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While browsing on the internet for some pictures of NYC, I noticed the lack of pics from the early 90's. There are also not many pics of the 1980's. I saw a few 1970's, but almost all of these were famous "urban decay" pics. Now, I realize most photos from the timeframe (1970's - 1990's) are going to show NYC at it's worst but there is a huge difference in the amount of photos post 2000 and the amount of photos pre 1995.
So I figured, since we had already had a NYC photo thread, that we can have a thread consisting of older photos.
Since they are hard to find, I looked in my families photo albums and found a couple of interesting photos of University Heights in 1994. The photo shows how gritty the Bronx and the rest of NYC was during the crack days. It really shows how far the city has come. Today, that same block has barely any graffiti and is much nicer looking.
I will try to post them up later. I have to scan them first.
If any of you have similar childhood or older photos, please post them up. If you dont want to get to personal, you can always blur the faces.
So open up them dusty photo albums, open up your old internet folders etc etc and lets see these pics.
It's funny - I was a teenager at this time and remember it being rough, but never thinking it was that bad. I'm more scared for my kids now than I was scared for myself then and technically they say it is a much safer city.
Check out some books by Bruce Davidson if you want to see some gritty photos of NYC. There is a book titled "East 100th St." that he published with photos from the late 60's. Check it out from a library near you since that books costs over $200 on Amazon and is very hard to find. He also did other books in the 80s...NYC Subway and Brooklyn Gangs from the late 50's.
Just curious...has that area gentrified or seen a shift from poor people to middle-upper middle class people?
What do you think caused a change in that neighborhood?
University Heights hasn't gentrified at all. There aren't that many new buildings up, like you see in some lower parts of the Bronx. So everything looks the same minus the graffiti.
The area is still poor, but is not as poor as it was. This in my opinion is due to the fact that more people are getting off their feet and working, and not relying on their father or uncle or brother to bring in drug revenue, like most families did back in 1994. The father, brother, or uncle probably got locked up, and people had to start working their way up. And many are earning decently now 15 years later.
Also back in the early 1990's, Dominicans who came to UH and the west Bronx, would immediately start selling drugs. Crime was up as a result. People looked at UH like a foreign third world ghetto ; run down buildings, graffiti, trash, shootings, stabbings and spanish being spoken in the streets. The Dominicans coming in today are actually helping revitalize the neighborhood. They are being displaced from upper Manhattan and move to the Bronx. Here they bring their families and their high work ethics, so there is more sense of community.
The supers of the buildings back then were almost all involved in the drug trade. They didn't care for the condition of the buildings. They were supers by name, and it was mostly to cover up what they were really doing. The ones we have now, clean the buildings and maintain them which is why they look so neat.
I seen a white family in my building recently, but they are still hard to find here. The end of the crack era is the #1 cause for improvement, everything else came as a result of that. But it's still not middle income, poverty is still widespread and I would call it a low income neighborhood still.
It went from 83 murders and being called the "wild west" to just 15 murders. So it has imrpoved alot.
With all that said, currently its still one of the cities worst neighborhood. And one of the precincts covering the area, the 52, is currently on pace to have 774 robberies this year, up from 513 all of last year! No other nabe is even close this year.
Probably the worst neighborhood in the city so far to start the year.
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