[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Now a love letter to the Bronx from the writer, Ian Frazier. His latest book, which has been described as his magnum opus, is Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. It takes readers on a journey through the borough's tapestry of history, culture and resilience. To write this book, Frazier actually embarked on a thousand mile trek across the Bronx, not easy, considering the actual size of the borough. He weaves together the past and present in a beautiful, compelling way. He spends a good chunk of time in the book in what he considers the Bronx's golden age.

Around the early 20th century, we get a picture of a thriving, diverse community where Jewish immigrants, Caribbean newcomers and migrants from the American South help create a sort of paradise, as he describes it. He gets into the unmaking of that paradise, but lots of contemporary beauty, too. Here to present his love letter to the Bronx is Ian Frazier, frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author of several previous books, including Great Plains, Travels in Siberia, and now his latest book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. Hi, Ian. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ian Frazier: Well, hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We'll open up the phones in a minute for Bronxites or anyone with ties to the borough. I'll point out that you've written about various aspects of New York City in the past in your books about the Great Plains and Siberia. Why did you decide to focus specifically on the Bronx for this book, and what made it an ideal setting for what has become your magnum opus?

Ian Frazier: Well, I thought it was a place that was not sufficiently reported on. We hear about other parts of New York City, but the Bronx didn't get as much attention as I thought it deserved. Some of the attention that it got was negative and mistaken, I thought, and to some extent, undeserved. I just wanted to explore this interesting place that I thought had not been sufficiently explored.

Brian Lehrer: Where do you begin this 500-page story of the Bronx?

Ian Frazier: Well, I begin it talking about the Bronx as a geographic entity. I mean, the Bronx is part of the continent. There's no water between it and the rest of the continent. New York City is an archipelago, except for the Bronx.

Brian Lehrer: Another way to put it is the Bronx is the only borough that's on the us mainland, right?

Ian Frazier: Right.The metaphor I use is it's like a hand that holds on to the other burrows and keeps them from drifting away on the tide. To connect to the continent, the New York City archipelago has to kind of run through the Bronx and hold on to the Bronx. The Bronx anchors it. It used to be called the continent. It used to be called the mainland, back in colonial times, when people mostly lived on Manhattan or in Brooklyn or on Staten island. Geographically, it has a big job. I also refer to it as an in between place. It's a place that people pass through to go somewhere else. That has taken a toll on it.

Brian Lehrer: You write its name, Honks, Bronx. Ideally, we could ask for a better sounding name, I guess, one that did not suggest a Bronx cheer just by the sound of it as it comes out of our mouths, but Bronx is what we got. How did the Bronx get its name?

Ian Frazier: Well, Jacob Bronx settled there in 1639 and had a farm there on the river that runs right through the middle of the Bronx, which became known as Bronx river because his property abutted it. Then the Bronx river became just a way of referring to the borough, the Bronx. It's the only borough with "the" in its name. The name is just a very compelling name. There was a poem written in the early 19th century just called Bronx, written by a poet named Joseph Rodman Drake, who is now forgotten. The poem was a famous poem in its time, and it established this powerful place name in people's minds.

So that later, when they went to look for a way of naming this place, which it had a bunch of provisional names before that, not only the mainland, but during the Revolutionary War, it was called the neutral ground because it was in between American lines and British lines. It became a part of the city, it became a borough, it was called. They chose the name Bronx because it had already effectively, sort of that name had become attached to it by then but it's a good name. It starts near the beginning of the Alphabet, and ends near the end of the Alphabet. It's kind of a fun word to say. Bronx.

Brian Lehrer: It is. Let's see. Who was the wise guy poet who wrote the short poem, the Bronx?

Ian Frazier: Ogden Nash.

Brian Lehrer: Ogden Nash.

Ian Frazier: Well, this is kind of to say thonx, not no thonx. I felt like those two words had had too much effect in defining the Bronx and dismissing it. What does Ogden Nash know? I mean, I feel like that about a lot of dismissive art that I could say was applied to this part of the city.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we will invite your love letters to the Bronx. If you call the Bronx home or ever have or have ties to the place of any kind, past or present, the place that Ian Frazier calls New York's greatest borough, tell us what makes it quite unlike anywhere else. Your love letters to the Bronx, or questions for Ian Frazier, whose new book is called Paradise Bronx, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. You also tell us a bit about the life of Governor Morris, a founding father with ties to the Bronx. What drew you to his story as we stay on early history, at least in the white settler era? How does he fit into the larger narrative of the borough's history?

