In his new book, “The New American Ghetto,” the photographer and sociologist Camilo Jose Vergara documents the deep human need to shape space. For almost 20 years, Vergara has haunted some of America’s most forgotten and reclusive urban neighborhoods, compiling a national photographic family album of loss.
Beauty is not the first word that leaps to mind when thinking about troubled urban outposts–including Camden, N.J.; downtown Detroit and the South Bronx–that are Vergara’s metier.
A 51-year-old Chilean-born sociologist, he has chronicled the changing physical environment of some of America’s most visibly forlorn neighborhoods. He has focused not only on symbols of abandonment and destruction, like razed inner-city blocks turned to prairie, but on peoples’ physical responses to living under siege, the way buildings “grow claws and spikes” when fortified with security measures, for example.
Yet beauty there is. Vergara has a sharp eye for the human hand, for what one of his subjects, Isabel Valentin of the South Bronx, calls “curiosidad.”
He finds beauty in powerful street memorials in which painted walls have replaced cemeteries as places to remember the dead. And he finds it especially in the ways people shape the environments they can control: their homes.
In Vergara’s view, interior design has become an important anchor in neighborhoods where there is little that might be construed as a public realm. In such surroundings, he argues, interiors “bring order and coherence and beauty. Traditions persist, reinforcing identity.”
Sam Beck, an anthropologist at Cornell University, observes in the book: “People need to create their own history, to leave traces of themselves and of the meanings they generate. They feel a need to give expression to their community, to leave trails, to say, `we are here,’ to create beauty.”
Earlier this year, Vergara sparked controversy by proposing a “ruins park” for Detroit’s boarded-up skyscrapers, to be encircled by a monorail a la Disney World. This suggestion, apparently serious, struck many observers as elitist at best and callous and cynical at worst.
His latest contention, that the ghetto (a problematical term to begin with) is “as intrinsic to the identity of the United States as New England villages, vast national parks, and leafy suburbs” seems bound to generate further discussion. (Vergara’s poetic infatuation with urban decay–inspired by one of his heroes, Edgar Allan Poe–can come across as an academic conceit.)
Nevertheless, unlike many of his predecessors who have photographed the poor, among them Jacob Riis and Walker Evans, he has ventured beyond the appalling poverty and dilapidation to examine how the dispossessed reclaim their neighborhoods against the odds, often through design.
For every fortresslike methadone clinic or day-care center in the book, there are storefront churches made festive with ornate murals or homemade signs.
In a sense, said Richard Plunz, director of the urban design program at Columbia University, Vergara is serving as a translator, “bringing the physical reality of the city to middle-class America, which considers it inaccessible.” (But can probably afford a $50 book on the subject.)
One day recently, Vergara took a reporter along to the South Bronx to meet some of the people whose apartments he has photographed (his work is currently included in the exhibition “City Speculations” at the Queens Museum of Art, through March 10).
On the way, he pointed out popular local sources for interior decoration, including the Almacen San Lazaro on Southern Boulevard, where a life-sized statue of Lazarus stands on the sidewalk, riveting passersby.
Santos statues, sold wholesale or retail, and other popular religious images “become essential at junctures where life is precarious,” Vergara contends. “The more the exterior environment becomes brutalized–windows eliminated, doors boarded up with steel–the more people are forced inside.”
“Their consciousness resides in their surroundings, as much as within themselves,” he added. “Interiors become about being who you are, about survival.”
Isabel Valentin, 54, lives with her husband and foster daughter on Longwood Avenue, a predominantly Hispanic stretch, where the average household income is $22,775, slightly more than half the city average. She came to the Bronx from Puerto Rico in 1972.
With its jewel-like beaded garlands hanging from the doorways, her three-room apartment has a luminous, magical quality.
For Valentin, the painted plaster santos figures that seem to spring from every crevice of the apartment are her lifeblood, a spiritual inheritance from her grandfather, who, she explained, “worked in spiritism,” a religious faith that embraces everything from astrology to reincarnation.
Her apartment also reflects other strains of religious life, including animism, a belief that all natural phenomena are either living or animated by spirits.
In her bedroom, she displays what she calls “fountains,” in which statues of religious figures are placed with coins in bowls of water, next to candles symbolizing fire. She credits her saints with many things, including saving her from muggings. She has decorated the apartment, where even the refrigerator magnets are artfully arranged by color, a little at a time, she said.
“I use color to make it come alive, to make it happier,” she explained. “I don’t go out,” she told a visitor. “My work is my house.”
Vergara admires passionate decorators like Valentin (although one suspects that she would be a creative decorator no matter what her circumstances).
Vergara’s own life goes a long way toward explaining his fascination with the ghetto and his somewhat romantic view of it. He grew up in Rengo, a small town in central Chile, in a one-story house whose adobe walls were so thick “I thought it was indestructible,” he writes.
In 1965, he arrived in the United States to attend Notre Dame, where, at age 21, he found himself in “an immensely wealthy, self-confident and energetic nation,” but felt drawn to the inner cities.
In the ghettos–the squandered fortune of the city–“I saw the eqivalent of houses I could have lived in, and I examined them almost as part of my own life,” he writes.
Devastation is in the eye of the beholder: Some of what Vergara mourns–the replacing of apartment buildings in the South Bronx with suburban-style single-family houses, for example–is widely considered a symbol of rejuvenation.
And Vergara’s idea that the environment drives interior design is belied somewhat by conversations with his level-headed subjects.
“I live in the ghetto,” Helen Steiner explained, “but inside is my personal private life.”
With her fellow resident Alice Myers, Steiner was responsible for resurrecting and ultimately purchasing New Hope Plaza from the city, which for years was the only building still standing on Boston Road at Charlotte Street, a street that became synonymous in the 1970s with urban decay.
“It was desolate,” she recalled. “This building was like a penny in the middle of your hand, just sitting there.”
From the rooftop of New Hope Plaza, Steiner has a panoramic view of Charlotte Gardens, its rows of single-family houses now dotting the landscape.
Inside, Steiner, 71, has filled her apartment with “rich people’s tax deductions,” as she ruefully put it: tapestries, a baby grand piano and silver wallpaper, all carefully culled from Goodwill Industries, where she worked until retiring 12 years ago.
To her, there is little connection between the ability to create a beautiful home and one’s circumstances.
“God made more than one way,” she said, explaining the elegant apartment she put together from discards. “If you’re smart enough, you’re going to find a way to please yourself.”
Listening to her for awhile, one gets the sense that Steiner would have little patience for books theorizing about people like herself.
“I don’t care if I was in one room, I’d make that room enjoyable,” she said, explaining what to her is the most obvious thing in the world.
“It’s not where you live,” she added, “it’s how you live.”
