A Crusade Goes Sour

It’s been almost three and a half years now, and the media hype has been over for a long time. What solidarity there was has gone. People are fighting like dogs over the money that’s left.” It sounded like an epitaph, coming from the mouth of a young parish priest, and it is.

He meant the eon since the legendary scene of President Carter standing in the rubble of Charlotte Street, wakening the public conscience to the South Bronx. The South Bronx is certainly no longer viewed as a running sore on the body and spirit of New York, and, by pregnant transfer, on the body politic of other American cities. It has become an institution, full of didactic exhibits, some of them even audiovisual, which trace human decline in the late twentieth century. The exhibits point out that it is nobody’s fault, but more like a chapter of natural evolution that just happened. The remains lie silted like a Mesozoic fossil, laid bare now in its original element for the instruction of the public. A Bronx councilman has even asked the Soviet Union for foreign-aid funds to help rebuild the place.

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Nicholas King

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It’s been almost three and a half years now, and the media hype has been over for a long time. What solidarity there was has gone. People are fighting like dogs over the money that’s left.” It sounded like an epitaph, coming from the mouth of a young parish priest, and it is.

He meant the eon since the legendary scene of President Carter standing in the rubble of Charlotte Street, wakening the public conscience to the South Bronx. The South Bronx is certainly no longer viewed as a running sore on the body and spirit of New York, and, by pregnant transfer, on the body politic of other American cities. It has become an institution, full of didactic exhibits, some of them even audiovisual, which trace human decline in the late twentieth century. The exhibits point out that it is nobody’s fault, but more like a chapter of natural evolution that just happened. The remains lie silted like a Mesozoic fossil, laid bare now in its original element for the instruction of the public. A Bronx councilman has even asked the Soviet Union for foreign-aid funds to help rebuild the place.