They may be trouble, but they are human, and they are there. They exasperate John, and occasionally they alarm him, the way they do the other people on the block, and, indeed, the people in their own families, but they belong to the reality of the shattered social contract we call the inner city, and John wanted them to stand in something of the same relation to the precinct policemen that they do to him and the neighbors. But they are a homegrown part of the neighborhood, and John, who lives in the neighborhood, too, and likes it, likes them-in an edgy, apprehensive way. Daleesha, at fourteen, is a street child, in and out of junior high school. Corey Mann, at twenty-four, is in and out of jobs.
Raymond Garcia, at thirty-three, is in and out of jail. Raymond, Corey, and Daleesha may not have been the best of the neighborhood. He wanted the police to acknowledge them, and he wanted the neighbors, seeing them cast in bronze and up on pedestals, to stop and think about who they were and about what he calls their “South Bronx attitude.”
He thought that maybe it would be interesting-or at least accurate to life on a calamitous South Bronx street, a street of survivors-to commemorate a few of the people he knew who were having trouble surviving the street, even if they were trouble themselves. John himself is ambiguous about “ambiguous.” He says that when the city asked him to “decorate” the precinct he thought of the Paseo de la Reforma, in Mexico City, with its bronze heroes-a mile of heroes. John Ahearn, who made the statues, says that he thought of them more as guardians than as saints, because their job was ambiguous, standing, as they did for a couple of days last year, between the drab new station house of the city’s 44th Police Precinct and what is arguably one of its poorest, saddest, shabbiest, most drug-infested, AIDS-infected, violent neighborhoods. It could be argued that the South Bronx bronzes fit right into the neighborhood-that whatever a couple of people said about bad role models and negative images and political incorrectness, there was something seemly and humane, and even, in a rueful, complicated way, “correct,” about casting Raymond and his pit bull, Daleesha and her roller skates, and Corey and his boom box and basketball in the metal of Ghiberti, Donatello, and Rodin and putting them up on pedestals, like patron saints of Jerome Avenue.
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