crowded), maybe the Honeycomb hideout (an empty building used as a drug trap), maybe just on the subway.
This is just another normal night for them.
I go back to my home after stopping in a bar near my apartment to get drunk—something I find myself doing almost every night.
At home I turn off my phone. When I wake up, I have a text from an unknown number: “Me & Takeesha had a spat last night and now she won’t tell me where she’s at. By the way, hello Chris. This is Steve. I’m depressed.”
A year after entering Hunts Point, I left my job in banking. Or they asked me to leave and I didn’t do anything to fight it or find another role. It wasn’t an easy choice—walking away from money and security is never easy—but it was the clear choice. The prior four years I had been sleepwalking, doing the minimum needed, just there to pay the bills.
Wall Street pays well, and after nineteen years, I had the luxury of not immediately needing a weekly check, so I was able to immerse myself fully in Hunts Point. I spent almost every day there, with Takeesha and Steve or anyone who came into their orbit: Shelly, Ramone, Sarah, Beauty, Tiny, Millie, Erik, Sonya, Ironman, Prince, Roland, Fernando.
I got pulled in further than I had expected, and although I tried to maintain strict boundaries, I started abusing drugs heavily—not their drugs, but my world’s drugs of alcohol and anxiety meds. I was drinking far too much, staying in bars until closing, and mixing the drinking with an ever-increasing amount of pills. When my prescription for Xanax ran out, I was deluged with offers to buy it from the streets—something I did. I justified it as being simpler than getting a new prescription (it was) and something that would give me street legitimacy (it did). As I started using more and more, it became clear I was buying it for the same reason everyone else was—I was addicted. It was a problem, but one I justified as trivial compared to the problems I was seeing.
Their problems also started becoming my problems. On the streets people share; that is just what they do. If you score big, if you jack a john’s wallet and pull in $300, you go back to the drug trap with drugs for everyone. Sure, you do you and your person first, take all you want, squirrel away a little for tomorrow (which you never keep), but you do your best to bring back enough for everyone. That is just the way it is. If I was gonna be part of this world, well, then I was gonna help. I had money—lots of it by their understanding—but everyone appreciated that my real money was off-limits. That was my wife and kids’ money, not theirs or really mine. “You got to do right by your family.”
But I could help in other ways because I had four things most didn’t: a computer, a phone with unlimited minutes, a car, and no habit to get in the way (well, I had one, just not as deep as theirs).
I could help, and since I was there, I had to. I started doing more than just buying everyone McDonald’s or sliding someone $20 now and then or buying Xanax from them at inflated prices. I started driving Shelly to detox, or visiting Sarah in Rikers, or finding out where Tiny was in the system, or seeing which hospital Millie ended up in, or taking Takeesha to the hospital, or getting someone out of the hospital, or whatever. I would wake each morning to texts for help or walk into requests the minute I got to Hunts Point.
I tried my best to answer each text, to respond to each reasonable request, but no matter how much I did, nothing seemed to change. Certainly not for the better as I then measured it. If I spent a day driving around getting someone into detox, I would find them in Hunts Point the next day, having run away or been kicked out. If I showed up to collect someone to make sure they appeared for court, I often ended up hearing nothing but excuses, if I could find them at all. After two years of this, nobody close to me got out or succeeded. Nobody got clean or sober or ended up in a “little home with a white picket fence.” The only way anyone seemed to leave the streets was being sentenced to an upstate prison, or thrown in Rikers, or mandated to rehab, or killed.
In the middle of 2015, I stopped going regularly to Hunts Point. I was drinking too much. While I could understand my friends’ drug use as forged from trauma, mine was simply about selfishness. I could no longer be around easily available drugs and daily dramas that made my mistakes seem minor; the contrast unmoored me.
Also, Takeesha and her friends didn’t need me trying to save them, something I found myself explicitly and implicitly trying to do, either through constant attempts at helping them get into detox, get into rehab, or get off the streets. They could handle themselves—they had thirty years on the streets proving that. If I had an obligation to them, it wasn’t to assume what was best for them; rather, it was to listen and try to understand what they valued, what they wanted, and not get in the way.
I also stopped going to Hunts Point because I wanted to see if what I had seen in the Bronx was representative of the rest of the country. To find out, I got in my minivan and visited other places across America. In each place I focused on the communities and neighborhoods that, like Hunts Point, I was told not to go to.