Ian Frazier: Well, he was considered one of the founding fathers. He had a big hand in writing the US Constitution, and he had a house right at the southeast corner of the Bronx. The Morrises. The Morris family owned most of what's to the South Bronx today. He was just an interesting and strange guy who was very important in the American Revolution, who was the most outspoken anti slavery delegate to the constitutional convention, made a very famous speech about how we did not want to enshrine slavery in our constitution. Then he was ambassador to Paris.

He was ambassador in Paris during the French Revolution, and he was the only ambassador from any country who stayed in Paris while the terror was going on. He had a weird courage, and he was a very lonesome guy. He was kind of a loner. I think of him as an in-between person. He was responsible for great civic improvements. He came up with the grid system for New York City, the streets, the way the streets are laid out in Manhattan. That was basically his idea. He was a big promoter and developer of the Erie Canal, which was as important a civic structure as New York City ever made. [crosstalk] Very important.

Brian Lehrer: Is Gouverneur Morris.

Ian Frazier: Gouverneur Morris, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Is he the reason we have the Bronx neighborhoods of Morris Heights and Morris park?

Ian Frazier: Oh, yes. That family, everything is named after him. The first public secondary school in the Bronx was Governor Morris High School, which is today still got Morris in its name. I think it's called something like the Morris campus or something. It was during the paradise period of the Bronx that you mentioned. It was the most integrated high school in the United States. Many good things are associated with Gouverneur Morris. He was a strange and ambiguous person in his own way. I feel that he was, as I said, a kind of in between person. He was both respectable and in some ways, not very respectable either.

Brian Lehrer: You just referred to the-- go ahead. You can finish that thought. Sorry.

Ian Frazier: Well, his house is long gone. The support structure for the RFK bridge is exactly where his house used to be. Before that, the railroads came through there and tore down his house. I talk about him in the sense that he is a forgotten person, or he has been, despite lots and lots of things being named for him. If you say to somebody, do you know who Gouverneur Morris was? Very few people will know. I've never, in fact, met anybody who knew who this guy was.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I didn't know until your book. That's why Morris Heights, which I don't live that far from, or Morris park, which has been in the news lately for some of the development and metro north station that's planned but you just used that phrase, the paradise era of the Bronx and the title of the book is Paradise Bronx. How and when did the Bronx become paradise? Did people call it that before your book title?

Ian Frazier: Well, it had a couple paradise periods. In the 19th century. It was sort of like what the Hamptons are today. It was a retreat for people with houses in Manhattan. In the 20th century, after it was developed as a subway suburb. That is when the subways came in, that created the Bronx. They came in by, most of them were in by 1920. Just development went up everywhere. What happened at that time was that the streets were paved. Once you had paved streets, you had this wonderful place for children to play, and you had a place where parents would then hang out on their stoop, because here their kids playing stickball in the street, or they're playing jacks just in the street.

There weren't that many cars. When a car came, people would say, "Oh, car." People would step up on the curb and the car would go by, and then you would go back to playing. I say in the book, kids had never had so many smooth, wide open spaces to play in. That was, of course, true for other urban parts of the city and the country. It was this period where kids could play in the street, and then suddenly you had cars. Cars came after the second world war in huge numbers, and that was the end of that street era of the Bronx.

That paradise period, which was also a period of a lot of immigration had come to the Bronx. That stopped in 1924 with the immigration Restriction act. You had this place of a lot of different kinds of people, people hanging out together in a place where kids could play. Then the motor car, as it was then called, sort of took over these spaces, and that era ended.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, you've got a sentence in the book that sums up the 20th century in the Bronx in one sentence. Then, of course, there's so much that fleshes it out but you wrote, "A history of the Bronx in the 20th century can be sketched in a sentence. The subways created the modern Bronx, and the highways almost destroyed it." This is a Robert Moses story, right?

