April 7, 2022 49The Stories of the Bronx
Emily Raboteau
Urban Legends:
The South Bronx in
Representation and Ruin
by Peter L’Official.
Harvard University Press,
310 pp., $31.00Given the global influence of the rap,
breakdancing, graffiti, and DJ culture
that flowered in the South Bronx in
the 1970s and 1980s, one might guess
that a work of scholarship about that
place and time would focus on hip- hop.
Bronx- born Peter L’Official, a litera-
ture professor at Bard, acknowledges
that “hip- hop was, and is, the Bronx’s
social novel for the ages”— and that
Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, Jeff Chang,
and others have already covered that
ground. In his recent book, Urban
Legends: The South Bronx in Repre-
sentation and Ruin, he deliberately and
skillfully reads the borough instead
through novels, movies, art, journal-
ism, and municipal records, looking to
both unpack and undo its mythology.
The result is a vibrant cultural history
that gestures beyond the tropes of the
boogie down and the burning metrop-
olis, those pervasive narratives of cul-
tural renaissance and urban neglect
that have dogged the area for half a
century.
As its name makes plain, the South
Bronx lies in the southern part of the
Bronx, the northernmost of New York
City’s five boroughs. On the subway
map, the South Bronx extends from
the head and neck of northern Man-
hattan like an elephant ear, separated
by the Harlem River. Its borders have
been debated over the years, but its
many neighborhoods include Con-
course, Mott Haven, Melrose, and
Port Morris. The 6 train gets you there
from Midtown, as Jonathan Kozol
points out in his urban classic Amazing
Grace (1995), making “nine stops in
the 18- minute ride between East 59th
Street and Brook Avenue. When you
enter the train, you are in the seventh
richest congressional district in the na-
tion. When you leave, you are in the
poorest.” That district would be the
Fifteenth— the country’s poorest, still.
It wasn’t always so. The area was
once Lenape territory, and then be-
ginning in the seventeenth century it
was taken over by colonial farmland,
owned by the aristocratic Morris fam-
ily, which included Founding Fathers
Lewis Morris (who signed the Declara-
tion of Independence) and Gouverneur
Morris (who signed the Constitution).
Annexed by New York City by 1895
and connected by subway to Manhat-
tan in 1904, the Bronx grew into a poly-
glot boomtown and manufacturing hub
that became known for making pianos,
and offered a step up for families es-
caping the crowded tenements of the
Lower East Side, or Fascist Italy, or
Nazi Germany.
During the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, working- class Ger-
man, Italian, Irish, and especially Jew-
ish immigrants had started populating
the area. By the 1930s, social workers
dubbed it the “Jewish Borough.” Ac-
cording to the Bronx- born writer and
activist Grace Paley, the Great De-
pression “was the first great blow tothe unfinished Bronx,” and with dis-
investment, its already aging housing
stock went into further decline. After
World War II, the South Bronx ex-
perienced a second boom, beginning
with Puerto Ricans and also Blacks
from the South. But as they arrived,
New York City was deindustrializing.
Racist redlining policies prevented
housing reinvestment as whites took
flight.
Between 1950 and 1960 the popu-
lation of the South Bronx went from
being two thirds non- Hispanic white
to two thirds Black and Puerto Rican.
Its northern boundary changed, too,
extending to the Cross Bronx Express-
way, completed in 1963 as part of Rob-
ert Moses’s plan for renewing the city.
The Cross Bronx Expressway dealt
the Bronx its second big blow. In the
introduction to his Bitter Bronx: Thir-
teen Stories (2015), Bronxite Jerome
Charyn describes its construction as an
injury tantamount to urbicide, displac-
ing local businesses and thousands of
residents, decreasing property values,
increasing vacancy rates, and helping
to turn the Bronx into “the poorest,
most crowded barrio east of Missis-
sippi,” plowing right through it “like
the avenue’s own sore rib.”
