As we scrambled out onto the street, cracks were furrowing the bricks on the front and side, and the wall facing the vacant lot slumped south, creating a four-inch bulge right at the foundation line. Our building was about to collapse. We stood there, cracking nervous jokes, as cops, firemen, engineers and acolytes of the city s emergency management agencies began to accumulate around us, speaking surreptitiously into their cell phones and shaking their heads. Lawyers, politicians, reporters and neighborhood agitators joined in the death watch, making it a regular Lower East Side street fair of accusations, intrigue and suspicion. As we watched, a city official taped an order to vacate onto our front door, making it illegal to enter the building.
Disasters have a way of encouraging testimonials.
I began to realize that our personal catastrophe was actually a community problem. Collapses are a predictable result of tenement economic history what happened to my building will probably happen soon to someone else s nearby. The degradation of these buildings, the first line of American architecture mass-built expressly for the poor, inspired the first American slum clearance. It was also the impetus for the first bureaucratic studies of the urban poor and the reason for the first American public housing projects in the 1930s. The tenements have been demolished by the hundreds since the turn of the century, felled by neglect and urban renewal.