Ian Frazier: Well, he's the figure that everybody looks at as the destroyer of many urban spaces for the sake of building highways, which was part of a big vision, and it was a national vision we were going to pave everywhere. Where I lived in Ohio, freeways were put through in the same way. It wasn't as visible as it is in the Bronx, where you could see the cross Bronx expressway just destroyed neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood as it went east west across the Bronx.

That was a decision made without sufficient thinking, is does this make sense? Do we want to do this? I don't feel that people, people were not consulted or people who resisted it were kind of cast aside. Moses does for want of a better. He is certainly the villain. The city had already decided that it was going to go from being a city to being a metro area. The Bronx was sort of the sacrifice zone for creating this huge metro area that for better or worse, is what we live in today.

Brian Lehrer: We'll come up more to the present. I will say I was speaking to a 90-something-year-old recently who told me that the building that he grew up in in the Bronx, after he grew up and moved out, he learned that it was demolished and what now stands there is the Cross Bronx Expressway. A lot of people with stories like that, and we're going to hear some Bronx stories. Our lines are full with people who want to talk to Ian Frazier on the occasion of the publication of his book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. We're going to start with Daryl in the Bronx. Daryl, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Daryl: Hello. Good morning. How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right, how about you? [crosstalk]

Daryl: I'm fine. Born in 1958, the boogie down Bronx. I have a lot to say on that. When my father first moved up into the Bronx, it was nothing but farmland. That was something like 1930, 1940, something like '50. He said was nothing but farmland when he first arrived here. I love the idea of having the conversation about the Bronx, because just like the gentleman said, we're the only borough that's not an island. A lot of folks don't understand that. I tell them, if you watch that movie about the bridges, if the bridges collapse around New York City, we still on mainland. That's one. We have a lot of famous individuals, like Stan Lee went to Clinton High School.

Brian Lehrer: Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame.

Daryl: Marvel Comics, the creative Marvel Comics. They have a mural in Clinton high School in there showing Stan Lee. I got a picture of it because I work in that area, so I know of that. The other thing you talk about General Colin Powell, who's our secretary of treasure. He went to Morris High School. We have all these famous things. We got Pole park over on the Grand Concord. The Bronx has a lot of things. Entertainment, we started doo-wop. We have some of the famous doo-wop groups that used to sing over the Fordham road.

Brian Lehrer: Started doo-wop and started hip hop.

Daryl: Yes, exactly. Then there's one school right behind Roosevelt High School. The famous movie star from the forays. They played with-- Oh, man, I can't think of his name right now.

Brian Lehrer: You have this one in.

Daryl: No. Not [unintelligible 00:17:50]. Who's the other one?

Brian Lehrer: I'm not sure. You mean Spencer [unintelligible 00:17:54]?

Daryl: He is a Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Ian Frazier: [unintelligible 00:18:01] that I didn't know.

Brian Lehrer: I'd have to look that one up.

Daryl: Look, we have some famous movie stars that attended that school across the street from Roosevelt High School, right there on Fordham Road. It's one of the oldest schools there. Do you hear me? Then on Tremont--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. We'll let you do one more. Tremont Avenue. Then we're going to get some other folks on. This is great.

Daryl: On Tremont Avenue, right past white plains, off the cross Bronx expressway, I believe is the oldest school in the Bronx, because if you look at their charter, it doesn't say New York City, it just says the Bronx. There's a lot of history we have in the Bronx. A lot of history.

Brian Lehrer: Daryl, thank you very much. What a great call. Ian, he could have written the book, for one thing. A couple of people are pointing out, it's a nitpicking thing, but Colin Powell was secretary of state, not secretary of the treasury, and I think we looked it up. He was talking about James Cagney, probably from Yankee Doodle Dandy but I don't know if he came from the Bronx.

Ian Frazier: I don't either. Colin Powell was from Kelly street, which is a famous street. Sonia Sotomayor briefly lived on that street. There were other famous people right from that area, which is Longwood. Yes, if you want to know the famous people, you just walk on the grand concourse on the walk of fame, and every streetlight has the name of another person on it. There are hundreds.

