1982 NEWS SPECIAL: The South Bronx | WASTELAND

This is the New York most tourists see the skyline of Manhattan with its Empire State Building and its canyons of skyscrapers. The real estate here is some of the most expensive in the world. Just a few minutes away, unseen by most visitors, lies a section of New York that has become an international symbol of urban decay. The South Bronx. 500 acres littered with devastated buildings and rubble. 50,000 apartments abandoned. It recalls Dresden after the bombing, London after the Blitz, but no enemy bombs destroyed this section of New York City. From the high rent district of Manhattan to the South Bronx is only a 15-minute ride by subway. In the South Bronx, 3,000 buildings stand empty. Tin sheets and cinder blocks have been inserted into the doors and windows in a vain effort to keep Almost half a million people still live on these streets. And yet the decay continues to spread from building to building, from block to block. 30 years ago, the Bronx was a mecca for the white middle class. The streets were lined with trees, apartments were solid, and rents were reasonable and strictly controlled. The Bronx called itself the burrow without slums and thought itself invulnerable. The decline was swift, but it began innocently with a plan to provide housing for New York's poor. When these massive housing projects went up, the Jews, the Irish, and the Italians began to move out. Bronx became a ghetto of the very poor, who were mainly black and Puerto Rican. They were dropped down like pawns on a giant chessboard. And when their neighborhood began to decay rapidly, they felt powerless to stop it. It started in the 60s with inflation. Landlords found that the rents their tenants paid no longer covered the costs of running their buildings. So, the landlords stopped doing repairs. In some cases, stopped heating and lighting their buildings. And so, tenants refuse to pay their rents. Mary Johnson and her four-year-old daughter live on the fourth floor of a building which has had no heat or repairs in over a year. In the kitchen is a broken window. uh here and it's been broke for several months and the gas it burns 24 hours a day and my con here bill is sky high. I can't even pay it half of the time. Half of the times we don't have no water is rats in here the size of a cat and I really don't know what to do no more. I can try some of everything. I just don't know what else to do