Learn more. 08.10.2019 United States Cities Film and TV History Why the Bronx Burned An interview with Vivian Vzquez Irizarry Gretchen Hildebran There's a popular narrative that blames the blight and decline of the South Bronx in the 1970s on the working-class people who lived there. Because of those factors, the houses held little value as collateral and lenders would only offer mortgage . We spoke to so many people who talk about the South Bronx as diverse and vibrant, where you can ask for sugar from your neighbor. In 1938 as the New Deal infused capital into cities and Robert Moses molded New York the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) carved America into the unequal landscapes it is today. We had a general knowledge of the history. Either way, claiming it was necessary for the budget, the city was closing fire stations across The Bronx, ensuring that even a minor fire would have time to spread.In the end, 80% of housing was destroyed and 250,000 people were displaced. Meanwhile, the rest of the Bronx suffers. <> What we want to say in the film is that yes, young people did all kinds of stuff, but who were the forces behind it? The geographic definitions of the South Bronx have evolved and are disputed but certainly include the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose and Port Morris. The geographic boundaries of the red lines are still there, but they do not delineate zones of something vs. nothing. In particular, its termination in 1968 makes it inadequate for answering the two questions people most frequently ask me: why does housing segregation persist nearly a century after the creation of redlining maps and what can be done to fight housing segregation today? . Maps Reveal Redlined Areas Face Higher Flood Risks - Bloomberg.com His remarks would not have been out of place in 1977 or 1987: Government has to be a partner and get it right, Clinton said. [44][45][46][47] Its precincts have recorded high violent crime rates and are all considered to be New York City Police Department "impact zones. Decoupling urban crisis and decline can thus provide a useful model for understanding what happened after the events of Race for Profit. [73] During a rally to save the building, DJ Kool Herc said, "1520 Sedgwick is the Bethlehem of Hip-Hop culture. ", "Tenants Might Buy the Birthplace of Hip-Hop", "1520 Sedgwick Avenue to be Recognized as Official Birthplace of Hip-Hop", "An Effort to Honor the Birthplace of Hip-Hop", "1520 Sedgwick Avenue Honored as a Hip-Hop Landmark Today", N.Y.C. The film challenges the narrative of why the South Bronx burned. It generated enough enthusiasm in the mainstream media for a short while to draw the art world's attention. They are producing racially literate structural analyses that emphasize the role of capital in housings political economy. To recenter their story on anything but that is unjust. [13] Jews in the South Bronx numbered 364,000 or 57.1% of the total population in the area. 16 0 obj One reason why widespread arson was possible was because predatory inclusion actually hardened neighborhood boundaries. Modern graffiti is prominent in the South Bronx, and is home to many of the fathers of graffiti art such as Tats Cru. endobj New Jersey, and the Bronx both had especially . Hope briefly came when President Jimmy Carter had come to the South Bronx, seeing the precariousness people had been living under. In Seattle, Black advocates called attention to unfair lending practices, and in the mid-1970s the City Council passed a law making redlining illegal. Growing up in the South Bronx, I often heard that we were responsible for the neighborhood declining and burning, she said. Many of these fires, in fact, needed such examination. Cutting through the heart of the South Bronx, the highway displaced thousands of residents from their homes, as well as several local businesses. In the Bronx, my home borough of New York City, it granted the Riverdale and Fieldston neighborhoods its green, first grade, type A status. Residents could not get insurance or mortgages and landlords had no incentive to invest in their properties. The South Bronx was notably different from what it is known as today. endobj We are talking across from each other, and we need to continue to do that. "We did not burn the South Bronx," says filmmaker Vivian Vzquez Irrizary, who grew up in the borough.. Andalusia is the southern part of Spain. Decoupling urban crisis and decline can thus provide a useful model for understanding what happened after the events of, . The narrative that we were told about why the Bronx was destroyed left us feeling that it was those of us who grew up there that destroyed it. (Perla de Leon). As the Citys departments of planning, housing, and health lead a neighborhood planning study of Southern Boulevard, at the heart of the largest redlined area, I have the privilege of becoming intimately involved. Right Here, in New York City", "2007 Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival", "Hope Is Artists' Medium In a Bronx Neighborhood; Dancers, Painters and Sculptors Head to Hunts Point", "Hip Hop is born at a birthday party in the Bronx Aug 11, 1973 HISTORY.com", "Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop? The fires had slowed down as a result. Redlining, Predatory Inclusion, and Housing Segregation, Submit a Guest Post or Roundtable