50 The New York Reviewfrom the locally operated merchan-
diser From the Bronx, which claims,
from a place of pride, rebranding the
borough as its mission.
Rebranding and rehabilitation aside,
the Bronx’s bad rep persists. When my
friend Eneida Cardona got mugged on
Philly’s Cherokee Street in the mid-
2000s, she defended herself against the
assailants who mistook her for white by
identifying herself as a Puerto Rican
girl from the Bronx, which was Nu-
yorican code for Don’t mess with me,
pendejos, you picked the wrong mark.
I read L’Official’s book with interest,
having recently moved with my family,
at the height of the pandemic, from a
three- room apartment in Upper Man-
hattan to a single- family house in the
northwest Bronx. The move was a sign
of our upward mobility, but I’m sorry to
say that there were plenty of people in
our circle who wondered if it was safe.
L’Official explains how two events in
October 1977 helped create the story
of the South Bronx as a neighborhood
gone to hell, and why the story stuck.
The first was a nationally televised visit
by President Jimmy Carter, who toured
the vacant lots, heaps of rubble, and
burned- out buildings along a stretch of
Charlotte Street— once a flourishing
neighborhood of more than three thou-
sand people— at the behest of his Hous-
ing and Urban Development secretary,
Patricia Harris, the first Black woman
to serve in a US cabinet. Whereas the
Nixon administration had shifted money
away from urban areas like the the South
Bronx, accelerating their decline, Harris
urged reinvestment, advocating for the
right of people “to have urban life as a
real choice— not only the option of the
rich or the fate of the poor.”
The South Bronx was chosen stra-
tegically. After years of landlords
abandoning their buildings instead of
repairing them, and letting them be
destroyed by fires, the area’s derelic-
tion represented the failings of late-
stage capitalism, almost cinematically
so. (Indeed, it was long favored by film
scouts looking to suggest dystopia, and
by politicians as the bleakest location
on whistle- stop tours of urban Amer-
ica.) Narrating footage of Carter’s walk
on the evening news, the journalist
Bob Schieffer called the South Bronx
“the worst slum in America”— a phrase
that quickly became commonplace and
has sometimes been attributed to Car-
ter himself. Never mind that the view
looked different just a few blocks over,
where community organizers were suc-
cessfully rehabilitating housing.
The second event took place a week
after Carter’s photo op. During a live
broadcast of game 2 of the 1977 World
Series, played between the Yankees and
the Dodgers, an aerial camera panned
from Yankee Stadium to a nearby blaze.
An abandoned school building was on
fire. “There it is, ladies and gentlemen,
the Bronx is burning,” Howard Cosell
supposedly said— and many people
still attribute these words to him, even
though it has been established for quite
some time that he never spoke them,
nor did anyone else during the broad-
cast. The phrase actually comes from
a 1972 documentary, The Bronx Is
Burning, about the fire epidemic. By
the time of Carter’s visit and the World
Series, L’Official observes, all of this
was too easily conflated:Images of the Bronx as a burning
borough had already been singedonto the public retina.... What was,
and what was willed into being were
often— as Cosell’s phantom quote
illustrates— indistinguishable.L’Official describes these two events
as urban legends owing to the way their
partial and distorted views solidified
over time. The fire outside the ballpark
was real. The TV audience could see
the smoke. But the quote that became
famous was apocryphal. Destroyed
C ha rlotte Street was as rea l as bombed-
out Warsaw, London, or Berlin, but it
was a four- to six- block area of a much
bigger borough, a place where— as in
those European cities— people still
lived, loved, worked, parented, andprayed. In showing us how fixed these
two legends became, L’Official aims to
loosen their dehumanizing hold.Throughout Urban Legends, L’Official
urges us to consider how we look at,
think of, and talk about the South
Bronx— and, by extension, other places
like it:I encourage us to think about con-
cepts like the “inner city,” “blight,”
the “ghetto,” “wasteland,” and “no-
man’s- land”— metaphorical con-
structions of place that continue, to
this day, to be used to characterize
cities and, more pointedly, the peo-
ple in them— as versions of urban
legends as well. These are all eu-
phemisms, ways to describe a city
so that people don’t have to think
any deeper about why it looks the
way that it does, a shorthand for de-
scribing problems so complex, sys-
tems of oppression so entrenched,
that the realization of their uncom-
fortable proximity produces a kind
of willful distancing via language.
They are coded special signifiers
for race.He argues that while gothic portray-
als of the South Bronx in fiction and
film obliterated the lived reality of the
area’s residents in the 1970s and 1980s,
the same ruins that inspired harmful
stereotypes also inspired literary and
artistic depictions of decay. Through
his examination of these depictions, he
dissects the mythology projected onto
the borough, showing the harm it’s
done.
