Portrait of the South Bronx 1965 | Full Film HD
Published 2022-10-19
www.buyoutfootage.com/pages/titles/pd_na_196.php
Ordinary people and life in the South Bronx with its crowded living conditions and poverty.
00:01:30 Bird’s eye view of the 3rd Ave El train cutting through the urban density of the Bronx borough of New York.
00:03:13 3rd Ave El train rumbling down the tracks in the South Bronx borough of New York. Passenger POV from the moving train as commercial buildings, neighborhoods and tenements flash by. Traveling motion footage is inter-cut with imagery of families living in crime ridden low income housing projects. Urban decay.
00:04:30 El Train pulls into the station and screeches to a halt as commuters wait on the platform. Eye-level view of bustling street with cars, shops, boards and posters. Uptown information signs. Diverse people of varied ages and ethnicities mingle. Focus upon a black man smoking, elderly, smartly-dressed white woman, black woman carrying a baby, white cop on a street corner. Sense of tension prevails. Newspaper traders busy, selling copies of black muslim publication “Muhammad Speaks”. Headline reads “America is Falling”
00:05:50 A multi-cultural street retail scene. Bustling spectator POV of a line of shoe shine cleaners busy at work as customers wait. Cut to storefronts. References to pricing, discounts and sales. Cinema with Spanish film titles, cabaret, cafes and restaurants, records, dance club, dress and clothes shops, Puerto Rican hats, religious effigies of Jesus Christ and a toy shop with two young black boys perusing items.
00:06:46 Busy, run-down street-market selling fruit and vegetables with an elevated bridge view in the distance. Traders ply their wares with a backdrop of store fronts. Customers of varied ages, creed and color, converse with traders, as items are weighed, priced and placed into paper bags.
00:08:26 Rooftop view of poverty and urban decay with houses, apartments, and litter-strewn streets in the South Bronx borough of New York. Zoom to clothes lines strung up high above the streets between tenements. Families with children sit half clothed on external, metal, fire escape stairs that wind downwards in order to escape the heat. Listless, shirtless man looks out of a window. Pan down to a view of rubble as a boy picks through litter and another plays in drain water.
00:09:17 South Bronx, New York City, 1960s. Shots include multi-ethnic groups of children playing in the street with a fire hydrant in the foreground. Black family members gather outside on the steps of an apartment building.
00:10:13 Black and white footage captures everyday life in a neighborhood in South Bronx in the sixties, with black families socializing in front of their homes, children playing in the street next to abandoned furniture, boys street fighting, and couples in fine clothes walking down the street.
00:11:54 Long rolling shot made from a car moving along a wide street located in the South Bronx during the Civil Rights era. The urban ghetto lifestyle of the low-income neighborhoods is faithfully presented through a series of picturesque snippets.
00:12:32 Young people in the South Bronx neighborhood are gathering in the street to play an impromptu stickball game with improvised equipment. This footage of an authentic street game made in the 1960s is full of emotion, as the game serves to bring the local community together.
00:14:19 In this black and white clip, we can see South Bronx men hanging out on street corners. A man is solemnly standing in front of a building and smoking a cigarette. Coming of age teenage boys are throwing a frisbee and playing catch. At risk youth. The clip ends with a police car patrolling the streets of the ghetto.
00:15:20 Urban youth hanging out in the streets of South Bronx, some of them are wearing gang jackets with the insignia LATIN CROWNS, typical for the 1960s in New York. One young man inhales drugs through a brown paper bag.
00:21:30 Train chugging and whistling, swiftly down the tracks. POV passenger looking out through a misty and grubby window, exposing the poor locale. Close up of a large Christian Cross overlooking the hazy street below. Front of the Bethany Christian Mission with well dressed black children playing in the foreground.
00:22:14 Sunday afternoon baseball game in St. Mary's Park. Girls are cheer for their team while young kids cool off in water gushing from a fire hydrant. The field's bleachers are filled with family and friends, including a couple of young latino men sporting hip sunglasses.
00:25:26 Black youths idly hanging out in the street depicting youth at risk and potential gang recruitment. Chalked text on the street reads VIVA PUERTO RICO. Cut to a family outdoors on a fire escape balcony in a high rise tenement apartment building. Overhead view of a young couple walking together down the broken sidewalks of the borough.
All Comments (21)
-
My Parents and grandparents owned a building on 147th St. near St Mary's park between 1940 to 1954. They sold out to a private company that bought many (over 50) buildings in the area. Overall the building was in great condition and tenants there loved it. At that time, after the war 1945 the families who lived there were moving away to purchase their own homes in New York State, Queens and Nassau County. Built in 1938 the building had 16 units and a rooftop structure to hold roofing tools and building supplies. The new owners somehow turned it from 16 rental units to 40 smaller units and rented the smaller apartments out cheap with no security deposit. Even the basement was broken down into 4 apartments. The rooftop building even housed a family. Later the building burned down in 1975. I have pics of the building and area in the 1940s. It was a sharp looking all red brick building with white stone highlights around the windows. Back then the neighborhood was mostly lower middle class Irish & Italian and some Jewish. As a child I used to hear my parents reminisce about the Bronx all the time.
