Title: A Cultural History of the Boogie Down Bronx [music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. According to writer Ian Frazier, living in the Bronx often meant surviving "in between," in between the American continent and the islands that make up New York City, in between two opposing sides during the Revolutionary War, in between the destructive construction of expressways, and in between times of paradise and times of struggle. Frazier has spent the last 15 years walking the Bronx, mastering its geography, researching its history, and getting to know its culture and people.

The result of his walks is a new book called Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. Frazier writes in the book, "The Bronx is the continent, and once you're on it, you can go for thousands of miles without seeing ocean again. The other boroughs, for their part, cling to the Bronx for dear life. The chafing and strife of this connection have made all the difference to the Bronx." Now, there's so much to discuss here that we're dedicating this entire hour of the show to the Bronx and the book. Ian Frazier, who goes by Sandy, is joining me now in studio to take your calls. Hi, Sandy.

Ian Frazier: Hi, Alison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: You walked the Bronx 15 years ago at first because you wanted to see how far you could walk while still smelling baked goods from a now-closed Kingsbridge bakery, Stella D'oro. What is something that you can only observe about the Bronx by walking it?

Ian Frazier: Well, you don't know what the geography is like. If you just look at it on your phone, you have no idea. If you drive through it, you're not aware that your car is going up and down as much as it is, but when you're on foot, you see this is a-- it's a hilly place, and it's also varied. It's hilly along the Harlem River, and then in, that is east of that, and then it becomes oceanfront. If you keep going, it's only like 7 miles across.

As you keep going, suddenly there you are. You're on the East River, which is also Long Island sound, which is also the Atlantic Ocean. You're going from an upstate geography, a hilly and challenging geography, to a two-way shore geography, to a coastal geography in one place. That's another in-between quality of the Bronx, that it's between the ocean and the upstate woods, almost.

Alison Stewart: The Bronx, as you write in the book, is at the edge of the continent, connected to the mainland. How do you think this dynamic has driven its cultural and physical development over history?

Ian Frazier: It was a place that you had to pass through, and it still is a place that you have to pass through if you're coming from these islands. The islands are, I would say, propitiously laid out there in the water for people coming from elsewhere. To get from these islands up into New England, up and to the continent, you had to go through the Bronx. I think people, if you live in New York City and you see it as an urban place, you may not realize that it is as just a work of nature. It's a wonder. It has so many different environments that it incorporates. It has saltwater and it has fresh water or brackish water. It has ocean, and it has land. The combination is just--

I think it's one of the most blessed places geographically on the planet. When you walk it, you can see those different sides of it. When people first came here, the description of what they saw is just-- what's now New York harbor was just full of fish, just all different kinds of fish. If you see when they did archeological digs of the Lenape village sites, what the Lenape ate, the Lenape are just having surf and turf every night. They're eating everything from elk to conchs to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, countless numbers of oysters. Before this was settled, it was estimated there were 350 square miles of oysters in the New York waters.

Now, the city itself, the land of the city, is only 300 square miles. You're imagining this was Oyster City. If you go to places where there were Lenape villages, you'll see there are oyster middens, where people just kept-- You had to eat a lot of oysters to get calories because they're not a high-calorie food. You would create these big mounds of oyster shell. It was, as I say, a blessed place. The Bronx is the pivot point of it. That's where you go from the ocean environment to a land environment in really the space of not very many miles.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Sandy Frazier. His new book is called Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. Listeners, let's give you some questions. Tell us about your corner of paradise in the Bronx. Where do you live? What makes it special? What's your favorite part of living in the borough? Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you want to tell us your Bronx origin story. 212-433-9692, 212-433-9692.

If you have any questions at all about the history of the Bronx, you like a neighborhood, how you got a street and a sign, a name, a story of a building, we'd be happy to answer it for you as best we can. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's get this out of the question now. The Bronx, where does the name come from?

