Beyond the Bus Window

I spent the summers of 1965 to 1967 working in New York City as a social worker for the New York City Housing Authority's Anti-Poverty Unit. In that capacity, I saw first-hand the disparity between the "uptown" of Broadway, Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue and the "downtown" of the Bronx, Harlem, the Lower East Side, the West Side and parts of Brooklyn. Every night, as I boarded the bus at the Port of New York Authority to go back to my home in New Jersey, as the bus winded around the ramps to leave the terminal, I could look into the tenements that surrounded the terminal. It typified the kind of poverty I was seeing each day at my job, a grinding poverty and a simple despair that seemed to have no boundaries. And I wrote about it.

Beyond the Bus Window, Leaving Port Authority on December 5, 1964
Christopher Bogart

It is a city, a bleeding city,
A deep running sore it is,
Amid the tumult of ever-moving feet,
Between the rubber of ever-moving wheels.

It moves and yet it mourns.
It dribbles the saliva
Of every drunk that lies
On each of its unnamed byways.

It cries, and yet it laughs,
Through crooked, gritted teeth.
Its echoes rebound from story to story
Up and down the cold grey sentries of its streets.

It is a city whose pulse
Is entirely composed
Of the nervous twitching of its ever-moving populace,
A pulse that never ceases.

You can’t touch it, you can’t,
But it is there.
It filters through the granite and the steel.
It runs along the walkways and the roads.

But it can be destroyed.
Pity will kill it.
Love, love will purge it.
But do we want it purged?

What will be left when it dies?
A big city, a thriving city,
Or a shell,
Cleansed of its filthy ugliness.

Steel girders, stone and glass
Will not move for love;
But the city will be destroyed.
The city will be destroyed.