Proposal, Thinking with (Neo-)Colonialism in Race for Profit. The blown up security maps are themselves a larger than life presence and the contextual information alongside them elucidates exactly what they mean. You can imagine how disruptive that is to a family or to children or to anyone who wants stability in their lives. By the end of the 1950s, the South Bronx was two-thirds African American or Hispanic (of any race). I didnt see any compassion for the people of the South Bronx. [56] Many who participated in this form of dance were members of crews, such as the Rock Steady Crew, the New York City Breakers and the Magnificent Force. I see them as different sides of the same coin, however. Less widely understood, then and now, was the. [71] At the concert he was DJing and emceeing in the recreation room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America's History Of - NPR Thus landlords could allow their buildings to decline and even pay to burn them down without fear of being held accountable. <> People know it was the landlords that burned the buildings and everyone thought arson, arson, arson. Redlining and its aftermath is the premise of a massive free exhibit currently on display at the Boston Architectural College, up through April 29. On Monday, Nov. 4, PBS Independent Lens will premiere Decade of Fire, a look at why the Bronx burned in the 1970s, and how some community members chose to stay and rebuild their neighborhoods. In the 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the housing stock in the South Bronx was lost to fires. The Bronx River Alliance serves as a coordinated voice for the river and works in harmonious partnership to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor so that it can be a healthy ecological, recreational, educational and economic resource for the communities through which the river flows. Riverdale and Fieldston have a poverty rate that is about half of that for the Bronx as a whole. In this case exclusion and inclusion was both sequential and concurrent; first redlining starved areas of credit, creating conditions for financiers to reap profits from offering easy subprime credit as the only option. When I was a little girl, I didnt see that integration as anything but normal. Taylor leads a new generation of scholars grappling with how housing segregation fits into US urban history. Through her analysis of public-private partnerships promoting black home ownership, Taylor demonstrates the ways in which the housing market, like all markets, was built to value whiteness and de-value blackness. The Bronx has a very strong graffiti scene despite the city's crackdown on illegal graffiti. For the Nashville neighborhood, see. The South Bronx was populated largely by working-class families. We lost 80 percent of our housing stock. I want to add that inherent in these policies and practices were the fears that were ingrained about people of color that we were not ready to live in cities, that we were dirty, were criminal, irresponsible, uneducated, and didnt know how to work. But when it did hit, it happened quickly and in conjunction with white flight. Hip hop is a broad conglomerate of artistic forms that originated as a specific street subculture within South Bronx communities during the 1970s in New York City. redlining meaning: the practice of refusing to lend money, give mortgages ,or sell home insurance to people living in. Under the regulations, Section 8 tenants who were burned out of their current housing were granted immediate priority status for another apartment, potentially in a better part of the city. An issue with this new cohorts work, including mine, is that explaining housing segregation through longer histories of structure and capital risks flattening it into an unchanging facet of Americas past, present, and future, and thus forecloses on the second question of what can be done about it. But what happens when a person lives their life, knowing their safety could feasibly get destroyed at any moment? 15 0 obj "We did not burn the South Bronx," says filmmaker Vivian Vzquez Irrizary, who grew up in the borough. A variety of New York City Subway services run through the South Bronx. Paige Glotzer is assistant professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (1995), by, This page was last edited on 31 May 2023, at 01:22. Subscribe today to get it in print at a special discounted rate! Who is creating these conditions? Inner City Press' Bronx Reporter: 1.4 Million People, Redlining, EJ In one scene from Decade of Fire, Vzquez visits the Fire Department archives and learns that half of the fires in the South Bronx were never even recorded. 