ABSTRACT
South Bronx. During the 1950s, as a teenager, a lot of that neighborhood was hacked open and torn apart by Robert Moses, New York's titanic construction chief, to make way for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Berman never forgot what happened there, the destruction and devastation, the evil forces released in the name of modernity. Then, as a college student in the 1960s, he actually got to do a little demolition himself, as an active member of Students for a Democratic Society, participating in a different kind of modernism, one the great Columbia critic and Berman's old tutor, Lionel Trilling once called "modern ism in the streets."