I didn’t do much research before I visited each place, beyond looking for areas with a reputation as “a place you shouldn’t visit” or a place that “sucks” or where “everyone who can leave has left” or was the butt of jokes. I didn’t want to go with a prejudice beyond knowing that others considered it unworthy of attention and so went with no goal beyond listening to the residents.
I stayed in a town for as long as it took to force me to rethink what I believed. I slept in motels that charged by the hour, or by the month, with parking lots of cars packed with possessions or trucks packed with tools and work supplies. The other guests were often families that had recently lost their homes or had come into quick cash and wanted—and could afford—a room and shower for a week.
In these communities I didn’t go to the nonprofits or the official community centers or talk to the local politicians. Despite the very good intentions of all of them, I had found many were still detached from those they advocated for, especially the politicians.
Instead, I first went to the busiest McDonald’s in the community and hung out, eventually talking to the morning regulars. Then I walked and wandered with no clear goal beyond meeting people and letting their suggestions guide me. I often walked the entire day, stopping in at a McDonald’s to rest and talk to more people.
Some nights, and on weekend mornings, I attended religious services, not in big beautiful churches but in the smaller ones, many that had taken over spaces designed for something else—an evangelical church in an old furniture store in a strip mall, or in an old fast-food restaurant, or in living rooms of a refurbished home. I tried to go to as many denominations as possible—Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic, Muslim, Evangelical. I was warmly welcomed into all of them despite rarely looking as though I belonged.
When I began my trips, I spent some nights in dive bars and bonded with strangers over a shared love of drinking. By the start of 2016, I had quit both anxiety meds and drinking. Then I began spending my evenings at McDonald’s, sitting at the same table every night, writing notes, eating an ice-cream cone, and talking to whomever until closing time. Often it was during these nights when I would meet people who were struggling the most, people without a permanent home, people who used the safety and warmth of McDonald’s until it closed.
I helped people out if they seemed desperate or if they asked. Mostly this meant buying them meals at McDonald’s or a pack of cigarettes. Sometimes this meant giving them money. If they asked directly for money, I tried to keep the amount below $10, the cost of most drugs. If I slid them $7 and they asked for three more, I knew what it was going for and told them I could buy them a meal but I couldn’t give them more cash. Most probably spent the money on drugs regardless.
Most people didn’t ask for money, even the most desperate. Most just wanted to sit and talk with someone who wasn’t trying to save them, didn’t scold them, and didn’t judge them. I tried to do that, often for hours, listening to long stories of wrongs, mistakes, and injustices. What most wanted wasn’t money but to use my computer or phone, to look up friends on Facebook or call for social services info or family or street friends. Almost everyone wanted to look and sort through the pictures I had taken of them and then have me send them the best one.
I did this for roughly three years, putting 150,000 miles on my car. Each trip lasted weeks or months, depending on how far I needed to drive. Between trips I returned home to my family and writing and focused on understanding what I had seen and where I should go next. I initially focused on black neighborhoods—places like Buffalo’s East Side; Selma, Alabama; Milwaukee’s North Side—places that, because of racism, had long been stigmatized. To give myself a greater balance, I added poor white communities, like Prestonsburg, Kentucky; Bristol, Tennessee; and the Ozarks. I tried to select places that, taken together, were as diverse as America, both by race and by location.
What they had in common was that all were poor and rarely considered or talked about beyond being a place of problems. All had been described as left behind, despite some, like Hunts Point, being adjacent to rich and successful neighborhoods. Residents growing up in these communities faced immense structural obstacles, and some, like minority neighborhoods, had for a very long time.
Despite their differences—black, white, Hispanic, rural, urban—they were all similar to Hunts Point in one important way: despite being stigmatized, ignored, and made fun of, most of the people I met were fighting to maintain dignity.
They feel disrespected—and with good reason. My circles, the bankers, business people, and the politicians they supported had created a world where McDonald’s was often one of the only restaurant options—and we make fun of them for going there. We pretend that the addicted take drugs because of bad character, not because it’s one of the few ways they have to dull the pain of not being able to live good lives in the economy we’ve created for them. We tell them that their religion is foolish and that they shouldn’t expect to be able to earn a living unless they leave their hometowns. We say the white working class is racist while the policies we endorse hurt the bulk of minorities. It is not surprising some have responded with cynicism or apathy, or rebel in anger.
This book is not a book about “how we got Trump,” though learning to see the country differently may help answer questions about the 2016 election. Rather, it’s a book about reconsidering what is valuable, about honoring aspects of life that cannot be measured, and about an attempt to listen and look with humility.