Cesar Melgar was born in Newark, NJ and raised in the Ironbound—a working class, post-industrial neighborhood. A child of first-generation immigrants from Colombia and Peru, he spent his youth exploring and playing in beautiful decaying, forgotten structures of a disinvested city. The leveling of his neighborhood and displacement of his neighbors for the construction of a sports arena was the writing on the wall that the city was going to undergo historic change due to renewed business interests. He has been documenting the physical changes of the urban landscape and its inhabitants since.