Brian Lehrer: We mentioned Morris park. Here's Tom, now in East Chester, who says he grew up in the Morris park area. Tom, you're on WNYC with Ian Frazier. Hi.

Tom: Thank you, Lehrer. I love the show. I was born in 1944. My family immigrated from Ireland, and they moved to the Bronx in '28 but here's a couple of interesting things that I think is accurate. Morris park is not named after Gouverneur Morris. Morris park is actually named after a man named John Morris. Here's the story. Leonard Jerome, who Jerome Avenue is named after, and the Jerome Avenue subway line, is the grandfather of Winston Churchill. He had a daughter named Jenny Jerome.

She married into the Marlborough family. Her father, Leonard, Churchill's grandfather, was a rich man. He built racetracks. He built the first racetrack in the Bronx, and it was called Jerome park over on Kingsbridge. He then partnered with a guy named John Morris from Louisiana, and in 1905, they built the Morris park racetrack, which was there until about 1910 or so. Then it became a racetrack.

When I grew up, everybody that I knew where I lived was either from Germany, Ireland, or Italy, and that area is still pretty much the same today. I think the book is great. I read the piece in the New Yorker, and one quick anecdote. My daughter gave me a t-shirt. It said, "Bronx, the motherland." I said to my daughter, "Ann, I can't take the shirt." She looked crestfallen. She said, "How come, dad?" I said, "It's called the Bronx." She had it spray painted back in the Bronx, so thank you for the book.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Tom. Any reflection on any of that, Ian?

Ian Frazier: Well, I didn't know that about Morris park, and I just quickly looked it up in my History in Asphalt by John McNamara, which is a book I recommend to anybody interested in the Bronx, because it tells you what names of places were originally and what the name comes from. Yes, it is from John Morris. I assumed it was the Morrises of Gouverneur Morris's family, because there were so many of them and so much is named after them. Yet Jerome was the guy who, they built Jerome Avenue, like he and his brother just built it back when if you had a lot of money and you wanted to just build a road through the Bronx, you could.

He built it to connect, I forget which bridge with his racetrack, which was in Kingsbridge and which is now under the Jerome park reservoir. Jenny Jerome, she and her sisters all married British nobility of one kind or another. She's the mother of Winston Churchill. I don't know that he ever came back to the Bronx, Winston Churchill. I don't know if he was particularly aware of that connection, but it's an interesting connection.

Brian Lehrer: Ian Frazier with us. His new book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. Another oral history call, but also oral present call, I think, from Brian in the Bronx. Brian, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Brian: Hello, Brian. Love your show. Very much looking forward to reading Ian's book. I was just on Morris Park Avenue when the show started. I'd been down in the Bronx my whole career. I teach at the medical school. I was born on the grand concourse at a hospital that was then known as the Bronx Maternity Hospital, which is now the site of the Concourse nursing home. When I got old enough to understand, my aunt pointed out to me that there were four exterior flights of stairs that led up to the door of the hospital. I thought to myself, "Oh, my goodness, there were lots of babies that were likely born on those steps."

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. We're going to take a break, and we're going to continue till the top of the hour because we have so many great Bronx calls coming in, and we have more of the history from the book to do as well with Ian Frazier, who, again, is the author now of Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. I will, as a queen's kid, ask you why you rate the Bronx number one over the other four, but stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, more on the Bronx, your calls, and Ian Frazier.

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we can continue with Ian Frazier from the New Yorker is where you probably know his writing or his previous books about the Great Plains, about Siberia and what part of the earth did he turn his attention to now? Paradise Bronx is the name of the book, subtitled The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. Before we go back to the phones, we talked about your notion that the subways created the modern Bronx, and the highways almost destroy it b ut I definitely want to talk about the resilience since the cross Bronx Expressway and the Deegan, et cetera, went in. What are some of the stories of resilience that stood out to you from the more contemporary eras as you wrote this book?

Ian Frazier: Well, one way to get a sense of the resilience of the Bronx is to go around and just look at places, what names they have now. You see all these different places with names on them, and you don't know who the people are. You can look the people up online, and they're amazing people who just created their community. They resisted the destruction. They didn't move out. The city was saying, we're just going to let this go back to grass. There was a time when the city was operating on a plan known as planned shrinkage.

