Culture March 31, 2011

“The train climbed the steel trestle high over the forest of red and brown buildings that tumbled across the landscape,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in his 1958 account of life among Brooklyn’s fighting teen gangs, The Shook-Up Generation. “From the platform . . . I looked down in the tenement back yards, the rubbish piles and bright paper tatters brightened by wash lines of blue and pink, purple and yellow. Here and there I saw the scraggly green of Brooklyn back-yard trees dwarfed by soot and sickened by cinders.”