The New Yorker Radio Hour - Ian Frazier’s Tour of “Paradise Bronx”

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

“I like to look at places that people aren’t seeing,” says Ian Frazier, the author of “Great Plains” and “Travels in Siberia,” and the new “Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough.” “Not only do people not know about” the Bronx, “but what they know about it is wrong.”  The book, which was excerpted recently in The New Yorker, came out of fifteen years’ worth of long walks through the city streets, and on a hot morning recently, he invited a colleague, Zach Helfand, to join him on foot. They admired the majestic Romanesque-style stonework of the High Bridge, where Edgar Allan Poe would walk while mourning his wife, in the eighteen-forties; the impressively tangled connections of the interstate highway system that engineers once called “chicken guts”; and walked east to the Cedar Playground, which has a strong claim to being the birthplace of hip-hop.  Note: The segment misstates the year Edgar Allan Poe moved to the Bronx. Poe moved to New York City in 1844, and to the Bronx in 1846.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Ian Frazier has been writing for The New Yorker since the 70s when he was fresh out of college. Ian, or Sandy, as most of us call him, is a writer of tremendous range. He's written some of the funniest pieces we ever published, but also a tremendous body of deep and sensitive nonfiction reporting. He's got a unique gift for capturing. the essence of a place. He's written about the Great Plains,

about Siberia, about Staten Island, and we just published a piece by Ian Frazier about New York City's sometimes most overlooked borough, the Bronx. The Bronx is a hand reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea.

Its fellow boroughs are islands or parts of islands. The Bronx hangs on to Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn, with Staten Island trailing at the end of the long tow rope of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and keeps the whole business from drifting away on a strong, outgoing tide. That passage is the opening of Ian Frazier's new book, Paradise Bronx. It came out of 15 years' worth of long walks through the city streets of that borough,

and on a recent, very hot morning, Frazier invited a colleague to join him, the editor and writer Zach Hellfand. He told me to meet him at the 170th Street Station underneath the elevated tracks on Monday at 9.30 and he said to bring comfortable shoes, sunblock, and water. Hi, Sandy. Hi, Zach. How you doing?

Like many people in the New York metro area, I know of the Bronx, mainly from driving through the Bronx, the Cross Bronx Expressway, or the Major Deegan, or the Bruckner. And that's not how Sandy sees it. Sandy sees it at street level, on a human level. And that's the Bronx that he wants to show me.

So the first stop is we're going to walk west to the high bridge, the pedestrian bridge that spans the Harlem River. All right, should we head off? Sure enough. What percentage of the streets or blocks would you say you've walked at this point? I have no idea. I mean, I have tried to cover it pretty thoroughly, and I set out to walk a thousand miles.

I don't think I did. But I walked a long way up here. I've walked a lot up here. There's so many senses in the book. There's so many sounds. And you started walking in the Bronx because of your nose, right? You were falling your nose. Right, yeah, yeah.

The first big piece I did about the Bronx was about the Stelladoro Bakery. And that was on 236th and Broadway. and the major deegan runs right behind the stelodoro bakery. And when I told people, I had this happen a few times where I would say, I'm doing a piece on the stelodoro bakery. And people who had driven on that would go, oh yeah, we could smell it when we went behind it, going up to wherever they were going.

One woman told me, when they went someplace, she lived in the Bronx, and when they smelled the steladoro cookies, she knew she was almost home when she was. was a little girl. And the smell of cookies in a neighborhood is an amazing resource. It makes it a nicer place. And so I wanted to find how far that smell extended from the bakery. And so I would just walk along and walk a few blocks. And yeah, I can still smell it. A few more blocks. Yeah, I can still smell it. And sometimes it would be like, you know, a mile and a half, two miles. If the wind is

right, you're still smelling those cookies way far from. the bakery. And that bakery was crushed by a private equity company that bought it and then lost money on it and sold it to a company who moved it to Ashland, Ohio. So why from that write a book that's basically a love letter in some ways to the Bronx? Well, my first book of this kind was Great Plains, which is about the middle of the country. and people would say to me, oh, yeah, I flew over it. There's nothing down there. People flying from New York to L.A.

There's nothing down there. Or people were calling it the flyover country. And that got my backup. I mean, this is one of the coolest places in the world. You know, Dodge City is out here for him to say. You know, there's all kinds of cool things out here. I like to look at places that people aren't seeing. And the Bronx is not only people don't know about it,

but what they know is wrong or is just really a gross oversimplification. There are places in Europe where a Bronx means a slum, you know, and I just wanted to know

this should not stand because this is a really cool place. So shall we make our way over to the high bridge? Absolutely. So this is it right here. You just, you're at the bridge. You're at the bridge.

