Bronx

Life in the Towers: 'I'm Tired Of Ducking Bullets'

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Ebone Ryals, a resident at the Towers for many decades, helps Janey and Letitia plant. Photo by: Hannah Rappleye

A day at River Park Towers reveals a lot about what low-income New Yorkers face from government, management and each other. By: Hannah Rappleye

When it opened in 1974, River Park Towers in Morris Heights, the Bronx, was lauded as the first modern high-rise for the poor. Much has changed since then. City Limits spent a day with some of the residents.

Economy

The Search for the Smoking Gun

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During four decades of debate over the causes of black-male joblessness and unemployment, there have been two broad schools of thought. There were those who blamed the problem on the way the economy works, especially its racial contours and barriers, and those who attributed it to the way black men behave, to their culture.According to New York University political science professor Lawrence Mead, black joblessness is about a failure of low-skill black men to choose to work or live up to their employers’ standards when they do get jobs. “The immediate problem is work discipline, a willingness to cooperate, to be a reliable employee,” says Mead. “It’s collective psychology. It’s attitudes, and this is characteristic of poverty, where people want to work in principle.

Justice

In the Drug War, a Stalemate?

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City Limits estimates that the yearly cost to government for investigation, contraband seizures, arrests, judicial processing, incarceration, parole hearings and probation services for all those arrested in drug cases in New York City could run somewhere between $825 million and $1.7 billion.

Justice

Cocaine: A Club Drug Becomes Enemy No. 1

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Sometime in 1975, Colombian drug dealers, who were already well established in the world’s marijuana market with their high-grade Colombian Gold, wrested control of the cocaine importation business from Cuban crime organizations operating in Florida and New York.