Paved Paradise

Before Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, and Kool Keith popularized rhymes about the Bronx, the local poet laureate was Joseph Rodman Drake, who died at age twenty-five in 1820. Drake name-dropped his turf most famously in “Bronx,” which was posthumously published in Harper’s and contains the memorable lines:

Drake is buried at the center of a park that bears his name in Hunts Point, a semi-industrial peninsula near Rikers Island, his fenced-in grave guarding the last few bucolic square feet in an area now full of warehouses.

Drake’s ability to conjure up deep associations from the landscape guides Ian Frazier through Paradise Bronx, a sprawling combination of cultural history and travelogue written from the perspective of “the ongoing past that is also the present.” The sagas Frazier recounts, from the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway to the origins of hip-hop, are not new but told in a novel way. His method is to pound the trash-strewn pavement in search of a key to understand the many accreted eras that have defined the Bronx. Thrilled by juxtapositions such as the hair salon and Bx27 bus stop at the site of a former Siwanoy Indian shell midden in what is now Clason Point, he hits on the book’s credo: “What has existed in a place, and what has happened there, are hard to cover up. The past bleeds through layers of accumulation like graffiti through whitewash. The truth of a place often is not hidden but can be seen in plain sight.” We only know about the midden, for example, because an anthropologist noticed oyster shells in the trenches dug to build a trolley line that is itself no longer.

Frazier’s epic begins with the natural history of the area, moving quickly through the folkways of coastal Munsee-speaking Siwanoy villages to the period of European settlement. The borough takes its name from the estate of a Scandinavian settler named Jonas Bronck; Bronck’s Land was later shortened, like Hollywoodland, to the famous version we now know. The odd-looking bird on the Bronx flag is said by some to be an auk, from the Bronck family crest, honoring Jonas’s time living in the Faroe Islands before departing for the New World on The Fire of Troy.

The seer stone through which Frazier views the complicated native history is Split Rock, a granite boulder in Pelham Bay. In 1643, Kieft’s War pitted Algonquian Indians against Dutch settlers in New Netherland, and also claimed the lives of New England preacher Anne Hutchinson and much of her family. One of Hutchinson’s young daughters, legend has it, survived a raid by hiding in Split Rock’s aperture. Three hundred years later, Robert Moses’s zealous highway construction plans called for the rock to be exploded with dynamite, but it was saved by Theodore Kazimiroff, a dentist and county historian. (In keeping with the theme of partial disappearance, Kazimiroff was posthumously honored with a street sign that was itself later removed.) Frazier leads us down the difficult-to-access path to Split Rock, which now sits unlabeled on a median strip by the Hutchinson River Parkway. “Old-time accounts said that if you sighted through the split, you could see the location of Anne Hutchinson’s farm on the west side of the river,” Frazier writes. Now, looking through, he spies only a cement wall and chain-link fence.

At another almost forgotten Bronx landmark, Indians and colonists fought side by side. The eighteen natives massacred in 1778 at what continues to be called Indian Field, near 233rd Street, were Christians, most of them from Western Massachusetts, who were defending the young United States when the British surrounded them in a surprise attack. One of Frazier’s heroes from this period is the eccentric Gouverneur Morris, whose family purchased what had been the Bronck estate. Though not a household name today (unless you live in Morrisania or Morris Heights or on Morris Avenue), Morris played an important role in determining America’s future. He authored the immortal preamble to the Constitution, served as ambassador to France during its revolution, dreamed up the Erie Canal, and later proposed that New York, Pennsylvania, and New England secede from the Union. He also shaped New York City, serving on the committee that implemented the street grid.

It takes Frazier nearly two hundred pages to emerge from the eighteenth century. The decades after the War of 1812 (which Morris opposed) saw the creation of trolley lines, rowhouses, and Drakeian cemeteries and parks. By the time the Bronx was incorporated into New York City, in 1898, mass immigration from Europe, particularly of Jews and Italians, was changing the character of New York as a whole—and the Bronx in particular. Frazier provides the remarkable statistic that half of the borough was Jewish circa 1930. After the Great Depression, internal American migration of Black families, especially from the Carolinas, and Puerto Ricans set the Bronx on the path to becoming the borough with the largest proportion of nonwhite residents.

“The history of the Bronx in the twentieth century can be sketched in a sentence: The subways created the modern Bronx and the highways almost destroyed it,” Frazier summarizes. By the end of the 1910s, the city had extended two subway lines deep into the northern Bronx, opening those areas to denser development. In 1925, the New York legislature seeded the idea of a cross-Bronx expressway, although it would take Moses’s Solomonic vision for it to materialize. Constructed over a period of twenty-five years, the elevated highway displaced tens of thousands of residents and split the borough into north and south, as opposed to the previous division between the higher-elevation west and low-lying east. Frazier tells a by-now familiar story of the brutal effects of deindustrialization, depopulation, and governmental neglect. From 1958 to 1974, the number of factories in the Bronx was approximately halved. The fires began in 1966 and peaked in ’74. For this period, Frazier makes excellent use of the hundreds of oral histories conducted by Fordham University’s Bronx African American History Project, giving a human texture to the bleak metanarrative of institutional collapse. Of course, out of this world of immiseration emerged hip-hop, a story Frazier retells with gusto.