And you've got to, You've got to go this way because bicycles go down that way. And I have come close to being run over a number of times. I've seen the high bridge a million times, usually driving on the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan. And it's really striking. It's got these stone arches really high. It looks like a Roman aqueduct. And it turns out it actually was an aqueduct back when it was first built.

Now, from this approach where we're walking, it looks entirely different. We're going up this long ridge, and then all of a sudden you can see the hills of Manhattan in the distance and this big sky, and there's this long promenade leading from all those things that invites you to walk on it. First, we're going to look this way. When I come out here, I think about Edgar Allan Poe. Poe moved to the Bronx in 1844 with his wife, who was also his cousin, Virginia Clem, and they moved there because she had consumption, which is now called TB. And they thought that the good Bronx Air would be good for her lungs. Well, that was then. They lived on Kingsbridge Road in a house where you can still visit, and she died there. And Poe was just Greek. And this is another walker in the city.

He walked all over the Bronx in his grief and misery. And he would come out here and just stare down at this wild scenery, which then was wild scenery. Right now it's busy and not very pretty to look at. But you can imagine when he was here, it's a nice place to be sad and forlorn and melancholy. Right. It was both a very wild... It was not only a wild place, this was an architectural wonder, you know, that this was built. The high bridge was running, it was, the aqueduct was working and running water across it by 1842.

And it was a really important improvement in New York City's infrastructure, because New York City then was just the tip of Manhattan Island. It had really poor water. It had water that people would catch cholera from. It also didn't have enough water to fight fires. And it had a cholera epidemic in 1832, a very bad fire in 1835. And they built the aqueduct system up to the Croton River in order to take water down to the city. And the reason this bridge is high is that the whole thing is a gravity feed.

So it just flows downhill to the city. The water, when it gets there, has enough pressure to go up four or five stories. And so now we can look north. So looking down, we're right on top of a roadway, a very busy roadway. There's train tracks on the other side and fencing. And then farther off in the distance is just this tangle of infrastructure. Loops and helixes and clover leaves kind of all jumbled on top of. of each other. So you're looking at all of this infrastructure, just like, we're all, all just together.

When they were building the connections, all these things were, when they were unfinished, the engineers referred to them as chicken guts. It was so confusing and weird to look at. And when you see a picture of this, like an aerial photo, it's astonishing, all the ways that they managed to hook all these things up together. So up here, I'll show you where I had you know, where we can walk. So we've talked about the wonder of the infrastructure and just how much of a technological marvel it is. But it also came at a great cost, right?

Well, it is funny because when I look at the high bridge and think about the high bridge, it's just like the highest achievements of man, you know? It's like, isn't this great? But the cross Bronx, the bridges that lead to the crossbronks, and the cross Bronx were also engineering achievements, but at an enormous cost to the people who live in the Bronx. What it did was it brought this, you know, rush of traffic

and kind of just changed how you thought about the place. It made it a place that you drive across. It made it a place that you drive through. Any place that people pass through going to and from suffers. If you're on a highway and you're going somewhere, I believe that things in motion have disdain for things that are not in motion.

And I think that when you look out your car window, you're kind of like, how long, sucker? You know, that that's a natural attitude for people to have. And it inflicts harm on places. There's the obvious harm. There's the noise and the traffic. and the entire neighborhoods that were uprooted to make way for these roadways. And then there's the less visible harms.

There's the air quality. The asthma rates in the Bronx are higher than anywhere else in New York City. So we're going to go down these stairs and we'll walk along Sedgwick Avenue and we will be in the historic sites in the 1970s era of the Bronx. The route we're taking along Sedgwick Avenue begins as a service road that takes us right through those chicken guts that the engineers were talking about. And now we're seeing what this is like at kind of river valley level. And see, I just love these.

It's like this is the foundation of the earth. These are the pylons underneath the bridges. These are the pylons that hold up the Hamilton Bridge. There's no sidewalk down there, and the side of the road is overgrown with all this plant life. and Sandy is walking ahead and parting these weeds so we can walk through. Okay, so we're kind of bushwhacking right now. We're on the side of a fairly busy road on a dirt path, and we're sometimes raising our arms above our waist to get through the overgrown weeds.

