Fort Apache remembered: A peek into once-devastated Bronx neighborhood

Fort Apache remembered: A peek into once-devastated Bronx neighborhood

By DORIAN BLOCK
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Monday, September 29th 2008, 6:59 PM
Lisa Kahane

The once-stately Bronx Borough Courthouse at Third Ave. and E. 161st St. sits bedraggled and forlorn in 1980, the victim of neglect and vandalism.
An apartment building on Crotona Park East comes tumbling down in 1982, one of many to meet that fate. Lisa Kahane

An apartment building on Crotona Park East comes tumbling down in 1982, one of many to meet that fate.
Bruised, battered and otherwise broken console TVs litter a debris-strewn lot. Lisa Kahane

Bruised, battered and otherwise broken console TVs litter a debris-strewn lot.

Almost 30 years ago, as the fires of the Bronx were just starting to die down to embers, photographer Lisa Kahane took to the streets to document the haunting aftermath.

What she found was a determination to carry on living amongst the rubble, captured in dozens of photographs in her new photo anthology, “Do Not Give Way to Evil, Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987.”

The borough has since transformed and time has healed, turning the 143-page book not into commentary, but an artistic take on history.

As Kahane writes in the book’s introduction, “The best thing about these pictures of devastation is that they can’t be taken in the Bronx anymore.”

The book documents scenes outside some of the 75,000 abandoned buildings of the borough.

There is a group of people sitting on old living room furniture in a lot surrounded by bottles, bricks and paper, drinking and lounging as if they are in another place. There are paneless windows, collapsed staircases and lots filled with car parts and tires.

The book is being launched tomorrow from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. as part of the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ monthly First Wednesday book signings. All are welcome to meet Kahane, a native New Yorker and 25-year veteran photographer who also has documented life in Europe and Latin America.

For more information, visit www.bronxmuseum.org.

dblock@nydailynews.com

[NYDN]