Tag Archives: Fox Street

Hunts Point Express Interview

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Surviving Hunts Point’s bad old days

Posted on 20. Feb, 2010

By Peter Jackson | peter.jackson@hunter.cuny.edu

Photographer Ricky Flores remembers bad times and good

By Peter A. Jackson
mrpjacks@gmail.com

Ricky Flores’ friends call him the “Jimmy Olsen Guy” because, like Superman’s sidekick, he always has a camera in his hands.

Flores left Longwood in the early 1990s, moving from his family’s apartment on Fox Street, first to the Grand Concourse and then to northern Westchester. Recently, however, he’s been revisiting his old neighborhood by reviewing thousands of photographs he took between 1982 and 1991.

The photos record not only the devastation of the South Bronx, but also the exuberance that helped residents to cope with those calamitous times.

Times were tough, Flores remembers. “People don’t realize how difficult it was, how barbaric, how marginalized our existence was.”

Yet he and his friends rejected the stereotypes that outsiders imposed on the people who lived in the South Bronx. “One of the things we always struggled with was our vision of who people thought we were, living in that community, as opposed to who we actually were,” he recalls.

He tells a story that illustrates this double vision. Abandoned cars were just left to on neighborhood streets. “Our block, our home was being turned into a dumping ground and the city just didn’t care.”
So Flores and his pals took matters into their own hands. From Longwood Avenue to Southern Boulevard, the pushed the cars into the middle of the street and turned them over.

“They may have called us hooligans, typical Puerto Rican trash, tearing up our block and making it worse for those that lived there. Maybe they might be correct in their assumptions,” he writes, “but to us, on that one summer night we decided that we were going to make the city clean it up.”

Visiting Hunts Point today, he sees a different place. “I look at stuff differently now that I am older. Tiffany Plaza is now a gated community. It’s now like Fort Knox,” he said.

Photography became Flores’ passion in 1978, when he came into a small inheritance from his father, who had died in 1965. He used it to purchase a camera and set out to learn the art of photography, learning to hone his craft and develop his eye primarily by taking shots of friends and family.

The local Police Athletic League (PAL) and Boy Scout Troop on Longwood Avenue nurtured his interest and talent.

The kids in the community hung out at the PAL, Flores recalls. For him and his friends the community center was always a part of their lives, he says.

He learned how to print his negatives, spending enormous amounts of time. On one occasion, he was even left behind when the PAL closed for the night. He could have left, but his love of the place impelled him to stay all night, rather than leave the building unlocked.

Flores recalls the kindness of Bill Raymond, who was the director of the PAL and involved in the Boy Scouts, and Dr. Edward Eismann. “They provided supplies and encouragement whenever I needed it,” he says.

Many of the people who post comments on his photos, are from outside of the United States, and Flores says they view the subject matter as romantic. There was nothing romantic about the time or his efforts, Flores insists. He says he was taking pictures of what he saw, both the pain and the pride.

The photos include burned out buildings, piles of rubble and the general devastation of the neighborhood.

He says he is proud of the people of Hunts Point and Longwood who managed to endure .

A version of this story appeared in the March 2010 issue of The Hunts Point Express.

Elaine

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It haunts me these conversations about the past. Filled with joy in finding folks that you thought you would never see again. Then to listen in growing sadness as you hear about those whose voices you will never hear again. By design or choice the stories continue to find their way to me.

I heard that Elaine was murdered in her home in the presence of her children. The brief cop report in the Daily News will never give people a inkling of what she like when she was young and looking for a better future then the one that life imposed on her in the end.

On Fox Street in 1983. ( Ricky Flores )

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Daily News article on Elaine;

Friday, April 23th 2004, 7:00AM

“Mommy’s not here. She’s dead.”

Those horrifying words came from the mouth of 4-year-old Dante Sealey, who woke up in his Brooklyn apartment yesterday to find his mother slain in the kitchen.

The little boy and his baby sister, Diamond, 3, stayed with their mother’s corpse for hours before someone tipped cops that her body was inside just after noon, police sources said.

When detectives arrived, the shocked toddler answered the door and muttered the awful news.

“Those poor kids were in the house for hours with their mother lying in there dead,” one investigator said.

Police believe the mom, Elaine Sealey, 41, was strangled sometime after she fed her children dinner Wednesday night.

The medical examiner was expected to determine the cause of death.

Neighbors said Sealey was a drug addict who often let crack addicts use her apartment on McDonough St. in Ocean Hill to get high.

“There was an awful lot of traffic in and out of there all the time. I complained about it to the management,” said Pamela Cook, 40, who has lived in the building for 10 years.

“She always took real good care of those kids, though. She definitely loved those kids,” Cook said. “She was just a person with problems. Every human being has problems.”

