Meryl Meisler couldn’t believe the sight that greeted her when she emerged from the subway in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for the first time, in 1981. “It looked like the photographs that I had seen of Beirut,” she recalled of the cityscape of bombed-out buildings.

Ms. Meisler had come to Bushwick to teach art at a public middle school. “I literally thought to myself, perhaps the other art teacher had been killed,” she said.

Like a number of once middle-class neighborhoods in New York City, Bushwick had spiraled into poverty over the course of the 1960s and ’70s, and poverty had spawned desperation. An epidemic of arson had reduced block after block of three-story frame houses to rubble.

Sometimes the fires were set by vandals who intended to return for the plumbing systems; sometimes they were set by landlords who were tired of chasing after delinquent tenants to pay rent.