Urban Legends

The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin

Peter L'Official

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674246485
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the "inner city" symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths. For decades, the South Bronx was America's "inner city." Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism.Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life.A Bronx native, Peter L'Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L'Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark's carvings of abandoned buildings with the city's trompe l'oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx's infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a "global Bronx" as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad. Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.

1

THE LONE TENEMENT

Any story with abandonment at its core might do well to first establish a sense of what is being abandoned. To hear that the South Bronx was the “most extensively abandoned piece of urban geography in the United States” by the late 1970s, one imagines extremes: collapsed walls, open lots brimming with detritus, and discarded newspapers as urban tumbleweeds, gusting down silent and deserted streets—a citified ghost town left to rot. Yet, urban ghost towns are still composed of materials, of physical monuments, of structures, and even of residents, which are certainly more tangible if perhaps not as lasting as the metaphors that are used to describe them. Though the South Bronx’s built environment may have suffered through a prolonged state of un-building, it was still by virtue of its status as part of the city of New York composed of parcels of real estate, upon which stood tenements, single- or multiple-family homes, attached houses, larger apartment complexes, and the like—housing stock that aged, perhaps improved with care, or deteriorated with lack of maintenance. What was once in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a collection of farms, estates, and small villages had become thoroughly urban—thoroughly built—by the twentieth century. Indeed, as statesman Elihu Root once observed of the city, the primary agent for neighborhood creation and growth was “the real estate operator [who] … gets hold of tracts of land here and there which he can map and cut up into blocks and building lots and advertise and sell.… He is the man who very largely determines the growth of a city.” It was real estate that brought residents to neighborhoods in the 1910s and 1920s, and it would be real estate—the Bronx’s buildings, blocks, and lots—that was left behind when those neighborhoods became untenable within but a few decades.¹

Though the South Bronx came to characterize abandonment itself in later years, it was its overcrowded neighborhoods and the transience of its population that characterized the borough in its earliest urbanized years. As historian Evelyn Gonzalez observes, some of the greatest population densities in the Bronx could be found in the section centered around Westchester Avenue and in the region immediately southwest of Crotona Park, “namely in those spots that were abandoned and synonymous with urban decay but that in 1920 contained 200 to 300 people per acre, living in blocks of fully tenanted apartment buildings.”² The North Side News observed that the “tenement house law is permitting as horrible congestion [in the Bronx] as that which damns Manhattan” and chronicled how a Crotona Park East block went from empty lots to tenements in about a year—the same block, on Charlotte Street, that would be visited by presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan seventy years later in ignominious recognition of the South Bronx as the world’s foremost metaphor for urban ruin.

The essential point that Gonzalez lodges here and elsewhere in her portrait is that the Bronx was a borough that has been historically characterized by the “excessive transiency” of its residents: it offered improved accommodations from downtown slums, it was a first port of call for newly arrived immigrant communities, it was a borough composed of neighborhoods full of renters, young tenants, and those whom the rest of the city did not welcome immediately with open arms.³ What’s more—and most important for the focus of this chapter—is that its housing stock, built haphazardly by real estate speculators desirous of a quick return on investment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had already begun to decline by the 1920s, and certainly by the 1940s when great numbers of African Americans from the South and Puerto Ricans began to settle in its neighborhoods.⁴ Those neighborhoods were hardly constructed with the idea of building a coherent neighborhood in mind; neither were they allowed the kind of maintenance or indeed top-to-bottom renewal that mortgage loans provided by the Federal Housing Authority or private lending might have offered due to large-scale redlining of areas of the South Bronx.⁵ Even so, as Gonzalez highlights in her recounting of the decline of the borough, “poverty and old buildings do not inevitably lead to crime, abandonment, and arson, for there had always been slums in the city.”⁶

