GORO, HERB - The Block.

1970. Paper. New York: Random House / Vintage Books. 1970. (First edition). Large octavo. Stiff pictorial wraps. A gorgeous copy of this excellent profusely illustrated book. A wonderful book.

... Photobooks are commonly discussed, especially since the books about photobooks industry started to take off. There are many reasons why those kinds of books are doing the community a huge favour. After all, not only do they discuss the medium photobook in ways that it truly deserves, they also expose a lot of unknown books to a larger audience. Except, of course, that often enough you then see those books listed on Ebay, say, with, for example, “Parr/Badger” included in the subject line... Read for more ...

The Block is testimony of a really dark area of New York city and speci fically the Bronx. Herb Goro is New York photographer and journalist that spent a year in a project in the South East Bronx around 1966. This book shows how terrible it was already to live in the bronx in the 60’s. Throughout the book Goro interviews local families, social worker, kids, and took more than 180 amazing black and white pictures to document this tragedy in the making

First Edition 1970 Good Condition All pages intact. Some shelf wear to cover and yellowing on the inside cover

Here is the introduction of the book by Herb Goro. (note that in 1970 they were still using the word Negro for African american…Pretty sad)

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the people living or working on one block in the East Bronx. The Bronx has undergone a great transformation since the World War II. Since that time there has been an exodus of middle and lower middle income white families, and their place have come thousands of Negro and Puerto Rican families. The Bronx is the only section of New York City situated on the United States mainland. It lies north of Manhattan Island and south of suburban Westchester. It occupies an area of 53.1 square miles. The Bronx is one of the most heavily populated areas in the nation, with about 33,000 inhabitants per square miles. About one-fith of all Bronx families have annual incomes below the poverty level, as measured by the index developed by the Social Security Administration. The Block I have chosen is within fifty-five square blocks designated as one of the city’s worst health areas. It’s population is approximately 50’000 with 48 percent Negro, 48% Puerto Rican and 4% elderly white. This section has a significantly high infant mortality rate (29 deaths per 1’000), a tuberculosis rate three times higher than the city average, and a significantly high venereal disease rate. As high crime area it ranks among the worst in New York City. I would like to thank the people of this neighborhood, who cooperated with an extraordinary degree. Everyone I interviewed has been given a voice in The Block.

HERB GORO

SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 2008

THE BLOCK by Herb Goro

Published in 1970 by Random House.

An amazing document of inner city life.

"An account, in pictures and text, of the greatest social disaster in American history: a close-up of the death of a New York City slum and the destruction of the people who live there.

The book is the result of a year spent by the photographer Herb Goro in a decayed slum in New York's East Bronx. More than a hundred fifty thousand inhabitants of the area live and die in the rotted, sometimes abandonend tenements. The text consist of tape-recorded interviews with the people whom we see in the pictures - the tenants, the police, the men and women dying, and the parents of the children being born, Theirs is the hopeless struggle to survive in the city which has no need for these people and which barely manages any longer to even keep them alive.

THE BLOCK shows us how the people in this neighborhood live, but it concentrates on the lives of three adolescents, as they come of age, struggle briefly to survive, and fail. In New York there are countless people, many of them hardly more than children, who live and die like those on THE BLOCK. This book confronts us with a profound social pathology and with the personal misery that accompanies it."