Ian Frazier: The Bronx comes from the Bronx River, and the name of the Bronx River, the Bronx River runs through the Bronx. It divides it really in half. It runs north and south from a reservoir up in Westchester County, and it empties into the East River, 8 miles long in the Bronx. It's the longest river in New York City. It got its name from Jonas Bronck, who owned land next to it. He came in the 1600s, mid-1600s, and people would refer to his-- Where he lived, they would say, "Well, that's Bronck's Land." Then they said, "That's Bronck's River." We have the Bronck's river. We had Bronck's Land, and pretty soon-- That name was just out there ever since Jonas Bronck lived there. Then in the early 1900s, a poet named Joseph Rodman Drake wrote a poem called Bronx. That's the title of the poem.

Alison Stewart: That's it.

Ian Frazier: That's it.

[laughter]

Ian Frazier: He knew a good word when he saw it back there in 1805. It's a cool word, and you think that it begins almost at the beginning of the alphabet, and it ends almost at the end of the alphabet. There you have another. It's between the extremes of the alphabet. The name came from the Bronx River and from Jonas Bronck. I think also from this poem, which was a famous poem of its time. It's an ode to the Bronx River. It's like somebody saying, "Oh, my dear Bronx River, how much I love you." It's a good poem, even. The place had a bunch of other names. When it finally became part of New York City at the end of the 19th century, that was the name that they gave to it.

Alison Stewart: Now, was Jonas Bronck a man of means?

Ian Frazier: He must have been because he had his own ship. He came here on his own ship, which was called the Fire of Troy. Seems like an unlucky name, maybe, to give a ship. He came in 1639 and bought land from the Muncie, which was a tribe of the Lenape, and also paid the Dutch, who by then had established themselves in lower Manhattan. He, I guess, gave them money to let him just settle there.

He didn't live there all that long. I think he died in, like, 1643 or something like that. He wasn't there all that long, but he just had a real catchy name, Bronck. America likes the word Bronck if you think about the west. He wasn't even the first European settler as far as I know. I'm not sure that he was, but he was the one people knew.

Alison Stewart: We're going to talk about the name of the hutch next from chapter three. If you're driving on the Hutchinson River Parkway in the northern Bronx, and you pass under a bridge where Interstate 95 crosses above the Parkway and the Hutchinson River, you are near the spot where a woman named Anne Hutchinson died. That's where it got the name the Hutch. Yes?

Ian Frazier: Right. Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did she arrive in the Bronx, and what was the cause of her death?

Ian Frazier: She was a very outspoken and very charismatic, unofficial religious leader in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She believed that you did not need works. I'm oversimplifying her theology, but she believed that you were just simply justified by faith, that you were okay just as you were. God loved you. You didn't have to go out and do good works. That's a severe oversimplification.

Alison Stewart: Got it.

Ian Frazier: She was a semi-mystic, I guess you could say. She had a lot of followers up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She got kicked out, basically, because she was a threat to the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She went to Rhode island, which was a more open place. Then she heard the Massachusetts people were going to take over Rhode Island, so she came down to the New York area. The Dutch were-- their interests were commercial. They weren't so much founding a Zion in the new world. They were more interested in commerce. They were much more free-thinking in terms of what religion was acceptable to them. They didn't kick people out for issues of faith.

She settled here knowing that she would be welcome, and they did allow her to settle here. The one thing she could have done a little more, maybe, background check because the place was in the middle of very serious conflict with the Native Americans, which had been brought on by a massacre of native people down around where the Manhattan bridge is now. She moved into this place that was-- there were a lot of Native people still living there, and they told her, "We don't want you here." She was always friendly with Native people, and she didn't think she was under any danger. She was killed in the fall of 1643.

Her farm was up there where that intersection that you mentioned, where that intersection is now. There's a beautiful rock up there. It's a great big rock that was brought by the glaciers, and it's called Split Rock. Her farm was supposedly right by Split Rock. When it came to build those highways through there, they were going to erase Split Rock, but because of its association with this famous religious figure, they saved it. The name of the Hutchinson River Parkway? The name of the Hutchinson River commemorates her, and then the Hutchinson River Parkway runs up the Hutchinson River, so that also commemorates her.

She was a very interesting and a very outspoken and dynamic person. In my book, I say that the idea of predestination, which she believed in, the idea that you are predestined to go to heaven, I think if you look at it on a secular level, that's the same as cool. If you're cool, you're just cool.

Alison Stewart: You're cool. You're the star.

