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For the past 20 years, Heidi Neumark has been the pastor of the Transfiguration Lutheran Church in the South Bronx, a bilingual congregation of Hispanics and African Americans. She is also a founding member of South Bronx Churches, an ecumenical community organizing group that has trained local leaders, built hundreds of low-cost homes, and established a top-ranked public high school. She is also the founder of Transfiguration Community Life Center, Inc., an organization providing after-school and job-training programs for youth, HIV, and domestic violence education and support, among other services. Over the course of her ministry, she has kept a diary, called, "An inner life in the inner city." She has now published her story and reflections in a book, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Beacon Press).

You describe South Bronx as a ground zero of urban blight. I didn't realize the degree to which it was due to poor urban planning.

A lot of people have this idea that the Bronx is a place of all these problems. But a lot of it had to do with urban planning that was very destructive. Robert Moses was a New York state and city official who did a lot of public works in the city. One of the things he did was build the Cross Bronx Expressway. And in order to build it, there were 60,000 families that were displaced. It went through an area that was filled with homes and businesses that were all in good condition, and they were just ripped out.

At the same time that was going on, he wanted to build some new housing in an area of Manhattan where there were poor residents, and they were moved out in what he called a "slum clearance project." They were moved into the South Bronx. So as housing was being destroyed, more poor people were moving in, and it just created social havoc.

Then in 1976, Roger Starr, who was then working for the city as the administrator for housing and urban development, came up with a policy responding to the devastation. His response was something called "planned shrinkage." It was to cut back on basically all public services, schools, fire services, ambulance, police, and hospitals. And the quote he said about that was, "to accelerate the drainage" in the worst areas of South Bronx.

You talk about the God of Molech, and he is uniformly condemned in the Old Testament because he practiced child sacrifice. One of the ways you get at our sensitivity and our responsibility about the poor is to show the degree to which our policy decisions and our neglect actually result in the sacrifice of children.

I've seen it in the South Bronx in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways was education. The schools in the South Bronx year after year are functioning on a very low level, and yet there is no administrative change. As we began organizing was there was a system of school boards that was completely corrupt. They were controlling millions of dollars, and the school boards near us were flying to Honolulu, Bermuda, for meetings. People were misappropriating money for special education to buy furniture for their homes, electronic equipment. Fortunately these people were prosecuted, but not before thousands of children's education were tremendously disserved.

At the same time that the schools were performing terribly millions of dollars were spent in building a prison not far from the church for 10 to 15-year-olds. The prison was going to be put there because it would save money on transportation. It was built for children from all over New York City, but most children would come from that neighborhood so it should be put there.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48