-
This was Spanish Bronx (PR). The first true Latino Hub in Bronx NY. Thing is, the people were happy. The children had a ball. Played all day in the summer. Never in the house. I later learned that after the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Bronx was split in two. North and south. Very few blacks moved north. Even fewer Puerto Ricans. That came a little later. The people in this video were surrounded by “Black Bronx” on all sides. Then they soon spread. We all were a more well balanced people then because of socialization. Human interaction. Prospect Ave was the main drag. We flew kites , played street games, had ridiculous amounts of fun. Believe it or not, crime wasn’t that bad in those particular days. Not many people got badly hurt. A 6 year old kid could wander around and be safe. Other adults would protect you. 5 years after this film things got really bad. Drugs man. It destroyed everything’
-
I’m torn between loving and hating this documentary: loving it for taking me back in time to my childhood in the South Bronx and hating it for showing me the days long gone that I can never relive. As rough as things were back then, it was a simpler time with a feeling of community among family and neighbors that doesn’t exist here anymore. Time can be such a cruel history teacher.
-
Wow.. it’s great to be able to see the Bronx during this time. It was a little while before I was born. I know some people may view this as a sad state (especially with the video being Black and White, and the narrator is trying to paint a particular picture) but for many living there, it was great. Some areas were better, and upbeat. Many of the people were warm and humorous, and there was a sense of community/every one knew each other and were very friendly and it was a vibrant culture with music on the streets. If you were born there, nothing about it bothered you and you didn’t view it as run down. There was nothing else to compare it to. If you were a kid, all the kids were playing on the street and it was a blast, you go out and play every day w all sorts of street games. It’s actually exciting and every day is a new adventure. There’s always something going on. Maybe it was better as a kid because you didn’t understand any of the bad stuff and the struggles some of the adults may have been going through.
-
The South Bronx was destroyed between 1970 and 1980. During this time, over 40% of the South Bronx was burned or abandoned. Seven census tracts lost more than 97% of their buildings, and 44 tracts lost more than half. It didn't have to be destroyed. Blame that on the folks who moved. From the film, it shows that the South Bronx was a vibrant community before 1970.
-
Came here to the south Bronx in 1980 it was like WW2 aftermath buildings abandoned burned rubble all over garbage it was crazy . But proud to be from the south Bronx and made it lots of good memories from my childhood and saw it change little by little . Now it’s changed a lot very crowded buildings all over every empty space a building is constructed over all this city is not that fun to live day to day it’s very hectic crowded in the Bronx . Even though these times was bad also in it’s way I’ll take the old Bronx than the way all this craziness is going on these days . Legget ave & Fox st I miss you 😢 is where I grew up from 5 years old . Cheers 🍻 my peoples stay safe 🙏❤
-
The South Bronx in 1965 was the calm before the storm. It's incredible how much it it declined between 1965-1970 but to be frank it wasn't just the Bronx; Harlem/East Harlem, Brooklyn and Queens all went through the same transformation as crime began to increase in that 5 year time frame.
-
I was a 1 year old at the time. Born in the Bronx, and still live here.
-
10 years later it was all burned down by the landlords. It wasn't the people it was the landlords that burnt it down.
-
This was the end of the White Flight Era and the Ricans and Blacks took over.I am old enough to remember old Italians and Jews still living in the area
-
I had lived in Bx since I was 8, born in PR. Of all my years here nothing has ever happen to me or my relatives. Now is when I'm afraid of going out. It's different in so many ways.I had live all of the Bx changes.
-
Life in Fort apache South Bronx during the 1960's was good because we were poor but didn't know it. The salsa music was tremendous. My happiest memories are of this supposedly horrible place. I'm black, the American poor elsewhere were considered middle class. Life in the Barrio was better than people think, better or worse is relative. Compared to today we had it good. ❤👏🌞🏖🙏
-
Born in 63. Grew up on 178th in the tremont section. By the 70s half the buildings were burned out. They wouldn’t tear them down. You just smelled smoke. I remember going for a ride the last day of the 3rd Ave El.
-
The mark at 4 minutes and 30 seconds we see the Hub where people transferred from the Central Bronx elevated to the subway at 3rd Avenue and 149th street.
-
My family went to the Bronx in the 60's and when they was passing by some streets over there, they received some rocks on their cars. Hopefully, it's not the same thing today. Have a nice day
-
That's my friend flying a kite @ 4:07. Today he's 83!
-
WONDERFUL memory trip before drugs and gangs fully ravaged S. Bronx.
-
The sad part is by the end of 1966 the arson rage would begin
-
I love this video. This is where I was born and raised.
-
Wow, look at how much prettier these neighborhoods were before the fires destroyed most of the buildings