Ian Frazier: You can't do anything to earn it, and you can't do anything to lose it. I feel that the predestinarians, like Ann Hutchinson, laid the groundwork for the idea of cool in the USA. I think cool is one of the best exports that we ever came up with.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some calls. I think this is Jigme. Jigme from Old Man Park?

Jigme: Yes. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm well. I'm well, thanks. What's up?

Jimge: Good. I was just calling to share my story about City Island in the Bronx.

Alison Stewart: Sure. You're on the air. Go ahead.

Jigme: Okay. I was an international student from Nepal. When I first moved to New York, I lived in on a sailboat in City Island because rent was really expensive. The boat, I got it for a really cheap price. I lived in an island in the mooring, and that was my memory of the Bronx City Island the first time in New York. I thought it was completely different from New York, how the rest of New York is. Life is very slow and everything. It was great experience.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling. Let's talk to Mark in Westchester. Hi, Mark, thanks for calling All Of It.

Mark: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I was born in Bruns Hospital, which still exists, which is wonderful, in 1942 and lived there until 1964. When I was living in the Bronx then, that part, it was just east of the Concourse at 167th Street. it was an extremely Jewish neighborhood. I've read in various cases that especially in the '30s, '40s, '50s, was one of the most Jewish places in the world.

We did the things that kids did then. We played in the streets, the things that people dream of for suburbs. We were not supervised directly by our parents. We made up our own games. We had an absolutely great time living there. As obviously many people know, the Bronx changed. I blame it mostly on landlords and not taking care of the buildings properly.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to dive in for one second. I'm going to ask Sandy's opinion.

Ian Frazier: That it would have been in the '30. In 1930, the Bronx was 50% Jewish, and the Concourse was much more. The percentage was higher. What's now the South Bronx was 80% Jewish. The idea of the Paradise Bronx, which is what I talk about, is what this caller is referring to, unsupervised play in the streets because people are sitting on their stoops and everybody's aware of what's going on. There is not this huge number of cars that we now have today so that the streets, which were beautifully paved, were open in a playground.

Kids had never had so many open hard flat surfaces where they could just play, where balls bounced true, where you could play hopscotch and tiddlywinks on the-- and all these games that were invented there. The Paradise fell into difficulty when the buildings aged. These buildings went up really quickly in the early part of the 20th century. When they aged, by the time you got into the '50s and '60s, these buildings, many of them were in neighborhoods that had been redlined.

Why had they been redlined? Because the powers that be, bankers, real estate agents, got nervous about the diversity of the Bronx, and they decided that certain blocks and great big parts of the Bronx were too risky to lend to. If you wanted to fix the building up, you couldn't really get a loan to do it. That contributed to the decay of the buildings. They were just falling apart. There were a lot of appliances plugged into wiring that wasn't equipped to take that much stress on it. A lot of buildings caught on fire, and that was something that happened very much in the '70s.

Alison Stewart: Tell us about your corner of the Bronx. Where do you live? What makes it special? What's your favorite part of living in the borough? Or, maybe you have a question about the history of the Bronx. Give us a call 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more with Sandy Frazier after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Sandy Frazier. You'll see it on his book title. It says, Ian Frazier. The name of the book is Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. I do want to go back to a little bit of history. Now, I hope I say this right. Gouverneur Morris?

Ian Frazier: Yes, that's good.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You spent a good amount of time in the book about Gouverneur Morris. Tell us a little bit about him and the borders of Morrisania.

Ian Frazier: The Morris family came to the Bronx in the 17th century, and they were there all the way through. They were the equivalent of barons. They were given this manor. Morrisania was the name of the manor. This, of course, is in the colonial times. This was given to them by the king of England. Gouverneur Morris was a descendant of that family. He was born in 1752. He had a very adventurous life. He was a wild-- He was a founding father. He wrote the Constitution. That is, he physically wrote it. He had excellent handwriting, and he contributed a lot to the constitutional convention.

His house was at the southeast corner of the Bronx. It was where the Bronx Kill comes into the East River, Long Island Sound. That house was in a spot where when railroads came, they would need that land. That was where railroads were going to-- it was just above water level, so that was where the trains were going to go. That house was torn down. If that house was still up in the same way that even Alexander Hamilton's house still exists, we would have another reference point to remember this guy because he is not remembered, Gouverneur Morris.

