Within five years of completion, good housing became a ravaged slum

Evidence

The one mile of the Cross-Bronx Expressway through East Tremont was completed in 1960. By 1965, the community’s “very good, solid housing stock,” the apartment buildings that had been so precious to the people who had lived in them, were ravaged hulks. Windows, glassless except for the jagged edges around their frames, stared out on the street like sightless eyes. The entrances to those buildings were carpeted with shards of glass from what had been the doors to their lobbies. In those lobbies, what remained of the walls was covered with obscenities. And not much remained. Plaster from the walls lay in heaps in corners; the bare wood which had been exposed was shattered and broken. The pipes which had been behind the wood were gone, ripped out, melted down and sold for the few dollars that would buy the next fix. Elevators no longer worked. Staircases were broken and shattered. Banisters had been ripped from their sockets, for scrap and a fix if they were iron, for malice, an expression of hatred and revenge on an uncaring world, if they were wood. Raw garbage spilled out of broken bags across the floor. The stench of stale urine and vomit filled the nostrils. One tried to look down only enough to avoid stepping on the piles of feces, whether mercifully dried or reeking fresh—animal and human. There was no heat in those buildings; if they were homes, they were homes as the cave of the savage was a home. And yet they were homes—homes for tens of thousands of people. They were homes for welfare tenants and for the poorest of the working poor, for families that drift from one apartment to another without, seemingly, ever paying a month’s rent in full—urban gypsies—for mothers who say desperately to the stranger, when they can be induced to talk to the stranger: “I got to get my kids out of here,” and for children who come to the door long after the knock is heard and peer around and ask the stranger, with fear in eyes and voice: “Are you the man from the welfare?” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3730

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing move — describing destruction in savage terms while insisting these were ‘still homes for tens of thousands of people’ — pivots hard against the very dehumanizing language it used moments before, making the reader confront who bears the cost. A masterclass in moral complication within a single paragraph.
• XREF: connects to: A single expressway’s noise and decline triggered cascading white flight and urban decay — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3722