Things went from bad to worse in
the 1960s, as is well documented by
Jill Jonnes in South Bronx Rising:
The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an
American City (2002). Then, during
the economic stagnation of the 1970s,unemployment rose— and with it crime
and the fear of crime. Cue more white
flight. Vacant buildings couldn’t be
sold. Squatters moved in. Gangs and
drugs beset the community. The city
was nearly bankrupt. Landlords were
pushed to convert their emptying
buildings to Section 8 housing, which
paid them federal rental assistance to
take in low- income tenants. The rates
were so pitifully low that without a
profit, these landlords lost the incen-
tive to maintain their buildings. Budget
cuts meant building inspectors and fire
marshals stopped checking for viola-
tions. Banks and insurance companies
further redlined the area.
“Absentee slumlords” and “welfare
hotels” became the new terms of abuse.
Unable to sell, landlords faced mort-
gage default. Into this grim picture
stepped a shady character called “the
fixer” with the following scheme: buy
a building below cost; sell it over and
over on paper using shell companies;
drive up the value a little with each sale;
take out a fraudulent insurance policy;
strip the overvalued property of its
wiring, plumbing, and fixtures for sal-
vage; and then— for the payoff— burn
it to the ground. Some local residents
set fires, too, encouraged by policies
granting priority status for new hous-
ing in potentially safer neighborhoods
to Section 8 tenants who were burned
out of their apartments. Block after
block of the once- flourishing province
of working- and middle- class familylife was destroyed, discarded, demol-
ished. The teeming, populous Bronx
had morphed into a dreadful object
lesson.
By 1977, when L’Official’s book be-
gins, so many buildings there were
burning each day that the fire depart-
ment could not, or would not, keep up.
The Bronx lost more than 108,000 resi-
dential units between 1970 and 1981 to
abandonment, demolition, or arson— a
fifth of its housing stock and a full third
of the estimated housing units lost in
New York City. That decade, over 40
percent of the South Bronx was aban-
doned or destroyed. But put another
way, almost 60 percent of it was not.In Urban Legends L’Official examines
the South Bronx as both a real place
and a repository of myth, much as the
historian Alan Trachtenberg wrote
about the Brooklyn Bridge as “fact and
symbol.” How is it, L’Official asks, that
this pocket of New York City came to
symbolize slumdom all over the world,
when its problems— poverty, unem-
ployment, municipal disinvestment,
racism, and building deterioration—
could be found in any other American
city suffering the fallout of a deindus-
trializing economy?
In his 1964 essay “Harlem Is No-
where,” Ralph Ellison wrote, “To live
in Harlem is to dwell in the very bow-
els of the city,” with “its crimes, its
casual violence, its crumbling build-
ings... and vermin- invaded rooms.”
Yet no other urban locale in the nation
registers decline in the public psyche
so persistently as the South Bronx—
not the Harlem Ellison described as
symbolizing “the Negro’s perpetual
alienation in the land of his birth,” not
Trenton, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chica-
go’s South Side, or South Central LA.
Apart from the Gaza Strip, I’m hard
pressed to name another hot spot that
warns the outsider quite so successfully
to beware.
I thought frequently of Helga Tawil-
Souri and Dina Matar’s anthology
Gaza as Metaphor (2016) while read-
ing Urban Legends. Both books look
closely at how imperiled places are
pathologized in the public imagination.
Just as Gaza has become the arche-
type of an “open- air prison,” evoking
metaphors of terror, siege, occupation,
resistance, and humanitarian disaster,
the Bronx brings to mind “urban ruin,”
synonymous with crime, civic neglect,
and the failings of “inner cities” (cre-
ated by white flight, redlining, and
other urban planning) and the com-
munities of color that call those places
home. The media has depicted both as
unruly funeral pyres, but where Gaza
is seen as the ravaged stand- in for the
Palestinians’ perennial conflict with
the State of Israel, the South Bronx was
long characterized as urbanism’s nadir,
the wreckage of the “underclass”—
Reaganite code for the “undeserving”
Black and brown poor.
“C’est Le Bronx” was French par-
lance in the 1980s for “It’s a mess,” just
as during the Lebanese civil war, “C’est
pas Beyrouth” signified “It’s not a disas-
ter.” Nowadays you can buy a “C’est Le
Bronx” T- shirt for twenty- eight dollarsJerome Liebling: Orlando Building, South Bronx, New York City, 1977Jerome Liebling StudioRaboteau 49 51 .indd 49 3 / 10 / 22 4 : 41 PM