One of the goals of my book was to say, "Hey, here's this guy. Every place up here is named after him. They're the Gouverneur Morris houses. There's Gouverneur Morris Triangle. There's Gouverneur Morris Square. There's all these different things named for him. Gouverneur Morris playground." Who was he? Nobody knows. Well, if his house didn't have to be torn down, because he himself was a person in between, we might know more about him and might remember him better. I revere him in a certain sense because he wrote the preamble to the constitution. He wrote we the people, simplifying a much more complicated preamble that he had been given. He said, in order to preserve a more perfect union.

I think this is one of the great founding phrases of the United States. In the same way life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is written by Thomas Jefferson, this is written by Gouverneur Morris to create a more perfect union for ourselves and our posterity. What he's saying there is, what he's referring to is, he does not totally approve of the Constitution. He was the most anti-slavery delegate to the constitutional convention. The Constitution institutionalized slavery in the US, and he had opposed that very much. You can read to create a more perfect union as his admission and the convention's admission, we didn't get it right. We hope we'll get it right. We're going to keep working.

People quote that all the time and nobody knows-- Somebody told me recently that they thought that Barack Obama invented that phrase because he used it so many times. It's definitely in the preamble of the Constitution. To me, that's sort of the height of his achievement. He had a very wild life. He was the ambassador to France during the French Revolution. He was the only foreign ambassador to remain in Paris during the terror, where people were being guillotined right and left. While there, he had a number of affairs, but one very major affair with a French countess. He kept a very thorough diary so that we know what Morris did through much of his life. [00:23:27]

I see him as someone, he came up with the idea of the Erie Canal, which was very important to creating the city of New York, the power of the city. He created the grid plan for New York City streets. The fact that he did all these things but is forgotten, I think is indicative of what happens if you're in an in-between place and they tear your house down. I very much want to make sure that people know what the history was so that we don't continue to just pave over things and tear things down and forget how we got to where we are today.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Linda, who is calling from the Bronx. Hi, Linda. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Linda: Hi. I'm glad to be here.

Alison Stewart: Tell us about your life in the Bronx.

Linda: I enjoyed this interview, and I like the Bronx. Did you just ask me a question?

Alison Stewart: No, I just said, tell us your story about the Bronx.

Linda: Oh, okay. Well, I am originally from Detroit, long, long time ago. I came to the Bronx in 1968. I have lived in, I think, three different places in the Bronx. Currently, and for the past couple of decades, I lived in Riverdale. I love the Bronx. It is diverse in every way you can think of. I'm really glad that our author talked about how the diversity was disliked by the banks. They redlined, would not support landlords who wanted to build in the Bronx, and so it became a very downhill borough, but we have an expression now, the boogie down Bronx. That is positive.

Although I live in Riverdale, and a lot of people say, "Where do you live?" I say, "The Bronx." They say, "Where in the Bronx?" I reluctantly say, "Riverdale." Then they go, "Oh, but that's not the Bronx." For so long, movies, et cetera, etcetera, have really depicted the Bronx as a violent, crime-ridden, poverty-stricken, awful place.

Alison Stewart: Linda, thank you so much for joining us. Let's talk to Ray from Fordham Road. Hi, Ray. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Ray: Hey, Alison. What's up, Sandy? I talk to you both. Long-time listener and lover of the Bronx. Lived here all my life. Right now, to give you a picture, Sandy and Alison, I'm on the Bx17, headed down Katonah in the heart of the Bronx.

[laughter]

Ray: Let me see if I can get everybody say, what's up?

Speaker 1: [unintelligible 00:26:20] I'm on the radio WNYC. They doing a piece on the Bronx. Y'all want to say what's up to the Bronx. Tell the people in the world that the Bronx is dope.

Speaker 2: Yes.

[laughter]

Ray: Yes, yes, yes. Just like the Bronx, everybody is not going to participate, but we love the Bronx. What we need in the Bronx though, especially when you're talking about redlining and stuff like that, that's the business I work in. What people need in the Bronx is the dignity brought back to living. The way that the situation of living is concerned is that it's being that the people and the tenants are being, how you can say, they're subjected to live a certain way.