5 0 obj The South Bronx was then a desirable place to live, a step up from the tenements in Manhattan. And as New York City entered a financial crisis in the 1970s, the city made the decision to close firehouses across the Bronx. The Bronx River Alliance is a coordinated voice for the river that works in partnership to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor so that it can be a healthy ecological, recreational, resource for the communities through which it flows. To them, Black and Latino neighborhoods were profitable up until they calculated that the lives of residents had less value than the ashes of a piece of property. Prince 9.0 rev 5 (www.princexml.com) From the presidential debates to anti-racist reading lists, redlining has gained purchase as a descriptor for many forms of spatialized dispossession. But a new film shows that it was landlords and the state who were responsible for the famous fires that ravaged the Bronx. Each neighborhood was color-coded according to the perceived security of prospective lenders' investments. What brought you to work together on this documentary? We wanted to make sure that people understood that there were policies that led to the arson becoming okay. The diverse backgrounds produced a variety of music, which they knew as music wars. It was for the people to enjoy and immerse themselves in. How did its black and brown residents become scapegoats for the nations social and economic crisis? It is an epic plan that includes . We must seek alternatives that in Taylors words do not make the quality of ones life and the substance of ones citizenship contingent on the possession of private property (262). Taylor observes that capital could move freely, while Black people could not (91). The media attention brought the South Bronx into common parlance nationwide. [37], Construction of the new Yankee Stadium has stirred controversy over plans which, along with the new billion-dollar field, include new athletic fields, tennis courts, bicycle and walking paths, stores, restaurants, and a new Metro-North Railroad station at East 153rd Street. "Excellent prospects" for investmentpredominantly white neighborhoodswere green; other desirable areas were blue; "declining" areas were yellow; and predominantly Black communities were red. 12 0 obj He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly and the Huffington Post. It wasnt us that destroyed the Bronx; we were the ones that saved it. Beginning in 1977 Jimmy Carter and later Ronald Reagan visited the burned-out buildings and empty lots of Charlotte Street, turning it into a national symbol for urban decline they attributed, in part, to those failings. Beginning in 1977 Jimmy Carter and later Ronald Reagan visited the burned-out buildings and empty lots of Charlotte Street, turning it into a national symbol for urban decline they attributed, in part, to those failings. [20], During this period, the NYPD's 41st Precinct station house at 1086 Simpson Street became famously known as "Fort Apache, The Bronx" as it struggled to deal with the overwhelming surge of violent crime, which for the entirety of the 1970s and 1980s made South Bronx the murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault and arson capital of America. A wave of foreclosures swept the country. Visiting the Longwood-Hunts Point neighborhood in the South Bronx today, it's hard to remember that only 30 years ago it looked like Dresden after the bombing, with abandonment the dominant characteristic. The South Bronx is part of New York's 15th Congressional District. His remarks would not have been out of place in 1977 or 1987: Government has to be a partner and get it right, Clinton said. Photo: Jebulon, CC0. The area comprises neighborhoods in the southern part of the Bronx, such as Concourse, Mott Haven, Melrose, and Port Morris. He did not believe any government program could ever repair the South Bronx and only worked to take away money from existing ones that could potentially help. The street had been so ravaged that part of it had been taken off official city maps in 1974. People were moving from place to place. Though the exhibition was only scheduled to be at the Bronx Neighborhood Health Action Center through March, its popularity has meant that it will be on display at least through the summer. South Bronx - Wikipedia For NYC, The Legacy Of Redlining Is In The Air We Breathe SOUTH BRONX I went through hell here, Amadeo reflected. Vivian Vzquez Irizarry and her sister Marcy on Leggett Avenue, 1975. . Irizarry talks to him about her life and shows him pictures from her childhood. [18] In either case, while desirable housing options were scarce, vacancies further increased. Redlining has been a profound factor in the creation of our cities and we tried to demonstrate that with a series of maps. [27] Piedra, interview by author. Then living in the South Bronx, Gonzlez was a member of the Young Lords Party, an activist group that tried to help residents preserve city services. <> Redlining, for one, is a practice that had started as early as the 1930s. The main policy we decided to focus on in the film was redlining which was part of the New Deal. At some level, people move to the United States because they can no longer live in their home country. Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As these houses fell apartin some cases the properties had even been condemned for demolition prior to salepolicymakers pointed to the conditions of neighborhoods as a reason for creating new exclusionary policies to maintain suburban segregation. But why would anyone want to burn their own home? 1. The Lasting Legacy Of Redlining | FiveThirtyEight I hope young people see that because they have to play a role and have a voice. lines v.intr. Everyone seems to know the story by heart: residents and greedy landlords burned down their own buildings for money. America's formerly redlined neighborhoods have changed - Brookings <> 2. 