Herb Goro - The Block

194 pages
Edited by Herb Goro
25.3 x 17.5 cm
Language: English
Softcover
Publisher: Random House
1970

An account, in pictures and text, of the greatest social disaster in American history: a close-up of the death of a New York City slum and the destruction of the people who live there.

The Block is the result of a year spent by the photographer Herb Goro in a decayed slum in New York's East Bronx. More than a hundred fifty thousand inhabitants of the area live and die in the rotted, sometimes abandoned tenements.

The text consist of tape-recorded interviews with the people whom we see in the pictures - the tenants, the police, the men and women dying, and the parents of the children being born. Theirs is the hopeless struggle to survive in the city which has no need for these people and which barely manages any longer to even keep them alive.

The book shows us how the people in this neighborhood live, but it concentrates on the lives of three adolescents, as they come of age, struggle briefly to survive, and fail. In New York there are countless people, many of them hardly more than children, who live and die like those on THE BLOCK. This book confronts us with a profound social pathology and with the personal misery that accompanies it.