AP/Wide World Photos [735652]

Camilo Vergara

No site captured the perils of urban life more than the public housing projects of the inner cities. Begun as an effort by urban planners and government officials to alleviate some of the abhorrent overcrowding in northern cities - a particular plight of African Americans, whose housing options were restricted by discrimination and segregation - many public housing projects had become hotbeds of drugs, violence, and gang warfare by the 1980s. But many of the slum clearance and public housing projects failed to solve the urban crisis. Opened in 1941, the Kingsborough housing project became the third public housing project in Brooklyn. By the 1990s, it had become a hub of gang activity and warfare between the Bloods and the Crips.