Buildings without foundations will inevitably come down.
I can be fooled, but my kids won’t be…
either we will correct what’s wrong,
it will be corrected for us.
James Baldwin, Take This Hammer
We’re real good at forgetting where we buried the bodies. Or in this case, where we buried the plutonium.
Hunters Point. Say it out loud. Sounds almost pastoral, doesn’t it? Like some weekend getaway where you’d spot deer at dusk, then kill them. But what got hunted here was different. What got pointed at was communities that didn’t have the right ZIP codes or the right lawyers or the right skin color to say “fuck you” loud enough that anyone gave a damn.
The Navy came through mid-century like they owned the place, which, legally, they did, and they did what militaries do when nobody’s watching: they made a mess. Radiological experiments. Atomic testing. The whole Cold War greatest hits album of “we’ll worry about that later.” Except “later” arrived decades ago, and we’re still pretending we can’t hear it knocking.
Now it’s condos and promises and community benefits packages wrapped in PowerPoint presentations that smell like cover up with notes of liability waiver. The dirt tests keep coming back hot. The cleanup crew keeps getting busted for falsifying records. And the people who’ve lived in the shadow of that shipyard, who breathed its air, who raised kids on its soil, they keep getting sold the same tired line about progress and revitalization and how this time, this time, we promise we got all the poison out.
Here’s what my photographs know that the press releases don’t: you can’t crop out a superfund site. You can’t filter radiation. And you can’t build luxury housing on top of institutional betrayal and call it urban renewal.
See the rest. ☞Click here☜. Look at what they don’t want you looking at.