11 0 obj [39][40][41] The population of the South Bronx is currently increasing. African American Intellectual History Society, *This post is part of our roundtableon Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylors Race for Profit. Connecting these dots is crucial to organizing for this fight. 80% of housing was lost to fires, and 250,000 people were displaced. Yet exclusion was not the sole mechanism. And there was the lady who was Irish on the second floor and also in my building there was an African-American and Cuban family. Redlining SEGREGATION BY DESIGN <>stream "They would say redlining is a self-fulfilling prophecy . By the 1930s, the Bronx was considered the "Jewish Borough", as nearly half the population was Jewish. Department of Education, Find a School (scroll down), "High School Information & Tuition | Build Bold Futures", "Hamill: Danny Aiello tells it like it is in memoir, "Watch: Nate Archibald Talks NBA's 'History Of NYC Basketball' Map", "Bronx natives Aventura set to rock sold-out MSG", "40 years on from the party where hip hop was born", "How Swizz Beatz Halted 'Piano District' Invention With South Bronx Art Fair", "Jellybean Benitez Remembers NYC Clubs of Yesteryear", Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn't Want to Be One - Mark Kurlansky - Internet Archive, "A Painting Depicting the Precarity of a Single Figure, and of Us All", "Humphrey global policy fellow Dr. Bonnie Jenkins nominated to Biden administration", "In New Memoir, Maria Tells Us How She Got, How She Got To, "Fox Street co-op draws middle income residents", "Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month: The legacy of Sonia Sotomayor", Walking tour of the Grand Concourse Boulevard-Cross Bronx Expy area, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=South_Bronx&oldid=1157795740, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. What we heard from people was it took a while for the impact of the redlining to be felt in a widespread way. Redlining | discrimination | Britannica <> In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the U.S. government set out to evaluate the riskiness of mortgages and left behind a stunning portrait of the racism and discrimination that has shaped. St. Martin's Press, New York: 2005. In this case exclusion and inclusion was both sequential and concurrent; first redlining starved areas of credit, creating conditions for financiers to reap profits from offering easy subprime credit as the only option. IE 11 is not supported. Vzquez Irizarry saw the effect that such stereotyping had on her community. "[74], Many dwellings in the South Bronx during the early 1970s lived in poverty or were part of gangs. But because they were labeled as cause unknown, they never received one. Very informative! Recently, at least one historian has suggested that redlining has become a narrative crutch. There were periods when we had no water, no heat. To prove that we can tell our own stories, and that we have the courage to survive and thrive.. The lady upstairs was my mothers best friend, and she was Jewish and also our babysitter. [56], Due to the positive reception, DJs began isolating the percussive breaks, or small portions of a song, often without vocals, which were easy to dance to, of popular songs. Historically, the availability of economic, social, and political opportunities has been almost absent from marginalized communities, such as the Bronx. [22], The early 1970s saw South Bronx property values continue to plummet to record lows. The local police precinctsalready struggling and failing to contain the massive wave of drug and gang crime invading the Bronxhad long since stopped bothering to investigate the fires, as there were simply too many to track. The same happens in Puerto Rico and in the American South. Not so with Race for Profit. Median household income ($37,500 in 2016) is lower than the rest of the city, while the poverty rate (28 percent) is higher. This scheme became so common that local gangs were hired by fixers for their expertise at the process of stripping buildings of wiring, plumbing, metal fixtures, and anything else of value and then effectively burning it down with gasoline. Originally referring to the industrial area below East 138th Street, the name "South Bronx" symbolically has had its northern boundary shift northward to East 149th Street, East 161st Street, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and Fordham Road over the years. Chang, Jeff. The same racist paternalism that Taylor shows got Black women labelled unsophisticated buyers also permeated discussions on how to fix Charlotte Street and its residents: they included calls to paint the primarily symbolic white picket fences black to prevent graffiti. She is a co-director of the film Decade of Fire. 63 0 obj Inequality in New York City. America got its first glimpse of what was happening in the South Bronx during the 1977 World Series, when a live broadcast from Yankee Stadium panned to a nearby blaze. The curriculum never got taught but that question about what our young people know about their history in the Bronx and what they should know led us to continue have these conversations. Redlining began in the 1930s when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created to insure mortgages. Now the area faces the threat of gentrification, Gonzalez said. Roughly a quarter of a million people lost their homes. In the early 1900s, the South Bronx was originally known