Towers of the heights

Paper, mixed media, collage

18x24 (24x36 framed)

$1200

Jerise Fogel

I celebrate the Bridge Towers: an iconic but underappreciated uptown monumental work of architecture and living space - and especially the people who live in them. The four 32-story high-rise buildings between 178th and 179th Streets, on Audubon, St. Nicholas, and Wadsworth Avenues, officially the “Bridge Apartments,” were built between 1961 and 1964, and they rise from concrete platforms directly above the expressway to the George Washington Bridge. They house 4,000 residents, and in their original conception they were multicolored as in my papercut representation. In 1964, their 960 middle-income rate apartments were immediately popular, publicly (state) supported through Mitchell-Lama; in 1972, residents successfully went on strike to avoid a large rent increase. In 1967, Robert F. (“Bobby”) Kennedy, beloved progressive statesman brother of JFK assassinated in 1968, met with residents to discuss air quality concerns; he then proposed (similarly to the now-being-conceived Bronx Expressway) putting some sort of barrier or cap on the expressway to improve health. In 1987, the legislature threw them onto the open market, and they were bought by a group of private real-estate investors, but tenants remained obdurate, and to this day the residents are mostly working class. The Towers should be celebrated, not just for themselves and their colorful history, but for the staying power of their residents--and to commemorate the long, hard fight for low-cost, pleasant and healthful public housing in NYC, which dovetails now with concerns about gentrification, homelessness, public neglect of housing, healthy air, and environmental and climate changes that threaten us if we refuse to heed their warnings.