The scene of urban desolation and social despair captured by the cover picture of 63rd Street, one of the ghostly thoroughfares transecting Chicago's collapsing black ghetto at century's close, invites everyone to reflect on the link between the built environment, social structure, and collective psychology. More precisely, it points to the need to elaborate theoretically and empirically the connections between urban desolation and symbolic denigration in America's racialized urban core and assorted territories of relegation in the dualizing metropolis of the advanced societies (Wacquant 2008): how the daily experience of material dilapidation, ethnoracial seclusion, and socioeconomic marginality translates into the corrosion of the self, the rasping of interpersonalities, and the skewing of public policy through the mediation of sulfurous cognition fastened onto a defamed place. This article proposes that the social psychology of place operates in the manner of a symbolic cog latching the macro-determinants of urban political economy to the life options and strategies of the poor at ground level through the mediation of the negative collective representations of dispossessed districts that come to be shared by their inhabitants, by city dwellers around them, and by the political and administrative elites that design and run the range of public policies and services aimed at deprived populations. (Contains 4 footnotes.)