For example, shortly after Presi-
dent Carter’s tour, a New York Times
editorial proclaimed that visiting theSouth Bronx was “as crucial to the un-
derstanding of American urban life as
a visit to Auschwitz is to understand-
ing Nazism,” whereupon chartered
bus tours of Europeans actually began
stopping at Charlotte Street to take in
the ruins, en route to the Bronx Zoo,
just as they might, on a tour of Italy,
make a stop at Pompeii. In Don De-
Lillo’s novel Underworld (1997), a tour
bus with a sign reading “South Bronx
Surreal” and carrying about thirty Eu-
ropeans pulls up across the street from
a derelict tenement building, watched
by two local nuns. As the tourists exit
the bus to gawk at the boarded- up
buildings, toting cameras, one of the
nuns shouts at them, “It’s not surreal.It’s real, it’s real. Your bus is surreal.
You’re surreal.”
L’Official notes that as late as 2013,
a company called Real Bronx Tours
offered visitors “a ride through a real
New York City ‘GHETTO,’” promising
walks through “a ‘pickpocket’ park”
and views of folks in line at a food pan-
try. Local public outcry and a scathing
open letter by the Bronx borough presi-
dent, Ruben Diaz Jr., eventually forced
the tour to cease operation.
Whereas L’Official credits DeLil-
lo’s rendering of the South Bronx in
Underworld for grappling with the
socioeconomic processes that drove
the area to ruin, he takes Tom Wolfe
to task for failing to capture the effects
of systemic racism, suburbanization,
deindustrialization, and white flight in
his best- selling satirical novel of race
and class, The Bonfire of the Vanities
(1987). Told at a reporter’s remove, the
book resorts to caricature in its para-
noid concern with facades. A disquiet-
ingly grotesque portrayal of the South
Bronx emerges as Manhattan’s bestial
Other— echoing the era’s journalism
and ultimately failing to illuminate the
real life within Bronx neighborhoods
that, according to L’Official’s persua-
sive and excoriating reading, remain in
Wolfe’s writing both overdetermined
and inscrutable.
L’Official contrasts the sprawling so-
cial novels of DeLillo and Wolfe with
the more personal fiction of Abraham
Rodriguez, a South Bronx native, in
his story collection The Boy Without a
Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992)
and its follow- up, the novel Spidertown
(1993). Rodriguez’s unsentimental
portraits of life among the ruins invert
the understanding of such spaces as
merely hostile, barren, and threaten-
ing. The story “No More War Games,”which follows kids hanging out in an
empty lot next to abandoned buildings,
is a meditation on violence, but also
on innocence and play, happiness and
exploration.
I wish that more of Urban Legends
focused on how South Bronx residents
have represented themselves— instead,
the views imposed by folks who never
lived there dominate the book. L’Offi-
cial surmises that there’s not much liter-
ary fiction about Black and Latinx life
by writers from the South Bronx— in
contrast to nearby Harlem and Wash-
ington Heights— because its creative
energy found expression instead in
the populist literature of hip- hop, the
poetry of graffiti (whose practitioners
called themselves writers), and the so-
cial novels of rap, perhaps most recog-
nizably expressed in “The Message”
by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five:
"
"
"
"
" !
According to L’Official, “The Mes-
sage” can be read “as urban report-
age, as an example of lyric and poetic
dexterity, and certainly as a work of
literary and musical protest— in other
words, as poetry or sociology, fields in
which academic discourse has often
invoked hip- hop.” And so he mostly
leaves hip- hop out of his own account.
But the problem with eliding such rich
source material in a cultural study of
the South Bronx is that while so much
of what’s told from the inside is sophis-
ticated sociology, so much of what’s
told from the outside is stereotypical
caca.
Take, for example, Fort Apache, the
Bronx (1981)— a police drama about
the Forty- First Precinct, directed by
Daniel Petrie and starring Paul New-
man, which portrays the Bronx as a
lost cause. It opens barbarically, with
the blaxploitation icon Pam Grier as a
drug- addled street hustler inexplicably
shooting two NYPD patrolmen point
blank in a parked squad car, then dis-
appearing over a pile of rubble in a field
of trash, whereupon scavengers, mostly
children, sneak like wild animals from
nearby abandoned buildings to strip
the dead cops of their valuables. En-
tirely absent is any care or interest in
why the scene looks like this or who
these people are, apart from the benev-
olent white savior cop played by New-
man. To his credit, L’Official balances
the considerable space he allots to an-
alyzing this movie with an account of
the Black and Puerto Rican locals who
organized to protest its dehumanizing
portrayal of their home.The strongest chapters of Urban Leg-
ends are the ones devoted to visual
representations of the South Bronx.
L’Official innovatively pairs— and as-
sesses on an equal plane— what heJoe Conzo: Third Ave Hub Block Party, South Bronx, 1981Joe ConzoRaboteau 49 51 .indd 50 3 / 10 / 22 4 : 41 PM