Newburgh: Portrait of a City by Dmitri Kasterine

An evocative portrait of a forsaken city and the tenacity of its people.

Only 57 miles outside New York City on the Hudson River, the city of Newburgh has fallen from the status of "All American City" awarded by Look Magazine in 1952, to a corrupt and forsaken place, that in 1981 was put on a Federal list of most distressed areas in the United States. As recently as May 2010, about 500 enforcement officers conducted a massive sweep through the city to staunch the rampant drug trade. This book of photographic portraits focuses on the often overlooked and ignored population of the downtown section of the city, as well as its abandoned buildings, which have been left to collapse. Some families have not had steady jobs for three generations; only a handful of the fine houses have been restored. Newburgh, with its history of declining industry and ensuing efforts at so-called urban renewal in the last century is a microcosm of much of urban America, showing a population confronted by racism, broken promises, and constant danger, that somehow does not surrender its dignity.