as the Manor of Morrisania, as it was the manor of Lewis Morris. Can bank-starved Bronx communities finally cash in after decades of This soon changed as World War II caused rent to increase in many apartments, pushing people out. They have also brought us movements around Occupy Wall Street, climate change, and Black Lives Matter. Citywide, the percentage is only 55%. The South Bronx is served by the NYPD's 40th,[8] 41st,[9] 42nd,[10] 44th,[11] and 48th[12] Precincts. How Fire Defined the Bronx, and Us - The New York Times [14] The term was first coined in the 1940s by a group of social workers who identified the Bronx's first pocket of poverty, in the Port Morris section, the southernmost section of the Bronx. Although the HOLC ceased . America was plagued with segregation during the 1950s. As early as the late 1960s, some neighborhoods were considered undesirable by homeowners, precipitating a population decline. They had lost their lives, their loved ones, their homes, and so much more. In 1982, after the city assigned an arson investigation team to the Bronx, the fires that were once so prevalent declined. The South Bronx is also home to both for-profit and nonprofit organizations that offer a range of professional training and other educational programs. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, "IN BELMONT AREA OF SOUTH BRONX, FEAR AND CRIME ARE REMOTE CONCERNS", "Your neighborhood guide to the Bronx's Castle Hill", "High Bridge Reopens the Bronx to Pedestrian Power", "Hunt's Point: How South Bronx's most-improved neighborhood stays that way", "City Adds About 600 New Pre-K Seats in South Bronx, City Educators Say", "The New Bronx; A Quick History of the Iconic Borough", The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, "Cross Bronx Expressway (I-95, I-295 and US 1)", "The South Bronx: From Urban Planning Victim to Victor", "Left to Die, the South Bronx Rises From Decades of Decay", "A City Gripped by Crisis and Enraptured by the Yankees", "Pulling Out of Fort Apache, the Bronx; New 41st Precinct Station House Leaves Behind Symbol of Community's Past Troubles", "In the Bronx, Blight Gave Way to Renewal", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9448892/?ref_=ttrel_rel_tt, "Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented since the 1960s", "As Concourse Regains Luster, City Notices", "NYCEDC has helped to create additional green space and new jobs while spurring private investment to support the new Yankee Stadium", "A Public Park to Rival the Yankees' Playground", "Bronx leaders urge hotel next to Yankee Stadium", "Affordable Apartments For Those Who Want To Enjoy Their Life -", "The Bronx Has the Highest Crime Rate in NYC. endstream For reasons like race, ethnicity, and class, these geographic areas have been targeted and named as risk areas in the mid 1900s by banks and other agencies. The reason why we don't suggest visiting Andalusia during the summer months is that temperatures can be extremely hot (40 C) and most tourists travel between July and August. provides a blueprint that goes beyond the history of redlining to answer both. People would wake up frantically crying and screaming to their homes being destroyed. 61 0 obj redlining, illegal discriminatory practice in which a mortgage lender denies loans or an insurance provider restricts services to certain areas of a community, often because of the racial characteristics of the applicant's neighbourhood. This shift, which Taylor illuminates through the experiences of Black women, was not limited to the realm of housing, but rather coincided with what Melanie Newport and Elizabeth Hinton, as the merging of the welfare and carceral states that was both deeply deliberate and highly calculated in its racist intent., Bill Clintons 1997 visit to Charlotte Street was different: by then Charlotte Street had been redeveloped through public-private partnerships into single-family ranch homes and dubbed Charlotte Gardens. Houses in redlined neighborhoods were generally old or too close to unattractive or unhealthy industrial areas. Read the rest here. "[62] As hip-hop grew from throughout the Bronx, 1520 was a starting point where Clive Campbell, later known as DJ Kool Herc, presided over parties in the community room at a pivotal point in the genre's history. The South Bronx is an area of the New York City borough of the Bronx. Movin' on Up - JSTOR According to the New York Post, the words used by the two broadcasters during the game were later "spun by credulous journalists" into the now ubiquitous phrase "Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning" without either of the two announcers actually having phrased it that way. My phone was hooked up, somehow, directly to the telephone pole outside, he recalled. [28], Other fires were caused by unsafe electrical wiring, fires set indoors for heating, and random vandalism associated with the general crime situation. Today the neighborhood you grew up in Vivian is under the threat of gentrification. Bronx Cab Driver Shot 7 or 9 Times Testified In Robbery Trial Now Mario Powell Found Guilty . Upon this, a technique known as Jamaican toasting, or the act of speaking over a beat which later became rapping, was introduced by DJ Kool Herc in the South Bronx at this point of time as well. It wasnt just the buildings.
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