Frazier is at his best when he gets out of the archive and into the streets, thinking on his feet and observing. Some routes have obvious purpose, such as his retracing of the path Jimmy Carter took on a 1977 visit. Others seem intentionally aimless, as when he describes scenes like the “sidewalk ballet” of Mott Haven at dawn in winter:

He meditates on some words scratched in cement near Crotona Park that read, in part, “I aM BEBO / FUCK YOU / FUCK / POLICE / MATTER / FACT/ FUCK / THE WORLD.” Frazier considers this missive to be “not only graffiti but an inscription, a historical marker, and a Bronx poem.” He confesses to having “lingered at the inscription and asked passersby if they know who this Bebo is or was, but no one does.” You have to admire Frazier’s gumption here. However, anyone who has done street-level research in New York knows that the chance a stranger will know of Bebo, or even be Bebo, is non-zero.

Frazier, a veteran of the New Yorker who lives in New Jersey, is an innocent abroad in the Bronx and seems to relish the occasional slapstick encounter or avuncular pronouncement (“Jerome Avenue rocks, in my opinion,” “our citizenry becomes increasingly tattooed”). He stops to ask unsuspecting residents of the Gouverneur Morris Houses NYCHA complex, one of the largest in the borough, if they know who Morris was. On Tremont Avenue, “a man in forest-green African robes walked by me and said a loud and cheerful ‘Hello!’ I said hello back, but he was talking into a headset.” Ouch.

He also takes the occasional potshot—even historian Kenneth Jackson, in his blurb on the back cover, cautions, “Readers may not agree with all of Ian Frazier’s many judgements.” One of the oddest is aimed at Leon Trotsky, who lived with his family in an eighteen-dollar-a-month Crotona Park apartment from January to March of 1917, supported, in part, by the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society. When revolution broke out in Russia, the Trotskys boarded a ship for home. “Would they had missed it!” Frazier crows, “Better by far if they had stayed in the new paradise Bronx, in their nice apartment with its affordable rent and modern conveniences.” He adds, “What if Trotsky had stayed, and his kids had grown up happily in the paradise Bronx? The family could have become Babe Ruth fans, and Russia avoided seventy-odd years of bloody despotism.” Heck, just a few years later, Trotsky could have picked up the first issue of the New Yorker. As Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace about the reductive theory that Napoleon lost the decisive Battle of Borodino because he had a cold, “To men who do not admit that Russia was formed by the will of one man … that argument seems not merely untrue and irrational but contrary to all human reality.”

Silly counterfactual aside, what exactly is the “paradise Bronx” about which Frazier waxes poetic? It seems significant that the passage about Trotsky is one of the select places where the book’s title comes up—and twice. In another instance, Frazier gives the concept a start and end date: “The decades encompassing the new paradise Bronx fell approximately between the arrival of paving in the 1910s and the completion of the Cross Bronx Expressway in 1963.” Often, he uses the term to paint an impressionistic picture of simpler times. Kids making small fires from scrap wood is “a tradition of the paradise Bronx—making side-lot campfires, sitting around them, sometimes roasting potatoes.” He tells the story of Gertrude Berg, who created the hit 1950s sitcom The Goldbergs, a sort of Jewish Leave It to Beaver set in the Bronx in which she appeared at the start of every episode in soliloquy. “If only the image of her leaning out the window of an apartment building could have held the paradise Bronx in place and kept the actual buildings from collapse.”

Frazier’s romantic nostalgia for the early- to mid-twentieth century of stoopball and doo-wop obscures the politics that helped make those heady Bronx days possible. Many, if not most, of the immigrant Jews who moved to the borough were not fleeing pogroms, as Frazier contends, but coming for economic reasons, having been excluded from much of the new factory work in an industrializing Russia. These circumstances helped foment a notable leftwing culture whose cohort was instrumental in creating some of the earliest cooperative housing in New York and whose presence was the reason Trotsky decamped to the Bronx at all. Even Berg, that national symbol of wholesomeness, refused to fire one of her actors, Philip Loeb—a leader of the Actors’ Equity Association—amid Red Scare accusations against him. Yet Frazier sees this egalitarian culture as a corruption of the borough’s virtues, rather than one of its achievements. He decries the “Soviet-style solemnity” of Co-op City and writes that, in the Central Post Office on Grand Concourse, “the socialist-realist murals in the former lobby dispensed their faded idealism into the shuttered gloom.”

It comes as a surprise, then, when he enthuses about mutual aid, a concept he learned from activists who run a Oaxacan restaurant in Mott Haven. He calls it “a Christlike gift, or a great sense of civic engagement, or wonderfully scaled-up neighborliness.” Involvement in mutual aid often leads to the formation of tenants’ associations, he notes approvingly. Frazier admits that he “had never heard of mutual aid,” but of course he had—that’s precisely what the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society was.

Paradise Bronx is a deeply personal book, even including hand-drawn maps and frequent asides about Frazier’s friends and children. It is also an encyclopedia of the Bronx’s many quirks, such as why Eastchester is west of Westchester Square. Like his hero, Gouverneur Morris, who tamed New York’s uneven terrain with the gridiron, Frazier creates rational order. One of his favorite tools is the list, as in this sidewalk survey: “Q-tips. A pigeon foot. Those Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from rearview mirrors. Syringes with pale orange plastic stoppers on their needles. Sunglass lenses. The butts of menthol cigarettes…” But does this appreciation for the Bronx’s surfaces paper over deeper concerns such as the borough’s persistently high rates of poverty and violent crime, both the highest in the city, while one Bronx congressional district is the poorest in the country? What makes the Bronx greater, or even different than, say, Brooklyn? And what motivates Frazier? We never find out. He seems to be searching for some cosmic significance in his juxtapositions, as driven by the journey itself as any goal. “Histories like this book,” he offers, “don’t really have endings.”