King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the Violence of Poverty on the Lower East Side (Institutional Structures of Feeling)

Rating:
Summary: A Moving Analysis of the Forces Shaping a Poor Neighborhood
Review: Jagna Sharff is an anthropologist who spent several years in the early 70s living in a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Lower East Side before arson and gentrification forced the poor out. In vivid, cinematic style, Sharff analyzes the different forces at work in the decline of the families in the neighborhood: the loss of manufacturing in the region throws men out of work; rules governing payments in Aid to Dependent Families break up marriages; cheap drugs flood the streets, providing a source of employment for young men as well as violence and drug addiction. Sharff gives detailed and touching portraits of family and neighborhood intereconnectedness and survival skills, while at the same time describing the part maternal dependence on drug money to survive plays in their sons' need to work on the street. Sharff has a gift for describing the joys as well as the constant anxiety about hunger or illness these families face: finally a father finds work in a dry cleaning store; soon after, his son falls several stories in an elevator shaft in their public housing unit, leaving the family (now off Medicaid) with a $10,000 medical debt that will crush the family's meager income for decades to come. Sharff ends the book with two intimate portraits of a brother and sister: the first, who witnessed a murder at the age of 11, spends years in solitary confinement in state prison "for his own protection" from other inmates; the second becomes a police officer in a neighborhood much like the one in which she grew up. Sharff is not dispassionate: a childhood survivor of war-time Poland who at 8 watched bombs dropping on the labor camp in which she and her 5-year-old brother were interred, she sees the children of this neighborhood as suffering from the traumatic stress of those who live in wartime: instead of bombs comes the smell of gasoline and the arsonist's torch, the whine of bullets between dealers, the sight of a bloody rug in which higher level dealers have rolled up the corpse of a young dealer they have murdered, to "send a message." Sharff draws an indelible portrait of this terrible, wonderful neighborhood, and especially of its children, and makes a convincing case for bureaucracies more in touch with the realities of the poor.