Flashback: The Bronx Slums, 1950s

The indispensable LIFE image archive has an entire catalog of photos titled "Bronx Slums" which were taken in 1952 and 1953 (though the words "Bronx Slums" have been spotted in print for decades before and decades after that).

A few years ago the Village Voice took a look at the South Bronx area (known as America's worst slum), recalling: "Robert Moses slammed his fist into the neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s, 'clearing the slums,' stacking the displaced in spiritless public housing towers, and sealing them behind a rampart of expressways: the Bruckner to the east and the Major Deegan to the south and west." And that's what's happening in the photos above.

As residents fled the area, so did blue-collar jobs, which caused poverty and crime to take over. The paper noted at the time, "Mott Haven became the South Bronx of infamy, and remained so until the drug and gang wars finally began to burn out in the early 1990s."

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By Jen Carlson in Arts & Entertainment on June 16, 2010 4:13 PM

Comments [rss]

BotanistPrime

FUCK Robert Moses!

Can we please memorialize his as the worst person in NYC history?

Between destroying the original Penn Station, quarantining the poor into soulless housing projects, and attempting to build 3 highways across all of downtown I can't think of anyone who has had a more negative impact on NYC than him.

butterbutter

Not much different than today.

justthinkin

Moses couldn't spell the word slum . But he certainly could recognize the color brown.

potsmoker

robert moses destroyed the bronx.

i wasnt born at that time but im sure those photos arent of SLUMS, but of the land and condenmed buildings cleared for his projects.

actually i dont see anything that says slums or ghetto,

i see construction projects and maybe someone updating the LIFE archives choose to call it SLUMS, i dont see a slum, i see cleared land. it looks like the slums of the late 70's and 80's with all the abandoned lots, but im pretty sure these pictures are lots cleared for construction not bldgs that just fell into disrepair or burned by landlords because the tax hit was more than the rent roll.

and i hate it when people say sonya sottomayor grew up out of the projects. the projects in the 50's and 60's were actually very nice places to live.

in the 70's i grew up in the south bronx and many of my neighbors and friends in classic tenement style bldgs were jews, irish and italians. lots of buildings along the grand concourse and all over the south bronx were actually synagauges temples or whatever,

and by the way isnt there some better way up looking at a slideshow without reloading the whole page its annoying

Kim Bong Ill

It may be annoying, but it gets you to reload the ads every time you click. Cha-ching!

You didn't think there was a technical reason for making the site so clunky, did you?

BDS=(Boycott.Divest.Sanction)

if you talk to the people who were there the soth bronx in the 40s and 50s when an idilyic place to live.

is moses to blame for killing that area too? damn. his name is mud in my book.