Building abandonment was the result of “an interaction between the housing market and the socioeconomic condition of the building,” but also of a self-perpetuating “perfect storm” of conditions that exposed an aging housing stock—into and out of which scores of increasingly unemployed residents cycled through, unable or unwilling to pay rent for landlords themselves unwilling to maintain or improve their properties—to a city increasingly short on funds. That city was forced to cut down on crucial infrastructural maintenance like firehouses, further exposing that aging housing stock to owner-profiteers who accelerated decay in their own buildings in order to eventually collect on low-premium fire insurance policies once they burned.⁷ Such a dreadful cycle of factors repeated itself from block to block, lot to lot, and from building to building, growing both the physical area and the idea of the South Bronx until its very name became a metaphor for abandonment, and an urban legend in its own right. The South Bronx was simultaneously “the inner city,” the “ghetto,” a “no-man’s land,” a notoriously “blighted” area of the city, and the nation’s most famous “slum” all at once. In the minds of many outside observers, the Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s was often reducible to a visual metonym: that of an abandoned, burned-out building, a single structure that stood for countless others. But what, if anything, did that metonym—that metaphor for ruin—mask? What modes of thinking, what narrative frameworks lay behind this familiar iconic façade? What—and whose—stories weren’t being told?

These and other metaphors for abandonment and ruin are not merely curiosities of language and semantics, but also ways of processing the difficult realities that places like the South Bronx presented. In a 1979 essay, the philosopher Donald Schön understood there to be two traditions of metaphor: the first as a “species of figurative language which needs explaining, or explaining away,” and the second as a kind of product, a “perspective or frame” and a “process by which new perspectives on the world come into existence.” He called this process “generative metaphor.” When applied to the domain of social policy, Schön observed two frameworks of thought regarding metaphor that are important for understanding the kinds of urban legends that defined the Bronx: problem-solving and problem-setting metaphors. If, as Schön notes, the dominant view in the development of social policy ought to be considered as a “problem-solving enterprise,” his view suggests an oppositional approach that focuses on the framing of the problem to begin with: rather than selecting the optimal means for solving a particular social problem—finding the “solution” to a societal problem—Schön believed that the true difficulties lay with the “ways in which we frame the purposes to be achieved.” That is, “problem-settings” are defined by the stories that people tell about complex and troublesome situations, stories that are already undergirded by metaphors that can dictate the directions that problem solving may take.⁸

In other words, how might one reckon with the fact of large-scale building abandonment and arson in South Bronx neighborhoods? One constructs a metaphor from an already familiar concept or field that attempts to make sense of the unfamiliar or unthinkable condition: such neighborhoods, once healthy, have become “blighted”—as if they were possessed of a disease. We understand a slum as a blighted area, so it is that blight that must be surgically removed if the area is to be healed. “The metaphor,” as Schön observes, “is one of disease and cure.” If, on the other hand, the neighborhood is viewed as a “natural community,” a response less drastic than removal via surgery may be in order. But given the imprecision of language, and the likelihood that such slipperiness will allow racism, not reason, to dictate what neighborhoods are “natural” and “unnatural,” some metaphors are more suitable than others, and many are grossly inadequate, which can lead to similarly inadequate solutions. But, as Schön is careful to point out, one man’s blight may be another man’s folk community. On what or whose criteria was the South Bronx diseased?⁹ As we will shortly see, some who were engaged in social policy debates around housing attempted to carefully outline the criteria by which concepts like blight and abandonment were judged and defined. Their work, and the broader discourse of urban ruin, demonstrated the difficulties inherent to producing rigorous analysis of such complex problems.

With Love and Affection: Vacancy, Abandonment, and Infection

By 1980, Charlotte Street was the bleakest whistle-stop on every national politician’s tour of urban America. In March of that year, Ted Kennedy stood on the very same spot that Carter had three years earlier; Ronald Reagan visited Charlotte Street in August, remarking upon emerging from his limousine that he “hadn’t seen anything like this since London after the Blitz.” In a sense, the national recognition and acknowledgment of the ruined South Bronx brought the neighborhood both closer to and further away from those who watched from afar—even those who watched from elsewhere in New York. The structural and systemic problems of municipal disinvestment, urban abandonment, and neglect that had combined with a host of other factors to create such a wounded environment—as well as the visual markers of that environment itself—would not be unfamiliar to residents of many other cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Newark. However, what the nationally broadcast images helped to fashion was a mind-set that viewed the South Bronx as a relative example of the “urban crisis” in their own cities while simultaneously allowing many to conceive of it as always happening somewhere else. By becoming the nation’s shorthand for urban American ruin, the South Bronx simultaneously made that ruin more difficult to see everywhere but in the Bronx.

