I love the Bronx. This year, I’ve started taking long walks in the Bronx a few days a week, and sometimes while I’m on these walks, I think about why I love the Bronx. I was never able to put my finger on why exactly I loved it so much, but I knew it had something to do with history. From music to sports history, the Revolutionary War in the 1770s and 1780s to community organizing during the 1970s and 1980s, so much has happened in the borough that there has to be some aspect of Bronx history that appeals to anyone who visits or lives here.
When I heard a book had come out about the Bronx that was described as “a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough,” I knew I had to read it. In “Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough,” author Ian Frazier traces the history and character of the Bronx from its beginning — about 500 million years ago, when North America was part of a landmass called Laurentia — until the present day.
Throughout the book, Frazier discusses the Revolutionary War, the development of the Bronx, the waves of immigration from Europe, the devastation of the South Bronx caused by the Cross Bronx Expressway and government neglect, the community organizers who saved their apartment buildings and parks from destruction and the subsequent rise of the Bronx. Along the way, we learn about the conversations Frazier had and the friends he had during his 15 years of walking in the Bronx.
On Thursday, Feb. 27 the Bronx County Historical Society (BCHS) and the Kingsbridge Historical Society hosted a “Paradise Bronx” book talk with Frazier. Steven Payne, the director of the BCHS, said he wanted to host this event because the book brought new positive coverage to the borough.
“Paradise Bronx” has fortunately gotten a lot of positive coverage in the press. It’s not too often when books that are focused specifically on the Bronx get that kind of coverage,” Payne said.
Payne would be right. The Bronx persists in national imagination — and even in the minds of some New Yorkers — as a dangerous place and a symbol of urban decay.
But in writing “Paradise Bronx,” Frazier makes the history of the Bronx interesting and accessible to a general audience. His love for the borough comes through clearly. In telling the whole story of the Bronx, Frazier makes it clear that the things that almost destroyed the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s — the Cross Bronx Expressway, the crack cocaine epidemic, the city closing schools and firehouses and landlords neglecting their buildings — came from above or from outside the Bronx. Many Bronx residents did everything in their power to hold their neighborhoods together.
If you were to walk through the South Bronx today, you might not be able to tell it ever burned at all. One of Frazier’s favorite Bronx walks is the route of former President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 motorcade. Carter visited the South Bronx after watching a CBS piece titled “The Fire Next Door,” which was the first major piece of reporting done on the Bronx fires. Carter exited his car at the corner of Charlotte Street and Boston Road and looked around dazedly at the rubble that stretched for blocks. Now, those blocks are filled with single-family ranch-style homes which are part of a development called Charlotte Gardens. After walking Carter’s motorcade route on a fall day, Frazier wrote, “The whole way, I had seen maybe two abandoned houses, no obviously abandoned buildings, and not one vehicle or structure that was burned out.”
Earlier in the book, Frazier wrote about when the Bronx was the neutral ground between the British and American forces during the Revolutionary War. At this time, Bronx farms along the Boston Post Road (now Boston Road) were subject to raids. Residents lived in fear, worrying that their homes could be destroyed at any time. At the book talk, Frazier noted that “when you put the two together, you see that the history of 1777 and the history of 1977 are similar in unexpected ways.”
While this history gets covered up by new development or lost to time, it will always be there. “Something that has always been and always will be takes you out of your daily life. To be able to step out of the limitation of time is intoxicating to me,” said Frazier. I find it intoxicating as well. Any block in the Bronx has decades of history, and spending time in places where history happened makes my chest feel tight and sets my mind wandering.
At the end of the book talk, Frazier said, “[history] gets erased because people go by without looking.” History tells the story of a place, of the people who lived there and of the things that happened there. New York City isn’t great at putting up historical plaques, and many important historical sites in the Bronx (such as Cedar Playground, where Grandmaster Flash realized he wanted to be a DJ) don’t have plaques commemorating their significance. Thousands of people drive through the Bronx every day on the highways that slice up and encircle the borough without really looking at what they’re passing by. I look for history everywhere I go, and you should too, if you don’t want it to be forgotten.
When I walk around the Bronx and think about the families and strivers, the historical figures and everyday people, the artists and musicians who lived here before me and live here now, I feel like I am a part of something bigger than myself and bigger than the present moment. This is why I love the Bronx, the greatest borough in the greatest city in the world. History is all around me.
Editor’s Note: Eleanor Smith is a current employee at the Bronx County Historical Society.