It was an unofficial plan, but they were going to close subway stops. They did close firehouses at a time when fires were increasing. The idea was, well, this place, we just never figure out what to do with it, so just forget about it. At the time, half a million people live south of the cross Bronx Expressway. I talk about a woman named Jerry Lamb. She ived in the hunts point part of the Bronx, and just what she did in her community.

You can go, and there's a street there, and it's named Jerry Lamb Avenue, and you aren't going to know who Jerry Lamb is, but if you look her up, you find this is someone who did all kinds of good in this neighborhood. One of the things I talk about in the book is a young kid whom she mentored. She could see this kid was going to be something, and he didn't think he was. He was very confused kid. She said, we're going to get this kid in good schools and we're going to just pay attention to him.

She did that with many other kids, but this kid went on to become a police inspector. Keon Ramsey and I have a whole thing in my book about Keon Ramsey, one of the really remarkable people of the NYPD. There were organizations that started as tenants just taking over their buildings because the landlord had disappeared, and what are we going to do with this building? One of the organizations that I follow is the Banana Kelly, which is now a major housing organization in the Bronx providing affordable housing. That was started by people who lived on that part of Kelly street known as Banana Kelly. They were just neighbors. They lived there. They renovated some buildings all on their own.

They kind of squatted the buildings, renovated them, fixed them up, and it grew to this very important organization. There are many other organizations that just resisted. They didn't let the buildings go to rack and ruin and ran the buildings themselves. You think about how does someplace get rebuilt? You imagine it comes from outside. It also comes just from the people who live there. The Bronx was, to me, a heroic story of renovating buildings and getting new buildings built and staying in a place that they loved, that they'd always lived in, their parents had lived in, and not moving out, but staying.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, a number of people are writing in to point out that I was wrong in speculating to an earlier caller who raised the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, that it was the actor James Cagney in that film who he was thinking of, who was from the Bronx. A number of people have pointed out that James Cagney was born and raised in Manhattan, not the Bronx. Alice in Brooklyn, however, grew up in the Bronx. Alice here on WNYC. Hello.

Alice: Hi. I actually am in Brooklyn. I'm a transplant. My husband and I have a mixed marriage. I grew up in the Bronx, and he grew up in Brooklyn.

Brian Lehrer: That must have been tough dating? That's about a two and a half hour subway ride, right?

Alice: Well, by that time, I had moved but the thing is the Bronx was a wonderful place in those years. I lived near the Yankee stadium, and we used to have the opportunity to see all the ball players of the most famous teams in Yankee history coming around in the neighborhood. They used to stay at the Concourse Plaza hotel, which was, in those days, a very grand place. My husband and I got married at the Bronx Concourse Temple, which is now the Bronx Museum of the Arts. We have a long history. I went to Bronx Science. Many, many famous people went there as well, including when I was there, Stokely Carmichael.

Ian Frazier: Yes. Well, I do want to point one thing out about Bronx Science. Its graduates can claim eight Nobel prizes of that high school. One high school, eight Nobel prizes. That's more than many countries, most countries, in fact. There are these distinguished things from the Bronx that people often are surprised to hear that, or they don't know. They don't know how much has come out of the Bronx.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, and Alice, thank you. Listener writes, please ask Ian to talk about City Island, a part of the Bronx but not connected to the mainland. Also Hart Island. Listener writes, spent much of my 1950s childhood sailing my parents old wood day sailor out of City island under the Whitestone Bridge and/or around Hart Island. There was no throgs neck bridge until 1961. Do you write about City Island?

Ian Frazier: I mention it. Yes. I say that if the Bronx is the continent, I say, if you omit its own islands, the islands like Harden and City island and Rikers island, all of which are part of the Bronx. I talk a little bit about City island. It's a pretty interesting place on its own. That's where they built PT boats during World War II. Now there's a bridge, but Hart Island is the island where people who don't have any other place to be buried are buried, where the city buries them. It's a kind of spooky place. I haven't ever been to Hart Island itself, but I've been to the dock where the coffins are unloaded and it's kind of the River Styx or something in the afterworld.