Why are the public hallways not clean? Why is garbage not taken care of? It's because there's a decision decided that the Bronx has to stay like those movies and has to be filthy when people want to live in a clean place. I'm definitely getting the book. Love y'all. Just continue on. I'm at work.

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Ray. Thank you so much for the shout-out. Love that too.

Ian Frazier: He was on the Bx17 bus, what's coming up?

Alison Stewart: Yes, he was. How did the Bronx become part of New York City?

Ian Frazier: How did the Bronx become? Originally, it was part of Westchester County. Then people from New York City started moving into the Bronx because it offered a lot of open space. At first, it was like the Hamptons in that people went there and had fabulous estates. It was a place where you had a lot of land so you could have polo fields. It was a place where you could have race tracks. The Tiffanys of Tiffany's had a beautiful estate up there. A lot of people would visit up there. It was a place with a lot of parkland. Then they began to buy up old estates and land that had been part of people's estates for parkland.

The idea was that it was going to become part of New York City. Then in the 1890s, they voted whether they wanted to be part of New York, and overwhelmingly, both the city and this part of Westchester County voted that this part of Westchester County would become part of New York City. That was before Brooklyn was a part of New York City or before Staten Island or Queens. That was before Manhattan became just one borough, among others. When the Bronx became part of New York City, soon after that, it became its own county. By like 1905, it was part of the city. It was its own county. It was a place with a lot of possibility where people could expand, could build apartments.

The subways reached it in 1905. The first subways got up there, coming up from Manhattan. Once you had the subways, you had the number one, you had the number four, you had the two and the five, and then you had the six. Those subways, I used the analogy of it was like garden sprinklers, that it nourished this place, and apartment buildings sprang up all along those subway lines. Again, when I talk about the Paradise Bronx, that was when you had all this wonderful new housing that people who lived especially on the lower east side, which was the most densely populated place on the planet, could move up there, get nice apartments. It became a place that people would move to.

If you remember, I believe I've been told this, but the last episode of The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason says, "Baby, we're moving to the Bronx." I want that positive view. You need a place where people can live that is not outrageously expensive. The danger is that the Bronx will become another expensive part of the city.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Sibora from Manhattan. Hi, Sibora. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Sibora: Sure. There's a new book which includes anecdotes by about two dozen people, including myself, who grew up in the Patterson Projects. The name of the book is Growing Up in the Patterson Projects: A South Bronx Tale - Keeping Our Roots Alive. It includes personal stories but also a history of the projects in the Bronx and the South Bronx in particular. We show, families moved into the project in the 1950s, and it was a very ethnically diverse place. People, like your guest was just saying, from people moving from the south, lower east side and other places, Harlem, moving up into the safe, newly built apartments that were designed-- the development was designed as a community with schools.

It was the way it looks now was actually a very pleasant place to grow up in the '50s and the '60s. When the funding for public housing was withdrawn, slowly declining, steadily declining, the services supporting the buildings and the infrastructure and everything just also declined.

Alison Stewart: You know what? We're going to end right there because we're going to talk about that after the break. My guest is Sandy Frazier. The name of the book is Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. We'll have more after a quick break.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Sandy Frazier. The new book is called Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. I got a couple of questions for you here from text. "Enjoying the show. Does your guests know how Shakespeare Avenue in the Bronx got its name? I spent some time there back in my youth."

Ian Frazier: I don't have a definitive answer to that, but one of the books that talks about Bronx place names says that back when the Bronx had these estates, a man who had an estate in that area had a park with a path that you could walk through. It had different characters from Shakespeare's plays along this path and that that supposedly coincides with what's now Shakespeare. I don't know if that's the solid, definite explanation, but it is a pretty cool street. I think it's really cool to have a street called Shakespeare.

There happens to be, in that same area, a street called Featherbed Lane. You can stand at the intersection of Featherbed Lane and Shakespeare Street, and it's just like, is there a better intersection anywhere? Featherbed Lane, by the way, got its name, supposedly, because during the revolution, when American troops wanted to sneak by the British, the local people who lived there put their featherbeds on this cobbled street in order to muffle the sounds of the Americans horses and wagons going along the street. Again, these are stories that come up, and who knows? Featherbed Lane, and I guess it's Shakespeare Avenue, Featherbed Lane and Shakespeare Avenue, what an intersection.

