« The South Bronx did not exist. Yes, the South Bronx was Morrisania, Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Longwood, Melrose, Morris Heights, and Crotona Park East. Eventually, it was also Tremont, East Tremont, and maybe even University Heights and Fordham. These were individual neighborhoods, each with unique identities that had, in many cases, been established since the late 19th century. They all came to comprise a southern Bronx in this, the northernmost borough of the five that make up the city of New York; the only borough which is part of the American mainland; a place that was once submitted for consideration as the permanent capital of the nation. But no, the South Bronx did not exist. »
I loved these lines ...
From the office of the future to the office of the past. What endures?
On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, newly translated: a Q&A with Alexander Chee.
An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.