Bouncing Back in the Bronx

The Bronx is no longer burning. The fires have been extinguished. Neighborhoods are living, breathing and functioning again. The borough has gone from a prairie to a tarnished gem working to regain its luster.

The Bronx has risen from the flames and ashes of the profiteers who burned its buildings to collect insurance payouts. The landlords who waited too long to cash out before people of color devalued the worth of their real estate investments are long gone. They filled their pockets and fled.

It was most striking in the South Bronx, where in the 1950s—when white flight began—the neighborhood went from being about two-thirds white (non-Latino) to being two-thirds black and Puerto Rican.

Landlords’ greed took over any sense of humanity they could’ve feigned for the newcomers. Systematically, buildings that landlords couldn’t sell at market price went down in flames. And insurance companies paid.

Some owners were paying junkies to torch buildings because that was more profitable than collecting monthly rent from the hardworking people who inhabited the units within. The landlords’ avarice left families homeless.

Block by block, neighborhoods were decimated. Very few within the walls of government did anything about it. At best, their actions could be construed as benign neglect. Most just wanted to abandon those newly arrived neoyorquinos—leave them alone to live a nightmare rather than a promising American dream.

Among the hundreds of thousands was my hardworking, newly divorced mother. She came to this city to work. She was starting a new life. We came to live in the Bronx in 1955 from La Playa de Ponce, Puerto Rico.

For the first six months, we lived in a furnished room on the West Side of Manhattan.

Moving to the Bronx marked the beginning of a new life for us.

I don’t even have to close my eyes to remember what 576 Fox St. looked like. It was one in a row of more than 20 attached buildings. Our apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up. It was my mother Noelia, my grandmother Julia, my baby brother Victor and me. La familia.

My younger brother Victor and I spoke no English. My mother spoke just enough inglés to get by. There’s no question that we were poor by any societal standard back then or even today—but like so many others around us, my brother and I didn’t know it. What we knew was that my mother always worked. To supplement her regular jewelry factory paycheck, she sold Avon and Stanley products on the side. We helped her distribute the orders to her customers. Mi santa madre worked as hard as anyone I had ever met then—or since, in over six decades—all because she wanted the best for her children.

Ours was a vibrant neighborhood. It was where for the first time I met Jews, Italians, Irish and blacks. I always got along with the blacks and Jews.

The first bodega I bought milk, bread, mortadella and cheese from was owned by a couple from Spain. The first knish, pastrami sandwich and matzo ball soup I ever ate was at the kosher deli on the corner of Avenue St. John and Fox.

It was also the neighborhood where for the first time I learned what a gang was. It was an Italian gang. It’s where for the first time I saw a junkie mainlining. He was a white teenager. I was about 10 years old and I can still remember the black leather belt around his right bicep and his left hand on the syringe pushing the heroin into the protruding vein. He was behind the stairs on the first floor. Just thinking about it is like I’m seeing him right now. Sometimes it’s hard to forget traumatic moments.

There may not be as much Bronx in me as there is Ponce (the southern Puerto Rican city where I was born). But I definitely feel comfortable in the Bronx.

It’s the borough where I got into my first fights. I didn’t realize until much later that those white kids didn’t like us. They called us spics. The fights were almost a daily part of my walk home from P.S. 62. I got a few lumps and I also gave a few. But there were no knives or guns in those days. Once in a while a stickball bat was used on me and so I learned to get better with them. I was better at hitting my attackers than the Spalding balls we used to play with. One doesn’t forget certain things.

There are thousands who, like me, lived through and witnessed similar things. Some like to call them “Bronx tales.” There are enough anecdotes to fill volumes of books—that’s for sure. Some stories are told by the survivors from those tough neighborhoods. And there were also hundreds who died from bad junk or who overdosed. Others were killed in stupid gang turf wars.

So the Bronx was changing. It was slowly turning into a place where survival was the daily goal.

In the meantime, the arson for profit continued. Then all of a sudden, the blight of the Bronx became national and international news.
It was on Oct. 12, at the beginning of the telecast of Game 2 of the 1977 World Series. The Yankees were facing the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was the first time since 1962 that the Bronx Bombers had been in the fall classic.

An ABC aerial camera had panned a few blocks from Yankee Stadium to a building on fire. The scene became a defining image of the Bronx in the 1970s. I still remember how the eloquent Howard Cosell—whose gift for oratory made him a news icon and masterful interviewer of that period—went on about the burning taking place within blocks of Yankee Stadium.

The Bronx had been on the national news just seven days before, on Oct. 5, 1977, when President Jimmy Carter took the press on a brief walking tour of a desolate stretch of Charlotte Street in the South Bronx.

While Carter’s visit focused the world’s attention on the neglect and abandonment that made the borough a symbol of urban decay, it was Cosell’s description of what MLB viewers were seeing at home and in bars that made it real for Americans everywhere.

Carter’s visit highlighted a period of neglect and abandonment that made the borough a shame for New York and the nation. For those who had no choice but to walk that desolate war zone stretch with President Carter, the memory has never left us.

President Barack Obama’s recent visit to CUNY’s Lehman College, where he announced plans to expand the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, a program aimed at helping men of color stay on the track to success, made me reflect about what has happened in the Bronx over the decades between the visits of these two presidents.

The Bronx has seen some really bad times. There are still problems to be solved and that need to be better addressed. The borough has made much progress, with so much more to come. It would be wise for those who now are reaping the fruits to never forget what some of us still vividly recall.

The Bronx is back. It’s not perfect. But there’s no denying that the Bronx is on the move.

The new Bronx is full of promise and hope. It’s on the upswing in many ways.

Today, I can say with certainty that if Jimmy Carter were invited back to Charlotte Street he wouldn’t recognize it as the same rubble-filled block that bewildered him less than four decades ago. He’d probably remember, though, that there was nothing but ruins and lost dreams the last time he was there.

Today, the Bronx is on the path to a new day. The transition of neighborhoods has brought the Bronx and its leaders to a realization that no one is running away from its new settlers. There’s no abandoning the Grand Concourse or other enclaves once inhabited by people who fled, out of fear of the arrival of people of color.

There is no other borough in this city that has lifted itself out of what the Bronx has. No people more resilient. No narrative less told … than that of the borough on whose streets I learned lessons and met people who prepared me more than I could have ever possibly imagined.