Brian Lehrer: We did a whole segment on the show on Hart island last year or the year before. Listener writes, if I could give a shout out to my mother, Mary Daley, Bronx born and raised. She was the first member of her family to attend college at Fordham, where she met my father from Brooklyn and eventually became the first woman to serve as the dean of St. John's University School of Law. There's your Bronx queen's connection, writes that listener. That's a good one. Why, by the way, do you call the Bronx in the subtitle of your book the greatest borough?

Ian Frazier: Well, I kind of set my own criterion for what made it great, but I would give it that on the basis of resilience and invention. Hip hop was invented in the Bronx, and there's no real dispute about that. It's an amazing invention. It went all the way around the world, and it was invented by teenagers in the early 1970s. Right there, I just think, wow, you invented an art form that had this huge effect. It was also invented at the darkest time of the Bronx when you were having, you know, 1976. There were, like, 36,000 fires in the Bronx.

The Bronx was being left to burn. Nobody even knew anything about hip hop nationally until 1979, but the first hip hop jam, there's even a marker on the building. 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. DJ Kool Herc and his family had this party on August 11, 1973. Well, that's pretty early in terms of where the fires had started in the '60s, and they continued to burn through the '70s. As I said, '76 was the worst year in terms of number of fires. At that same time, kids are going to playgrounds, they're wiring their massive speakers into streetlights.

They're turning those speakers up so loud that the streetlights dim, and they're inventing this art that is based on the beat rather than on any new beat. It's just the beat itself. This kind of radical and interesting invention, to me, that's a real major accomplishment. I kind of went by that. In a way, every borough is great but you want to say the Bronx needs a little bit more attention than it's got.

Brian Lehrer: I think Bill in Queens is calling with a memory of the era you were just describing. Bill, you're on WNYC with Ian Frazier. Hello.

Bill: Hi, Brian. Thank you and Ian, so much for this. Ian, you tapped such a rich example of resiliency. We're writing a book on resiliency now based on the Rockaways, but that's diverting. Back in the '70s, I was trying to place the year, I'm sure it was 1976. We took on Bathgate as a result of a community organizer activist. If I could name his name, he may still be active in politics, Xavier Rodriguez, who went around to the major architectural firms. I'm an architect, urban designer, to the major firms asking for help. Architects are vulnerable to that kind of request. Some reacted, some didn't. I took on that issue.

The South Bronx was burning bonfire, the vanities, and all that good stuff, and it established the reputation it has now. At that time, this was the most amazing place. The Bathgate thing was a result of the cross Bronx and right on the cross Bronx was a beautiful thing called a police precinct. I think that's also become notorious, I forget the name. It was situated also between two incredible neighborhood parks, one having a closed public swimming pool, which is again, ideal, rows of abandoned, beautiful townhouses and so forth and so on. We redid the Bathgate.

Brian Lehrer: Bill, I'm going to leave it there because we're almost out of time in the show, but thank you for those memories. Going to read one text real quick that says, my father lived a block away from Yankee Stadium on Gerard Avenue and many players lived in the neighborhood. He told me of walking Yogi Berra home after games. Ha. We have a Yogi Berra segment in the works in our hundred years of a hundred things series because he was born in 1925, but that'll come on next year.

To finish up and back to your book, I mean, the Bronx is always changing, as we've been hearing. Like so many other parts of the city is now undergoing some gentrification. It gets impoverished and that's a problem. It gets gentrified and that's a problem. How do you think the borough maintains its essence in the face of constant transformation? We have 40 seconds.

Ian Frazier: Well, I think that you need a place where people can live and where you can start out that, and that will of necessity be a place that, it's not going to be the [unintelligible 00:39:02] side. It's going to be a place where you can afford an apartment I certainly hope it can continue to be that. There's all this gentrification plan for Jerome Avenue, for example. That gentrification would remove all the auto shops, all the auto repair places along Jerome, which are very important to the city. As you pull up across Bronx, you can go up Jerome Avenue. You need to get a new tire. You can get it.

Brian Lehrer: There we have to leave it with a question mark for the future about a part of the Bronx with Ian Frazier, frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author now of Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. This was wonderful. Thank you so much.

Ian Frazier: Well, thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Callers, you're incredible. 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.