From George Washington to DJ Kool Herc: Paradise Bronx Speaks of Resiliency & Spirit in New York’s Overlooked Borough.
In his new book, Paradise Bronx, author Ian Frazier takes us through a grand history tour of the Bronx from its days as a Neutral Ground designation during the Revolutionary War through the birthing of the Hip-Hop culture.
“The rich will strive to establish their domination & enslave the rest. They always did. They always will.”
Gouverneur Morris
As a writer, Ian Frazier is a keen observer and a describer. For 15 years, he walked through every street in the Bronx. He captured everything from important locations that lacked any visible acknowledgment of their historical significance to the welcomed smell of breadsticks, cream-center cookies, and anisette toast floating in the air from the Stella D’oro Bakery that spread a half mile in either direction.
During Frazier’s 15 years of walking through the Bronx, He ate in restaurants, spoke with historians and educators, business owners, as well as residents, artists, politicians, and most importantly, community organizers, whose collective efforts brought the Bronx back from under the garbage heap of burned-out buildings in the 1970s and ’80s to the massive rebuilding that is still taking place.
The scope of this book is massive. Most New Yorkers and even Bronxites will be surprised at the rich historical context in which the Bronx is embedded. George Washington, the Father of Our Country, fought many essential battles in the Bronx, known as the Neutral Ground, during the Revolutionary War. The Bronx sat between British Loyalists in New York City (Manhattan) and Patriot strong-holds in the north. This location made it a buffer zone that neither side could fully dominate. The neutrality designation made the Bronx a bloody battleground, full of violence and lawlessness.
During the 18th century, the area of the Bronx was inhabited by the Lenape people, specifically the Wappinger and Siwanoy bands. These groups were part of the larger Algonquian-speaking Lenape community that occupied much of the Bronx region and parts of New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, and Long Island. The Lenape were known for their fishing, hunting, and farming practices and were participants in the wars of the Neutral Ground during the Revolutionary War, fighting side by side with Black soldiers fighting for America’s independence.
The details of this time in Bronx history is fascinating, and if you have never heard of Gouverneur Morris, this book is an excellent introduction to the man who helped shape the future of the Bronx. Morris was one of the United States’ Founding Fathers and wrote the Constitution’s Preamble. He owned the Morrisania estate in what is now the South Bronx (Mott Haven). He was also one of the champions of city planning and predicted the Bronx to become a striving community.
History of the Bronx is only complete by noting the contributions of Robert Moses, the urban planner and public official known chiefly for ruining the Bronx by building highways through it and, in the process, tearing apart neighborhoods. Moses saw the Bronx as a pass-through city for people traveling from west to east, mostly from Manhattan to Long Island and Manhattan to upstate New York and beyond. Thousands of families were displaced to make room for an ugly highway that split the Bronx into two so wealthy people could pass through easily without ever putting a tire on a Bronx street.
In the minds of many, the Bronx is still a place of burned-out landscapes of desolation and poverty. Frazier details the winners and losers of over a decade of fire and destruction. This book points out that while the fires raged, the city closed many fire stations simultaneously. Frazier says city officials wanted residents of the south Bronx to move out of their buildings and figured that ignoring the large stretch of former communities and apartments to be reduced to rubble and creating a desert in the middle of an urban area would make them move. This action was part of their “planned shrinkage’.This thinking also manifested when Bronx administrators closed neighborhood health clinics, stopped maintaining the parks, reduced library hours, and ended after-school programs in the neighborhoods that needed them the most.
Many prominent people blamed the arson on the residents of the Bronx. But Frazier pointed out that a lot of people made a lot of money (through insurance payments) from the arson, a total of over 250 million dollars in today’s money. It has yet to be discovered where this money went or to whom. Usually, insurance money is supposed to be for rebuilt, but that did not happen. And there is no concrete proof that citizens burned their own homes. Many buildings had old wiring, and modern appliances strained the system.
This book sheds light on the global movement of Hip-Hop and its birth in the South Bronx (with a diss on Queens rappers who tried to take the title away from the Bronx). Historical pioneers such as DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, and KRS One are all highlighted, and their contributions to the culture are detailed. Reading this book about the Bronx and its dissolution in the 1960s and 1970s, it seems as if the hip-hop culture had no choice but to develop on those desolate streets, where resiliency, along with mental and physical strength, is a prime talent for survival.
The most compelling point of this book is how the citizens stood their ground and fought against the machine tearing apart their neighborhoods. I found their stories captivating and inspiring as Frazier lays out the life of ordinary people who were able to do extraordinary things such as restoring the parks, cleaning the Bronx River, building new homes for the people with lower income, and rebuilding their neighborhoods back to safe and secure and secure communities that are a model of cultural diversity.
When I was a child growing up in the Bronx, I could see the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge from my roof. With its bright lights, the bridge was the gateway to the rest of the world. I imagined I would drive over that bridge one day and see the rest of the world. Ian Frazier relays a story about the Bronx, born and raised, Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor. She was visiting The Bronx Defender, a nonprofit group providing free legal counsel for those who cannot afford it. Speaking at their headquarters on East 161 Street to a group of high school students. She told them to …look beyond the Bronx and know that they are part of America and what a big and amazing country this is.
I understood her statement, and so did the students. But it also made me realize there is probably no place in the country where that statement would make sense. It is taken as a given that we are part of America. Sotomayor’s statement brings to mind how outsiders and the residents themselves portray the Bronx. And we all need to be reminded that the Bronx is also America. Admittingly, you will not mistake the Bronx for any other city in the world, but sometimes it is that uniqueness in culture, landscape, and history that makes it seem apart from the rest of the country.
I do not agree with all of Frazier’s assessments, and I think he concentrated too much on Morris’s life outside of his direct involvement with the Bronx. These are just minor issues. I recommend this book to former and current inhabitants of the Bronx, especially Bronx lovers. However, I also recommend this book to people interested in American history. Paradise Bronx is a fascinating book.
