Alphabet City

By Geoffrey Biddle

My Moms was a good person. She cared, but she just couldn't hack us no more. She kept saying she gonna kill herself, too. The day she died, she told me that my father hit her, and I told her, That was good for you, for not cooking for him. And she left. I didn't know she took the pills, though. The next day, they told me she was dead.--Pistol This searing portrait of inner-city life takes us inside one of America's deadly urban battlefronts--the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Alphabet City on New York's Lower East Side. With unnerving clarity, Geoffrey Biddle shows us the people who live there, summoning their spirit against the brutalizing conditions of poverty, joblessness, drugs, crime, and violence. Capturing life in this ghetto on film and in words with rawness and compassion, he shows the human toll of impoverishment and neglect. In 1977 Geoffrey Biddle photographed the residents of Alphabet City for the first time. Ten years later, he returned to this same area and photographed many of the same people again, this time also interviewing them. Alphabet City is the result of those encounters. While the stories are unique, they coalesce into a single tale all the more jarring for the matter-of-fact tone in which it is told. There is Ariel, whose dreams of becoming a boxer were destroyed when he contracted AIDS. And Linda, raising three sons while sleeping in the street, hungry and drug-addicted. There are also tales of human resilience like Richard's, a defiant former gang member who now attends college. These stories belong not only to one New York neighborhood, but to urban ghettos across the United States. Framed by Miguel Algarín's compelling introduction and dramatized by the speakers' own testimony, Geoffrey Biddle's photographs are haunting portrayals of a ravaged community battling ineffectually against deprivation and betrayal. This book forces us to see faces and to hear voices that won't be easy to forget, and yet which in the end are not so different from our own.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
My Moms was a good person. She cared, but she just couldn't hack us no more. She kept saying she gonna kill herself, too. The day she died, she told me that my father hit her, and I told her, That was good for you, for not cooking for him. And she left. I

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780520320055

Geoffrey Biddle

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

A CENTENNIAL BOOK

One hundred books

published between 1990 and 1995

bear this special imprint of

the University of California Press

We have chosen each Centennial Book

as an example of the Press’s finest

publishing and bookmaking traditions

as we celebrate the beginning of

our second century

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSFounded in 1893

ALPHABET CITY

GEOFFREY BIDDLE

Introduction by Miguel Algarín

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1992 by Geoffrey Biddle

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biddle, Geoffrey.

Alphabet city / Geoffrey Biddle;

introduction by Miguel Algarín.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-520-07360-6 (cloth: alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520—07949-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) — Description — Views. 2. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) — Social conditions. 3. Puerto Ricans — New York (N.Y.) — Pictorial works. 4. New York (N.Y.) — Description — 1981 — Views. 5. New York (N.Y.) — Social conditions.

I. Title.

F128.68.L6B5 1992

974.7'1 — dc20 91-40309

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution provided by the General Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press.

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Acknowledgments

The most sensible and certainly the most useful response I got as a young photographer was to be given work. Many people did just that, particularly Alice Rose George and Gary Hoenig, who gave me the assignment that started this project.

This work was done over a nearly fifteen-year period, and it would be impossible to remember everyone who was helpful along the way. Among those I do remember, Peter Galassi has been both a true friend and an unflinchingly critical supporter. Abby Heyman and Linda Ferrer each helped at important junctures. Thanks to my mother, Anne Biddle, for giving me the will to figure out what I really wanted to do, and for her ideas and encouragement. Thanks to my aunt, Sheila Biddle, who put me in touch with the University of California Press; to Naomi Schneider, my editor, and to Barbara Ras, Tony Crouch, and Steve Renick, all of U.C. Press, who gave me more than professional attention; to Larry Wolfson, the designer of the book and my friend; and to Miguel Algarin, who took on the Introduction and did such a wonderful job.

Pistol, Johnnie, Blackie and Irma, Baby, the Zapata sisters, Eddie Santana, Evalene Claudio — thanks for all you gave.

Thanks and love for my wife, Mary Ann Unger, who is there for me every day, as I am for her, and the same for our daughter, Eve, who lightens things up around here.

I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Robert M. Siegel, 1950-1979, friend, mentor, guide, perhaps the most dedicated person I have ever known, founder of the Andrew Glover Youth Program, located at 100 Centre Street, Room 1541, New York, NY 10013, serving the youth of the Lower East Side.

This project was made possible in part by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Preface

This book is about a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. It is a tough area, poor, and full of drug dealers and users. It is being slowly gentrified.

The neighborhood was not called Alphabet City when I started working there. It was the Puerto Rican part of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the people who lived there called it Loisaida, Puerto Rican English for Lower East Side. The name Alphabet City, which refers to the area’s Avenues A, B, C, and D, began to be used in the early 1980s, when gentrification made its first incursions into the neighborhood. The real estate developers popularized the new name because people who were interested in buying condominiums found the Puerto Rican name to be both meaningless and unpronounceable. Low-ee-SIGH-da. That’s still the name the Puerto Ricans use. New people and people outside the area use the name Alphabet City.

The neighborhood is bounded on the north by Fourteenth Street and on the south by Houston, which falls one below First Street but is still two miles from the bottom of Manhattan. From Avenue A on the