Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I wanted to preview some of the conversations we'll be having on the show later this week. Grammy Award-winning musician Maren Morris has just released a new album. It's called DREAMSICLE. Tomorrow, she'll join us for a listening party. On Wednesday, former District Attorney Catherine Christian will be here to discuss the case of Sean Diddy Combs.

On Thursday, we'll talk about a new exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden that brings Vincent van Gogh paintings to life with flower installations. That is in the future. Now let's get this hour started with a book about the Bronx that just won an award.

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Alison Stewart: We have exciting news from one of our recent guests. This morning, it was announced that the writer Ian Frazier won the Gotham Book Prize for his work called Paradise Bronx: The Life and Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. Frazier has spent the last 15 years walking the Bronx, mastering its geography, researching its history, and getting to know its culture and people.

Those neighborhood strolls were the bedrock of his writing in Paradise Bronx. Frazier writes that for many, living in the Bronx has often meant surviving "in between, in between the American continent and the islands that make up New York City, in between two opposing sides of the resolutionary war, in between the destructive construction of expressways, and in between times of paradise and times of struggle."

While announcing Frazier's book as one of this year's two winners, the co-founders of the Gotham Book Prize called Paradise Bronx "a compelling narrative that sweeps the reader up in the pulsing culture, diverse lives, and fascinating past and present of our northernmost borough. Ian Frazier, who likes to go by Sandy, joined me to talk about his research. I started by asking Sandy what you can observe about the Bronx by walking, as opposed to just driving through, around it, or taking the train.

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, and 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 it's a hilly place, and it's also varied. It's kind of 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 seven 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, so you're kind of going from an upstate geography, a hilly and kind of challenging geography, to a shore geography, to a coastal geography in one place, so that's another kind of 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: Well, 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, and the islands are, I would say, kind of 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 don't realize that, you may not realize that, as just a work of nature, it's a wonder.

It has so many different environments that it incorporates. It has salt water, and it has fresh water or brackish water. It has ocean and it has land, and the combination is just-- I don't even know. I think it's one of the most blessed places geographically on the planet, and when you walk it, you see. 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, tit 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, so you're imagining this was Oyster City, and if you go to places where there were Lenape Villages, you'll see there are middens, 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, and you would create these big mounds of oyster shells, so it was, as I say, a blessed place, and the Bronx is kind of 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. 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, and 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, and 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 where he lived. They would say, "Well, that's Bronck's land," and then they said, "That's Bronck's River," so we have the Bronck's River. We had Bronck's land, and pretty soon, that name was just sort of out there ever since Jonas Bronck lived there, and 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? That's it?

[laughter]

Ian Frazier: That's it. 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, so there you have another. It's between the extremes of the alphabet, but the name came from the Bronx River and from Jonas Bronck, and I think also from this poem, which was a famous poem of its time, and it's an ode to the Bronx River.

It's like somebody saying, "Oh, my dear Bronx River, how much I love you," and it's kind of a good poem, even. The place had a bunch of other names, and 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: Well, he must have been, because he had his own ship. He came here on his own ship, which was called The Fire of Troy. It seems like an unlucky name, maybe, to give a ship. He came in 1639 and bought land from the Munsee, which was a tribe of the Lenape, and also paid the Dutch, who by then had established themselves in Lower Manhattan. He, I guess, kind of gave them money to let him just settle there, and he didn't live there all that long.

I think he died in 1643 or something like that. He wasn't there all that long, but he just had a real catchy name like Bronck. America likes the word Bronc, 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: Let's talk to Ray from Fordham Road. Hi, Ray. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Ray: Hey. Hey, Allison. What's up, Sandy? I'm honored to talk to you both. A longtime listener and a lover of the Bronx. Lived here all my life. Right now, to give you a picture, Sandy and Allison, I'm on the BX17, headed down Katona in the heart of the Bronx. [laughter] Let me see if I can get everybody to say what's up. Hey, y'all, I'm on the radio, WNYC. They're doing a piece on the Bronx.

Y'all want to say what's up in the Bronx? Tell the people in the world that the Bronx is dope. [laughter] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: Aw, I love that.

Ray: 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 kind of the business I work in, but 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 in 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, but I'm definitely getting a book. Love y'all, and 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 a BX17 bus that's coming up?

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

Ian Frazier: Well, originally, it was part of Westchester County, and then people from New York City started moving into the Bronx because it offered a lot of open space, and at first, it was sort of like The Hamptons in that people went there and had fabulous estates, and 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 racetracks. The Tiffany's 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, and 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, and 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, and when the Bronx became part of New York City, soon after that, it became its own county. By 1905, it was part of the City. It was its own county, and it was a place with a lot of possibility, where people could expand, could build apartments, and the subways reached it in 1905.

The first subways got up there, coming up from Manhattan, and once you had the subways, you had the Number 1, you had the Number 4, you had the 2 and the 5, and then you had the 6. Those subways, I use the analogy of like there was 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, and it became a place that people would move to.

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

Alison Stewart: From text, it says, "My memory of the Bronx is buying two cars in 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 drive climate, so they moved to the Bronx."

Ian Frazier: Yes, that is a pretty interesting thing. People used to move there for their health, and Edgar Allan Poe moved there for the health of his wife, who had consumption, which is TB, and they moved there for that reason, and it didn't particularly help her as she died not that long after they moved there, but it is funny that the Bronx-- 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, and 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 at the time of construction. Robert Caro 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: Well, it cut the Bronx in half, and what it did was first knock down a lot of neighborhoods. It separated people. It physically separated people that 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, and it was just sort of 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, but 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, and 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, and in a way, it was an amazing achievement also. Yes, 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: Well, the idea was this was arson, and some of it was arson, but 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, and 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.

Well, 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," and the buildings were redlined, I repeat, so 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," and they closed firehouses in the Bronx at the height of this plague of fires. The idea that the people of the Bronx burned down their own buildings is largely nonsense, and that's a major thing that people get wrong about the Bronx.

Alison Stewart: 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 get in right to ensure that the Bronx doesn't fall into further gentrification?

Ian Frazier: Well, 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. 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-- What is that? 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, and 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 kind of entry-level job that people get. Why not have auto shops on Jerome Avenue?

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

Ian Frazier: Yes.

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, and we're going to turn it up so loud that the street light that we're draining power from gets dim. We're going to blast this to the skies," and 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-

Alison Stewart: "We have an answer." [laughs]

Ian Frazier: -and here it is."

Alison Stewart: That was Sandy Frazier speaking about his book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. It won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize. The other winner, she was a guest on The Brian Lehrer Show. Want to give her a shout-out? That's Nicole Gelinas. The name of her book is Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. Congrats to both.