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Author's Notes
Excerpt from Introduction to South Bronx Rising
On a warm overcast August day in 1984 I spent many interesting hours cruising around the South Bronx with Ed Logue, on my last day of reporting for the first edition of this book. We stopped here and there to get out and look at various bedraggled empty lots as he described their ultimate better fate. But we lingered longest at his brain child, the Charlotte Gardens ranch houses across from Crotona Park. Ten were already up and occupied, a delicious parting triumph for Logue who had proven the skeptical urban know-it-alls dead wrong. Not just dozens, but hundreds of potential home buyers had vied for the chance to buy and live in those houses. Though I did not know it then, I would not see the Bronx again for fourteen years. I had already moved to Baltimore, Maryland, with my husband and by the time We’re Still Here (as the first edition of this book was titled) came out in the fall of 1986, I was beginning my Ph.D. in American history at Johns Hopkins University.
In the ensuing years I had a daughter, received my doctorate, published Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs, a topic I felt was insufficiently explained when I was researching my history of the Bronx. Late in 1997, when I was helping the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration design a museum for their D.C. headquarters, I received a phone call from Patrick Logan at Fordham University. He wondered if I had copies of my Bronx book he could buy. He wanted his own copy and also one for his boss, Joe Muriana, for Christmas. We both lamented the fact that the book had so long been out of print. I wondered if perhaps Fordham University Press might want to bring out a paperback edition? Soon thereafter, Joe Muriana, former community organizer and now an associate vice president for government and urban affairs at Fordham University, became the determined champion of a new edition of South Bronx Rising. He made sure the press got a copy, spent hours with me in person and on the phone on this project, and helped obtain funding to underwrite this new edition from the Ford Foundation, which had also supported the original, and from the Enterprise Foundation.
On Monday November 16, 1998, another grayish, overcast day, I returned to Bronx County for the first time in fourteen years and spent six hours driving around with Joe Muriana, revisiting all the places where I had spent so many fascinating days from 1981 to 1984. Oddly, my own Bronx memories were in black and white, like an old World War II film, with comparable images of grim dark ruins and empty looming hulks filling street after bombed-out street. While the physical backdrop to my first book was pretty bleak, the Bronx people hanging on in those tough years were really wonderful--as lively, eccentric, and enjoyable a group as one might expect in this urban outpost. Now, all these years later, the Bronx had roared back to life, the old black-and-white memories giving way to a bright, American technicolor version of twenty-first century life. As we drove up towards Charlotte Street and the blocks and blocks of ranch houses came in sight, all the rubble long since covered over under lawns, roses, and living rooms, I felt a great wave of emotion at seeing Logue’s dream flourishing. Joe wheeled through one neighborhood after another, I all the while exclaiming at the reborn landscape.
The Bronx is a vast place, something that is easy to forget when you’ve been away. But here, where once woe-begone half-ruined apartment houses and hideous vacant wastelands blighted mile after mile, gritty normalcy had returned. The size and scope of the renaissance was truly difficult to absorb. It had taken well over a billion dollars, money available thanks to Mayor Edward I. Koch. Renovated apartment houses and thousands of new two and three-family row houses had transformed the streets, as had the new colorful playgrounds, community gardens, new PAL Centers, and public schools. It was a very thrilling, amazing, and inspiring day of urban tourism.
On another sparkling blue winter day we returned to Belmont, which I fondly remembered as a shabby but lively Italian neighborhood grimly staving off the urban disaster encircling its shrinking perimeters. Our usual destination was the inimitable Dominick’s with its long communal tables filled with old guys eating and no menu, one of the last decent restaurants in the South Bronx. Today Belmont is flourishing, its bustling streets lined with dozens of new up-scale restaurants and cappuccino and pastry shops, specialty food stores, open fruit and meat markets, and serious cheese and wine shops. Dominick’s was the same as ever, old guys eating pasta dishes and stuffed artichokes crowded into the long wooden tables.
This new edition, retitled South Bronx Rising, takes up where I left off in 1984 and follows the continuing resurrection of the Bronx as experienced in the three neighborhoods I wrote of then–Charlotte Street and the old southeast Bronx, the Grand Concourse, and the North West Bronx. Numerous new and admirably worthy groups have been launched since then, and I mention some of them in passing, but I preferred to concentrate on those whose early history I knew and whose accomplishments reflect the overall resurrection of the borough. And as before, I have striven to tell the story from the viewpoint of the those who work, live, and struggle in the neighborhoods.
South Bronx Rising "Jill Jonnes wrote the
definitive account of one of the great urban tragedies of the 1970's and
1980's: the near destruction of a large part of New York City through an
epidemic of abandonment, vandalism, and arson. But even while the
conflagration raged, determined citizens were trying to stop it, and in this
new edition of her book she tells us how the epidemic was contained and the
Bronx was in large measure rebuilt." |