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she really miss the good old days.
she came from that era of block parties,
hip hop jams at bx river projects
listening while bambatta did his thing

Those cats breakdancing,
y’all remember them…
They was rockin steady

she wore lee jeans
with the matching hoodie
and the fresh eggshell all white adidas
with the fat laces that matched her jeans.
y’all remember

her hair was cornrolled back real tight
and her tag name was dizzy!!
Ok I know it sounds funny
even corny
but she was kool

Then there was the weed
Man we would get
around thirty joints out of that
little yellow bag.
We were so kool

But things changed (sigh)
she met this white bitch
she became her master.
she didn’t know where she came from.
she thought she was her friend.
She told her she had her back
and she believed her.

they did everything together…In the beginning.
But I don’t know what happened.
One day she turned on her.
“Don’t u know I love u” she said..
“i would do anything for u?”
So she said in her most seductive voice
“prove it”.

now, I don’t have to tell u
but u need to know that she did anything
and everything for this bitch.

Man, what the fuck.
What happened to the good old days.
All she wanted was to be “down”

~~~~Mona Bode~~~~

Genesis

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This is where it started.  That moment in time when you are confronted with the reality that your life, the one that you lived and breathed, day to day, is something  more then what you thought it was.  It is the focal point of what you will become and all that follows, all jelled down to a single discussion around a solitary image.

I remember vividly all that was said that day.  I remember the room and the wall where our photos were neatly tacked up on the board.  I remember feeling that this environment, this world was alien and new to me.  The class was filled with white students, mostly from middle-class suburbia and, that I, and one other student were the only people of color in the class.  That school, that classroom was the make or break point for me as a young man seeking a way through life, maybe through photography.

The interview process to enter the school was brutal at best.  The woman looking over my portfolio thought that I had no talent and didn’t believe that I had any ability as a photographer or an artist and went on to say that it was something that you were born with.  Maybe like the money that the mostly affluent students had who attended the school were born with, I thought.  But I had a full ride from the government,  and, I can’t prove it, maybe the right last name and physical defect and I was accepted.  The school was a strange and bizarre world and completely foreign to me.  There were no friends for me and every thing felt like a competition.  Students surrounded themselves with ego driven elitism that tinged everything with cynicism.   What some would consider to be a creative environment was simply a soul killer for me.

So here I am in this room and the instructor points to my photos and asks people what they think.  One woman said “You watch too much violent TV shows” and that it was reflected, she believed in my photo.  I think I tuned out, reacting to the implications of what she and other students said afterwards.  I remember the instructor looking at me and my seething reaction and got them to back off of me.  I didn’t understand their reaction.  It was just kids playing cops and robbers.  It was only later I came to understand it wasn’t simply the kids, but the environment that they were standing in, the person who took the photo and the alien world that it represented to them.

The instructor saw my pained reaction and knew that her college was not the right place for me and turned me on to another college that would be more supportive of what I was doing.

At the end of the year I was out of there.

So it began, the single question, what was different about who I was and where I came from?

This was my home

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It had to start sometime, in the late 60’s, I can’t even be sure when or how it happened. It had to be gradual because I can’t seem to remember when the buildings started to become abandoned.

There were obvious signs I suppose. Those signs that a building was falling apart like some cancer eating away at a body.  Watching people getting water from the pump to wash clothes or to take baths; entire families lugging those buckets filled with water into some of the buildings on Fox Street.  I guess for some, they were forced to leave when a fire started in some apartment not exactly destroying the building, but heavily damaging the apartment where it started and all those below from the water damage from putting the fire out. Or the landlords would stop repairing the apartments and buildings and even stopped paying for electricity to light the hallways or fuel to heat the buildings in the wintertime. Then more fires would start because people used space heaters or their ovens for heat and accidents would inevitably happen.

How do you describe this outrageous existence to an outsider? How do you tell them about this world that you live in? How do you talk about the desperation of seeking an escape from that life? I think about those nights when I would wake up with the bed shaking from the deep throbbing of the fire engines outside my window down below and wondering whether this was the night that I would be burnt out of my home with what little possessions that I have in this world.  How do you describe the feeling of thankfulness, tinged with guilt, that tonight it was not your building but someone else that you knew being force to leave their home? I remember picking up the camera and shooting the images and wondering, “tonight it was them and not me,” and the sick feeling I felt inside at that guilty thought.  At what point did I stop feeling and just kept shooting because that was all the power that I had and hoped that one day someone would look back at these images and ask the question, “How did this happen and who is responsible for it?”

I can’t even remember when people started moving from the block. It seemed that one day the buildings was full of life and the next they were empty.

How many fires took place during those early days? I can’t seem to remember past the ones that I have photographed and those photos were taken late during the destruction of the South Bronx.  In my mind they all have become one huge fire, one fused memory making them seem endless.