Alison Stewart: It says, "My memory of the Bronx is buying two cars and one afternoon at the police car lot, a Buick for 250 and a thunderbird for 125." Someone else wrote, "Both my parents grew up in Coney island back in the 1930s. My dad's mom had a bad sinus condition. The doctor said she should move to a dry climate, so they moved to the Bronx." [laughs]

Ian Frazier: Yes, that is a pretty interesting thing. People used to move there for their health. Edgar Allan Poe moved there for the health of his wife, who had consumption, which is TB. They moved there for that reason, and it didn't particularly help her as she died not that long after they moved there. It is funny that the Bronx had-- people would go there because it was a rural place. It was like a country place that you could recuperate.

Now the Bronx has the worst air in the city, and it has very high rates of asthma. It has bad air, to go back to the question of being in between, because so many vehicles run through there. It has the big market, the produce market there, Hunts Point, and lots and lots of trucks coming and going, so it has changed.

Alison Stewart: The Cross Bronx Expressway, which carries I-95 from New Jersey through Connecticut, runs right through it. The final cost of the highway was $238 million. That's in 1946. That's $2 billion in today's dollars. It is the most expensive road in the history of the time of construction. Robert Carroll writes about it in The Power Broker, obviously about Robert Moses. How did the expressway alter what it meant to live in the Bronx?

Ian Frazier: It cut the Bronx in half. What it did was first knock down a lot of neighborhoods. It physically separated people. People who had been friends didn't see as much of each other, especially during construction, because it was hard to get across-- it remains hard to get across the Cross Bronx if you're going north to south. It was just insulting that you're going to put this kind of road through. People say that it was the worst thing that happened to the Bronx and contributed the most to the decline of the Bronx. It was a violent process of construction and tearing down and dislocation, and for what? For 6.5 miles of highway.

It is tough to get across the Bronx east to west. What I was saying before about the geography of the Bronx and the up and down quality of it, those ridges run north and south, so it makes it hard to push a highway through. In a way, it was an amazing achievement also. The Cross Bronx was almost fatal. I say the highways almost destroyed the Bronx.

Alison Stewart: In 1976, the number of fires of all kinds that year totaled more than 33,000. You write extensively about this moment in Bronx's history, but what is something you think people get wrong or misperceive about the Bronx fires of the 1970s?

Ian Frazier: The idea was this was arson, and some of it was arson. If you look at New York City fire marshal reports, they say only a small percentage of those fires were arson. The idea that the people burned down their own housing for who knows what reason. That was an idea propagated by Senator Moynihan, who said the people of the Bronx must not want housing or they wouldn't burn it down. That was just untrue and unfair for the senator to say about people he represents. That's something people get wrong. It burned for a lot of different reasons.

In a way, it was a panic. It was like the buildings went up in the early 19th century in almost a rush of enthusiasm to build here, and they kind of came down in a panic of fear, like this is all going to fall apart. The buildings were redlined, I repeat. It was hard to get money to repair them. It was also just an idea on behalf of the city that, well, we're just going to let this place go. They closed firehouses in the Bronx when those at the height of this plague of fires. The idea that the people of the Bronx burned down their own buildings is largely nonsense. That's a major thing that people get wrong about the Bronx.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Stephanie online too. Hi, Stephanie. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Stephanie: Hi, and thank you for this wonderful program. I'm getting the book.

Ian Frazier: Good.

Stephanie: I believe I am a child of the Bronx for the most part. It makes me a little bit sentimental. I lived there at the age of maybe one to about three. My grandfather and his brothers had a restaurant on Fordham Road. My great uncle, his brother, had come at the turn of the century, I think in 1905. They were Greeks. He left a Turkish occupied part of northern Greece from a little village where there was a lot of fighting. He came and he got into the restaurant business. His name was Jimmy Serletis, and he had a great restaurant on Fordham Road, right next to Fordham University and the train station, which was quite a hub for people up until the 1940s, I believe.

