Lower East Side clearance created a literally bombed-out landscape inspiring artists

Evidence

In the 1950s, a red brick palisade of high-rise public housing went up along Avenue D. Many LES residents, arrived since the war, were Puerto Rican; the area’s remaining Jews were mostly concentrated in older, less monumental public housing south of Delancey Street. “They were tearing down block after block,” the artist Aldo Tambellini recalled. “It looked like a bombed-out area from World War II.” Tambellini found inspiration in the rubble: “I vividly remember a dismembered wall remaining standing from an old synagogue with a big mural of the Lion of Judah.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences what I’ll use as the test case: material devastation as the precondition of artistic invention.