“For some unknown reason — perhaps because someone had casually said, “If you like wastelands, you should see this...” — I found myself late in 1982 taking the subway up to the South Bronx. The entire neighborhood of many square miles had been devasted— destroyed and abandoned during the financial and political turmoil of the late 1970s. Little was left standing. There were countless rubble-strewn lots. Sometimes, whole city blocks were empty, with no street lamps or traffic lights. Buildings were left vacant, bricked up, or partially burned down. It seemed like a depopulated scene of a postwar apocalypse. But, in other ways, it had the same remote, quiet sadness that I found in the Meadowlands. “ - Ray Mortenson