His two brothers were my grandfather and his brother. It was quite a successful restaurant until the landlord raised the rent and drove my grandfather out of business. The uncle had died. He actually had TB, and he went back to Greece. My grandfather had the restaurant until sometime in the '40s. My mother went to college right there, the Mount St. Vincent. We used to smell Stella D'oro going to my grandparents house in the Major Deegan. They lived all around in Arthur Avenue. They're basically a story of the Bronx for, I guess, the first 60 years of the 20th century anyway. We left the Bronx along with a lot of other kids, and we went to schools in Westchester County when our parents all migrated up.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much, Stephanie. We really appreciate your call. Sandy, toward the end of the book, you write about the present and the future of the Bronx, especially luxury apartments rising along the Harlem River. The rents have gone through the roof, 26% in the past decade. What do you think the city needs to do or getting right to ensure that the Bronx doesn't fall into further gentrification?

Ian Frazier: A fact that I think everybody should just keep in mind, I keep in mind, 34% of renters in the Bronx pay more than 50% of their income in rent and go back to Gouverneur Morris. If you had said to him, "Is that the kind of country that you're looking for is something where people are basically back to--" How does that differ from serfdom? That's too much rent. How do you deal with that? I am not a housing expert. I can't say how it can be done. I have no prescription, but I know that it is important that somehow that number, 34%, paying more than 50%, that has to change. It just can't be how people live.

What you look for in the future is, this is a place with extremely good infrastructure in terms of the subways to begin with, railroad access. They're now building metro north stations on the southeast part of the Bronx. It is a great place. It's a great place. Easy access to the city. People will want to live there. They will continue to. It should be a place that is affordable. How one goes about that, I don't know.

I know that the idea is you're going to gentrify Jerome Avenue and make it so that you can't have auto shops on Jerome Avenue. What else is Jerome Avenue? Jerome Avenue is a perfect place for auto shops. They've been there forever. They support a lot of people, a lot of people who come in from other countries. You can make a better wage in an auto shop than you can in food service, which is the other entry level job that people get. Why not have auto shops on Jerome Avenue?

Alison Stewart: It's what happened at 10th Avenue.

Ian Frazier: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Let's try to get one more call in. Hi, Michael. You've got about a minute?

Michael: Okay. I'll go through a list then. My parents had a three-bedroom apartment on Walton Avenue in the '50s. Three bedrooms. The rent was $93 a month. My father used to take me to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, where he played soccer with his adult friends on Sunday mornings. Now, I've been back recently. Now soccer has become cricket.

Ian Frazier: Yes. That's true.

Michael: There was two great ice cream parlors around Fordham Road, Jahns and Krumbs, beginning with a K. The library on Bainbridge Avenue, I used to live there every Saturday. You've already mentioned street games, ball games, punch ball, stickball, stuff like that. There's a great theater on the Grand Concourse called the Loew's Paradise that used to be considered one of the top three or four movie theaters in the city because of its expanse and its star-studded ceiling and its big screen and stuff like that. At some point, I think it was broken down into a multiplex. I don't know what it is now.

Alison Stewart: Okay. I'm going to stop you right there because you went a little more than a minute, but there was good stuff.

Ian Frazier: Yes. I would just say that Loew's, or Loew's, it's pronounced as far as I can tell, two different ways, is still there. It has not been broken down into multiple. It's now a church of some kind. Some evangelical church has taken it over. Yes, that was an incredible place. That was called the Paradise. Across the street was the Paradise bowling alley. There was a lot of Paradise naming back in those days in the Bronx, and so that's one reason I called my book Paradise Bronx.

Alison Stewart: Can you give us a reason why hip hop came out of the Bronx?

Ian Frazier: It was an answer. It was an answer to all the stuff that had been done to the Bronx. It was like, "Well, you brought massive machines in here to flatten us, and look at the size of these speakers. We have speakers that one of the guys said you could live inside of those speakers. We're going to turn it up so loud that the streetlight that we're draining power from gets dim. We're going to blast this to the skies." It's like an answer. Hip hop is like an answer to, like, "Oh, you're going to do planned shrinkage on the place where that was an idea that they had? You're going to push highways through here and not care about who lives here? Well, we have an answer, and here it is."

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Paradise Bronx: The life and times of New York's Greatest Borough is by Ian Frazier. Thank you for spending the hour with us.

Ian Frazier: Oh, I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.