Reclaiming the Bronx

by Randy Shaw, 2009-10-01

Since World War II, urban America has been shaped by two thirty- year trends. The years 1945-75 saw the middle-class relocate to the suburbs, and the decline of the nation’s once thriving urban residential neighborhoods and business districts. From 1975-2005, affluent residents returned to cities, spawning a wave of urban gentrification that has steadily continued, stalled only by the 1987 S&L crash, the late 1990’s dot com bust, and the current nationwide mortgage crisis. The Bronx section of New York City never recovered from the post-war middle-class exodus, missing the massive gentrification that has overtaken neighboring Manhattan during the same period. Unfortunately, instead of producing a solid working or middle-class community, the Bronx was long beset by arson, crime and disinvestment; it is currently the nation’s poorest urban county. Constance Rosenblum uses the 100th anniversary of the Champs Elysees of the Bronx, the Grand Concourse, to explain what has happened to this once beloved neighborhood. While Boulevard of Dreams is a bit overly skewed toward nostalgic recollections, the book provides helpful insight into how a once fabled neighborhood that was the launching point for generations of Jewish immigrants fell into disrepair, and how the past decade has finally seen evidence of revival.

For most non-New Yorkers, the Bronx is likely best known as the home of the New York Yankees (aka Bronx Bombers). But as Constance Rosenblum shows in her new book, the Bronx has a rich history that is deserved of greater attention for its place in the nation’s urban history.

Home to the Jews

Possibly due to the film, Hester Street, and/or the wonderful Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Jewish immigrant experience in New York City has become largely identified with the Lower East Side. Yet those living on Hester or Delancey Street aspired to move to the Bronx, and it was the Bronx where generations of Jewish immigrants primarily resided, and which has also provided opportunities for upward mobility to the Irish, Italians, and now African-Americans and Latinos.

Although my father grew up in the Bronx and I’ve toured the northwest Bronx and the Grand Concourse, I had forgotten the neighborhood’s historic greatness until reading Boulevard of Dreams. The book is a reminder that the Bronx was the historic launching pad for the American Jewish community, while helping to fulfill the aspirations of newly arrived immigrant groups to this day.

The Bronx in the 1920’s-1950’s

Much of the book chronicles the legacy of the Grand Concourse, an eleven lane roadway that included some of the era’s great Art Deco structures. The buildings on the Concourse featured extremely large floor plans, a dream come true for immigrants moving up from the cramped Lower East Side. The boulevard was host to great marches and political events, and was clearly the centerpiece of one of the great immigrant communities in the nation’s history.

It does not take long for Rosenblum to convince readers of the greatness of the Grand Concourse, and how residents of the area felt they had fulfilled the American Dream. She provides photographs of many of the wonderful building interiors, and a 1966 photo shows the boulevard retaining its character despite the neighborhood’s decline.

Rosenblum does not ignore the less noble aspects of the Bronx in its heyday. She describes an institution known in the 1930’s as the “Bronx Slave Market,” where African-Americans waited on sidewalks like the day laborers of today to be picked up for domestic work by the mostly Jewish women of the West Bronx. Domestic workers had been excluded from the labor and minimum wage protections of the National Labor Relations Act, and the Bronx situation showed the harsh consequences of this unregulated labor market.

The Decline of the Bronx

Considering its quality housing stock, wonderful Grand Concourse, and proximity to Manhattan, why did the Bronx decline? To readers of Robert Caro’s classic, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the answer is clear: the Cross Bronx Expressway destroyed key Bronx neighborhoods, including the cohesive, working-class community of East Tremont. I found the mass evictions of East Tremont residents and the brutal demolition of their community to be among the most powerful sections of Caro’s work, and Rosenblum describes Caro’s depiction of Moses’ transformation of the area into a “human graveyard.”

But Rosenblum cites recent scholarship claiming that Caro’s overstates the destructive highway’s role. The argument is that many neighborhoods in the Bronx that were not near the expressway were also ravaged by the 1970’s, and that the forces negatively impacting similar urban neighborhoods nationally -- disinvestment, redlining, the withdrawal of city, state and federal funds, and suburbanization -- were also major factors in the Bronx’ decline.

These latter arguments, which Rosenblum backs, reminds one of the revisionist arguments justifying Walter O’Malley’s relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. The idea is that whatever damage caused by the Cross-Bronx Expressway, or the move of a beloved baseball team, is essential for “progress,” and that such acts serve the greater good.

The Bronx Stagnates

Rosenblum also addresses why the Bronx did not improve in the 1980’s along with New York City’s other boroughs. Among her answers is the notion that the very homogeneity of the community resulted in an unusually rapid out migration, leaving a sudden and dramatic hole that invited arsonists, speculators and pervasive crime.

Local, state and federal governments could have provided housing subsidies to bring African-American and Latino working and middle-class families to the Bronx to replace the departing Jews and Italians, but instead allowed the private sector to control the community’s future. This resulted in the city’s worst housing condition, worst schools, and transformed the Bronx into a place few would choose to live.

Fortunately, starting in the 1990’s groups like the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition began rebuilding the neighborhood, and while acute poverty still prevails, historic structures have been rehabilitated and buildings along the Grand Concourse restored. Thanks to Rosenblum’s work, the Bronx’ glorious past will not be forgotten while a new, positive chapter for the neighborhood’s future is being written.

Randy Shaw is the author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.