April 7, 2022 51deems “municipal art” and “high art”
as a means of studying the city’s built
environment, and as an intervention
against predominant stereotypical nar-
ratives about the place. As part of this
discussion, he compares the New York
City Department of Housing Pres-
ervation and Development’s trompe
l’oeil “Occupied Look” program—
which began in the early 1980s under
Mayor Ed Koch and consisted of vinyl
decals painted to look like curtains,
shades, shutters, or window panes on
boarded- up windows— with the work
a decade earlier of the artist Gordon
Matta- Clark, whose Bronx Floors
(1972–1973) presented sculptural slabs
of floor that he sliced from abandoned
buildings in the South Bronx.
L’Official describes Matta- Clark
as “a kind of archivist who, with ram-
shackle precision, extracted samples
of rapidly deteriorating sections of the
city as both testament to and protest
against the prevailing urban condi-
tion.” He also quotes Robert Jacobson,
director of the Bronx office of the City
Planning Commission, on the purpose
of the Occupied Look decals: “The
image that the Bronx projects— and
projects to potential investors— is the
image you see from that expressway,
and our goal is to soften that image so
people will be willing to invest.” With
his examination of these undertakings
as well as fascinating images from what
he refers to as the municipal “shadow
archives,” L’Official proves himself to
be an original kind of archivist, and the
book really sings.
As an amateur photographer my-
self—interested in documenting the
ripped advertisements on New York
City subway platforms, which can resem-
ble abstract paintings and are sometimes
described as “unintentional art”—I
especially enjoyed the care L’Official
took in examining the “shadow ar-
chive.” These include photographs from
the Department of Finance’s citywide
census, made between 1983 and 1988,
wherein officials collected over 800,000
images, about 85,000 of which show
buildings and vacant lots in the Bronx.
He discusses these alongside documen-
tary photographs of the same period by
Jerome Liebling, Ray Mortenson, and
other photographers from the fine arts
world, and asks an important question:
“Where does the visual memory of a
city reside?”
L’Official argues that the munici-
pality’s aim for total representation of
New York City’s blocks and lots (which
preceded projects like Google’s Street
View) resulted in an archive that pre-
vents the South Bronx from passing en-
tirely into myth. That’s because in many
of the building census photos, there
are people— hanging out, crossing the
street, shaking hands. These are the
everyday people who lived there, not
the boogeymen from Fort Apache, the
Bronx. Even the unpeopled tax photos,
like the one of 1305 Nelson Avenue,
which shows a massive pile of rubble,
when paired with more self- consciously
haunting images of abandoned, fire-
ravaged buildings by Liebling and
Mortenson, make us feel more keenly
that the space was once occupied.
Mortenson was familiar with the
work of Matta- Clark and was em-ployed as an electrician when he first
started shooting the South Bronx in the
early 1980s. His mantra on the subway
he took to get there was “Take the 5,
stay alive. Take the 4, dead for sure,”
because the neighborhoods along the 5
train seemed to offer fewer chances of
getting mugged or stumbling across a
drug deal. His photographs convey the
breadth of destruction in Mott Haven,
Morrisania, and Tremont by offering us
a way to glimpse the community’s inner
life. In one such intimate shot, Untitled
(19 October 1983), an old, upholstered
wingback armchair sits covered in a
blizzard of fallen paint flakes before
a wall on which, above two crossed
swords, is written in Arabic: “There
is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is
the messenger of Allah.” The chair is lit
like a throne from which someone has
recently risen.
In Liebling’s monumental composi-
tion Orlando Building, South Bronx,
New York City (1977), it appears that
the photographer has stepped into the
empty lot to get the low- angled shot
of the bare brick facade of a building
thrusting upward from a hill of rubble
(see illustration on page 49). Liebling,
who had been a member of the Photo
League, was interested in document-
ing urban destruction but not in cel-
ebrating ruin. His pictures sought to
reveal the community in a seemingly
inhospitable place by representing the
environment, and sometimes its peo-
ple, stripped down to its essence. His
straightforward presentation of struc-
ture and form shares a precisionist ethic
with the anonymous tax photographs,
illuminating a series of local disasters
in the Bronx, the aftereffects of rupture
worth scrutiny and redress as opposed
to revulsion, sick fascination, or scorn.
