Ski Cohn and her son, Abe, leaving their Yonkers home for school. The Cohns live on Park Hill, where a 300-foot cliff separates an affluent area from the city’s gritty southwest section.

Anastasia playing in the hallway.

Anna and Abe playing chess.

The Cohn family sitting down to a steak dinner. From left: Ms. Cohn; her stepdaughter, Anna; her husband, Peter; and Abe.

Ms. Zimniak, an orderly in a special-needs home, wakes Anastasia for school.

At the bottom of the cliff, less than a mile away from the Cohns, Angelina Bell gets dressed for school in a cramped apartment.

From left: Angelina; her stepsister, Anastasia Ortega; and their mother, Angela Zimniak, at home, preparing to make beef tacos for dinner.

Abe looking out the window over southwest Yonkers. The city, with about 196,000 residents, has a history of segregated housing. Much of that has changed today, but Yonkers remains divided by its hills, with black and Latino families in the low-lying areas.

When the photographer Melissa Bunni Elian looked at an aerial image of Yonkers, she saw two cities: Atop the New York suburb’s many hills were tree-lined streets and stately homes; beneath them lay a dense grid of buildings. “One area was basically a park, and the other was concrete,” said Ms. Elian, who grew up in Yonkers. “That really spoke to me of the inequality in America.”

Read the full story from The New York Times. 

Melissa Bunni Elian is a Haitian-American journalist who has been satisfying her curiosity and passion for people and storytelling by capturing everyday life and historical moments using words, photos, video and audio since 2008.

This story originally appeared in The New York Times with support from EHRP.