Land Power
Mural on the Lincoln Recovery Center building, Mott Haven, Bronx NY, 2021. [Cassim Shepard]
Places Journal
By: Cassim Shepard
On a bright October morning, I took a walk around Mott Haven in the South Bronx. My destination was a three-story yellow brick building located where 140th Street dead-ends into a superblock. On the other side of Willis Avenue, 140th continues, but a playground bisects the street, providing a tranquil pedestrian thoroughfare between a public housing complex and an elementary school.
Bas-relief caducei indicate the yellow brick building’s original purpose as a hospital, while its modest size recalls a bygone era when healthcare at the neighborhood scale assumed similar architectural gravitas to the large, institutional campuses that define modern medicine. The now-abandoned building was erected by the Works Progress Administration, at a time when public investment in public facilities set new standards for the salutary role of design in civic life. The clinic soon became a satellite of nearby Lincoln Hospital, which, by the 1960s, had fallen into infamy for its number of patient deaths. In 1963, the City condemned a cluster of properties adjacent to the yellow brick building, and four years later, construction of the resulting superblock left the erstwhile hospital on a dead end in the shadow of the 20-story Mott Haven Houses, beside the flat box of P.S. 49, the Willis Avenue School.