Liebling’s South Bronx series, sup-
ported by a Guggenheim fellowship,
made visual parallels with images of
urban destruction from postwar War-
saw, Rotterdam, London, and Berlin
by Henri Cartier- Bresson, Werner Bi-
schof, and others. This was not Pom-
peii, though it looked as much like a
warzone as Dresden did after the fire-
bombs. These images and the dozens of
others that L’Official reproduces in the
book are less spectacular than familiar
depictions of the Bronx as a no- man’s-
land, including the broadcast of Presi-
dent Carter’s visit. They testify to the
lives of its mostly Black and Latinx res-
idents, whether pictured in the frame
or, more often, just outside it. This tar-
geted landscape was their home.Though Urban Legends focuses on
words and pictures rather than music,
I couldn’t help hearing “The Message”
as its soundtrack. With its kaleidoscopic
way of seeing place, L’Official’s book
operates something like the video art-
ist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s
work, including his seven- minute video
essay Love Is the Message, the Message
Is Death, which suggests how visual
media can transmit beauty and alien-
ation as powerfully as can Black music.
It also shares something with Lucy
Sante’s portraits of New York City,
Low Life (1991) and Evidence (1992),
although where Sante admits to being
drawn to Surrealism— “I commuted tohigh school in Manhattan and would
sometimes cut class, wander down the
West Side through what was still a very
industrial area of New York, looking
for the dream landscapes of Rimbaud
and Lautréamont”— L’Official’s atti-
tude to Surrealism is to put a pin in it.
With grief rather than nostalgia,
L’Official mentions that Community
Board 5, made up of the University
Heights and Fordham neighborhoods
of the Bronx, where he grew up, now
faces the biggest threat of displacement
by gentrification in New York City,
signaled by a pair of twenty- five- story
luxury towers that he watched rise
from his living- room window while
he finished writing his book. Real es-
tate developers have in recent years
attempted to attract money by renam-
ing neighborhoods in the South Bronx
with sobriquets like “SoBro” and “the
Piano District.” Walking through Port
Morris or Mott Haven now, you’ll find
art galleries, subway- tiled cafés serving
espresso, and locally owned stores sell-
ing Bronx- branded merchandise.
As for Charlotte Street, it was con-
verted from an “urban jungle” to a
pocket of ninety- two subsidized ranch
houses called Charlotte Gardens,
the first of which went on the market
in 1983. In his conclusion L’Official
writes:The South Bronx waterfront, once
entirely industrial, will soon ap-
pear as nearly indistinguishable
from the newly built- up shore-
lines of Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
or Long Island City and Astoria,
Queens, all of which now feature
packed enclaves of steel- and glass-
clad residential towers.Given this rapid growth, he asks,
how will this place live on in our mem-
ory? One way may be the Universal
Hip Hop Museum, founded by Rocky
Bucano and backed by rappers Kurtis
Blow, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmas-
ter Melle Mel, Nas, Ice- T, LL Cool J,
and others, which plans to open a phys-
ical space in the South Bronx next year,
and an immersive app through which
you can access 3D objects and perfor-
mances starting this spring.
We hear much in Urban Legends
about what the South Bronx wasn’t.
It wasn’t merely a backdrop for polit-
ical initiatives, a sideshow, a theater
of poverty, a crime den, a metaphor, a
wasteland. Yet it can be hard to see the
Bronx as it actually is. L’Official’s book
predates the pandemic, which has had a
devastating effect on the area. Accord-
ing to a June 2021 report by the Office
of the New York State Comptroller, it
was struck harder than any other bor-
ough, suffering the city’s highest rates
of hospitalization and death, precisely
because it already suffered the highest
rates of food insecurity, poverty, unem-
ployment, and lack of access to health
care. “In the period leading up to the
arrival of Covid- 19 in New York City,
the Bronx saw improvement across nu-
merous socioeconomic indicators, in-
cluding population, employment, and
wage growth,” the comptroller’s report
said. “The pandemic put an abrupt stop
to that trajectory.” Gentrification not-
withstanding, that’s how it is now. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets,
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Editor: Edwin Frank
Executive Editor: Sara Kramer
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