During 1966 and for nearly two years after, Bruce Davidson regularly visited East Harlem with a view camera and tripod with which he would photograph the residents of a city block on East 100th Street between First and Second Avenues in New York. Sam Holmes, a picture librarian at Magnum Photos, had a childhood friend who was a minister and community leader who lived on the block. He introduced Davidson to Reverend Norman Eddy and his wife, Reverend Margaret Eddy, who, in turn, introduced him to the local citizen's committee, who agreed that Davidson could make a small number of photographs of a family, which he would then submit for review. The family and the committee approved these photographs, allowing Davidson to continue.
Davidson chose this block because, at the time, it had a reputation as being one of the worst in the city. He always asked permission to take a photograph, and each time he returned, he would bring prints with him to give to his subjects, further contributing to his acceptance as a part of the community. Davidson's choice of equipment also gave a sense of formality and dignity to the act of taking photographs, encouraging people to see him as less of an intruder.
In his preface to the 1970 first edition, Davidson writes: '"What you call a Ghetto, I call my home." This was said to me when I first came to East Harlem, and during the two years that I photographed the people of East 100th Street, it stayed with me... I entered a life style, and, like the people on the block, I love and hate it and I keep going back.'
Bruce Davidson added 25 additional photographs and a new afterword for this edition.

Second edition; (303 × 280 mm, 12 x 11 in); black-and-white photographs, design by Paul McMenamin; brown endpapers, ivory cloth-covered boards, black-and- white photographic reproduction mounted on front, titles to spine and upper board in black, light marking to lower side, shelfwear to bottom edge, publisher's acetate dust-jacket with light creasing to head and foot, near-fine; [vi], 166pp.