If the South Bronx first entered the American imagination as exemplar of the national “urban crisis” in 1977 after President Jimmy Carter’s appearance on Charlotte Street, residents of the Bronx neighborhoods Morrisania, Melrose, and Mott Haven and of Brooklyn’s Brownsville would have been chagrined at the nation’s relatively late recognition of their plight. A February 1970 report of the Citizens Budget Commission, one of the earliest public reports to concern itself entirely with the problem of New York’s abandoned buildings, registered alarm at what was then already becoming an “emergency situation” in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Seeking remedies for what it called “the greatest housing crisis in [New York’s] history,” the report attempted to divine both the causes and underlying conditions of building abandonment and the solutions for possible renovation.¹⁰ It discussed methods for dealing with the physical entity of the abandoned building, whose detrimental effects on the surrounding neighborhood were legion and, in some cases, life-threatening. Structurally unsound, vacant buildings posed a constant threat of collapse, and due to the atmosphere of desolation that they engendered in their immediate vicinity, these husks were havens for drug trafficking and other crime.¹¹ New York City housing commissioner Roger Starr himself was a famous—or, rather, infamous—proponent of the idea of “planned shrinkage” as a solution to abandonment and the issues facing the South Bronx. The idea, related to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s earlier idea of “benign neglect” toward issues of race (offered in a 1970 memorandum to President Richard Nixon), suggested that rather than committing the millions of dollars it would take to quite literally fix the South Bronx, shifting people into more compact areas and effecting an overall reduction in city services and their costs would pave the way for renewal in the left-over spaces. One 1978 proposal to the city for addressing building abandonment and housing in the South Bronx boldly rebutted Starr’s controversial proposal, stating that

such “planned shrinkage” is less an urban policy than the lack of one. It calls for closing down communities rather than building them up. It makes assumptions that are untenable in a democratic society. Who decides which people leave—or where they go? Government re-settlement programs are no answer. The answer to the South Bronx is in the South Bronx.¹²

But what constituted “abandonment” in the first place? Who, exactly, abandons, and what do they leave behind? These are questions that, in 1977, the Women’s City Club of New York (WCC), a nonpartisan, nonprofit civic activist organization, tried to answer. The WCC (still extant, though rebranded as Women Creating Change as of March 2019) was founded “on the eve of women’s suffrage” in 1915 and began advocating for issues like safe working conditions in garment factories in 1915 and allowing physicians to give birth control information in 1917; it also drafted and ensured passage of New York State’s first child labor laws in 1924. Early members included muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, Eleanor Roosevelt (while still first lady of New York State), actress Helen Hayes, and Ruth Watson Lubic, founder of the National Association of Childbearing Centers. In the 1970s, many of the WCC’s efforts focused upon issues of housing and voting redistricting, among many others. Its report, titled With Love and Affection: A Study of Building Abandonment, serves as a useful entry point into the amorphous issue of abandonment, its causes, its effects, and possible solutions.¹³ The report locates its analysis near the geographic heart of Bronx abandonment and shrewdly devises a framework and method that establish the tenement block as its unit metric, thereby grounding the more abstract notions of “ruin” in clear, relatable, and empiric terms. Beneath what often appeared in the media as a sea of churning rubble, and against against popular conceptions of the abandoned inner cities of America and the Bronx, this was analysis at a level that at least approached the granular. If it was to be the abandoned tenement building that would visually define this era of urban ruin in the Bronx, then beginning any empirical study of the Bronx with its buildings was the most natural point of origin.

The study examined two blocks in the Bronx, “one a square block facing Crotona Park and the other, a linear block nearby,” located in the Morrisania and Tremont sections of the borough.¹⁴ Once part of the extensive manor of Fordham, created under a patent by Charles II in the seventeenth century, as the report rather portentously observes, “There is nothing manorial about them now.”¹⁵ The site was chosen because it contained 38 residential buildings constructed between 1899 and 1929 whose condition ranged from “fairly good” to “grossly deteriorated” and which were classified as either abandoned or occupied. In June 1970, 11 of the 38 buildings were abandoned and 27 were occupied. By 1976, 11 of the occupied buildings had become vacant or had been demolished, and two others were almost completely vacant. In the ten years following the first instance of abandonment in the study site, 1966 to 1976, nearly 60 percent of the 38 buildi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: When Legend Becomes Fact
• 1. The Lone Tenement
• 2. Perception Is Reality
• 3. Death and Taxes
• 4. A Global Bronx
• 5. South Bronx Surreal
• 6. The Paranoid Style of South Bronx Film
• Conclusion: The River Is Deep
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index