Word: bronx
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...years following, that magical somewhere became in reality a sad nowhere of hard drugs and forgotten loyalties. Now, however, the gangs are back on the streets with a vengeance born of a decade of upheaval. The battleground is no longer Manhattan's West Side but the Southeast Bronx, a predominantly Puerto Rican ghetto where more than 70 "cliques" or "organizations" have formed in the past year. The members -mostly dropouts, reformed junkies, displaced Viet Nam veterans-are older, angrier, better armed and more socially aware. Their avowed enemy is not a rival gang but society. "In essence," says Benjamin...
...conditions that produced the rumbles of the 1950s have, if anything, worsened. The population density of the Southeast Bronx-500,000 people crammed into 5 sq. mi.-is among the nation's highest. Housing, health care, employment and education are woefully substandard. Fifty percent of the children under six have never been immunized against polio. Forty percent of the area's families are on welfare. More than 10% of residents between 15 and 44 are heroin addicts. Says one of Mayor John Lindsay's minority specialists: "The Puerto Rican experience in New York has been a total...
...Southeast Bronx, the unrest has spawned gangs with such sinistersounding names as the Savage Skulls, Young Sinners, Savage Nomads, Mongols and Reapers. Each clique has from 20 to 50 members ruled by a president, vice president and warlord. Their "colors," elaborate coats-of-arms stitched to the backs of their denim jackets, depict bloody skeletons and skulls, fire and lightning. Their arsenals include not only clubs, chains, knives and zip guns but also Molotov cocktails, rifles, shotguns and, say youth workers, hand grenades and machine guns...
Presently living in a four-room ghetto apartment in The Bronx with four of her seven illegitimate children, Betty Jackson says, "I live in dope city and on one of the worst streets. The apartment has been robbed three times, and I've been cut once. We have no heat. We get hot water once in a while. The wall is coming apart from the leaks. I've had a broken window for the past year. The kids sleep in their clothes. I use the stove and oven for heat, but the gas and electricity bills are very...
...Clockwork Orange makes it seem that Kubrick did get lost in the stars and has become a spaced-out religionist. Aside from his ludicrously simplistic emphasis on free will, the Bronx enfant terrible has lost his purely filmic bearings. The film shows the limits of crudeness. When it takes an actor three minutes to roll off a provocative phrase like "the old in-out in-out", witty language is killed. When there are no developed antagonisms, and the camera supports the actions of a single group, gang warfare is threatless and meaningless. And, perhaps intimidated by the director...