You call the book Paradise Bronx. What and when was the paradise? Well, I mean, as I kind of broad-brush view of Bronx history, the Paradise Bronx was when you had all these paved streets after the Bronx was built up in the 19-teens and 1920s. And not very many cars. And kids would just play in the street. And they were, if you look at the pictures, some of the paving was just smooth and looked beautiful. And so you could draw on it. You could draw hopscotch.

squares on it, you could play marbles on it, you know. So that period, which is like 1920 to, I don't know, I say until the completion of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which was 1963, that was a time when that people who lived here just remember it as so it was such fondness, you know, where everybody was just on their stoops and hanging out and... And then what happened? Well, the buildings got old, which was a real problem. The buildings had gone up in a rush in the building of the Bronx that followed the subways.

The subways came here from 195 to like 1930, but all the Bronx was just built up in a real estate frenzy. And those buildings aged, fell apart, and they started burning. And that's kind of what happened. The story that I had always heard growing up was that people were just burning the buildings. But you said there was some arson, but in most cases that wasn't the case, right? Reports by New York City Fire Marshal said that only a small proportion of the fires were started by arson. You know, they burned because they weren't well maintained. They burned because they needed new wiring.

They burned because too many people were. in a building and there wasn't enough heat and somebody was using a space heater. There were just all kinds of reasons. But it did become a plague. It just happened. It was just one building after the next. What did the government or the greater civic world do to help or not help the situation? Well, at first, they did not help. And the idea was that this was going to just kind of disappear. And there was an called planned shrinkage. The plan had moved industry out. The basic idea of the metro area was,

industry wasn't going to be in the city anymore. And the city would be like more of a white-collar place. And the Bronx lost hundreds and hundreds of businesses. Once you didn't have businesses, then you've lost a tax base, which means that you don't have the money to sustain, you know, all the stops on the number six train. And so you would just close some of those stops. And they did disastrously, they did it by closing firehouses.

And they closed firehouses right at the time that the fires were starting to get really bad. You know, and this was a time when there's still half a million people living in the South Bronx. I mean, like 400,000, so. It went through a really tough period, and people assumed that that was something, about the people who lived here and about the place. It wasn't about that. It was about decisions

that had been made elsewhere. Well, that place, we can sacrifice it. And that was more or less what happened here. And it gave the Bronx a bad reputation and an undeserved reputation. So, you know, it's a place where a lot of poor people live. It's a place where people live when they're starting out. And for the city to do what it does, which is to make immigrants into Americans, there have to be places where you can start, where you don't have to have a lot of money. And so you do have, you know, a lot of people with precarious lives live here. And that makes for lots of different, difficult social social. situations, but the Bronx is successful, I think, at bringing people into the city and being a place

where lots of different people can live. Ian Frazier with Zach Hellfand, on foot in the Bronx. We'll continue in a moment. Our route on Sedgwick Avenue has morphed from this kind of underbelly, under all this infrastructure, a nowhere zone. and all of a sudden it becomes residential, pleasant, these high-rise buildings with these nice river views. Okay, where are we now?

Well, we are at Cedar Playground, and this is where some of the early hip-hop jams took place as early as 1974. It's kind of hard to imagine from the bench where Sandy and I are sitting, but if you know anything about the beginnings of hip-hop, You know that one of its creators was a man named Clive Campbell, also known as DJ Cool Herk. And this was his stomping grounds. This is where he was doing the creative. What Cool Herk would do is bring his massive amplifiers here, and they would plug into the light, the streetlights.

These amps were so powerful that when they got really cranked up, the street lights would go dim. And there is a description by Grand Master's, Flash in his book, The Adventures of Grand Master Flash, where he talks about coming here because he's heard about this, and this is in May of 1974, and he comes here and he says he could hear it thundering blocks away. And when he gets closer, he says that it was not only the loudest music he had ever heard, it was the loudest sound he had ever heard.

There's so many sounds in the book. book, there's dynamite, fires, cars, horns, train whistles, cannons. This was a different kind of sound, but almost kind of a reaction to some of those sounds in a way. Yeah, I mean, I see it as a reaction and I see it as, I mean, what is it based on? It's based on the heartbeat. It's like, we're still here, you know? It's a sound, it's a really powerful sound. It's kind of like if you ever hear the song South Bronx by Boogie Down Productions,

I mean, that's like a war cry. It's just like, South Bronx, South Bronx, South Bronx, South Bronx. South Bronx, South Bronx, South Bronx, South Bronx, the South South Bronx, the South South Rock, South Bronx, the South South Rock. South Rock. South Rock. The South South Bronx Many people tell me this style is terrific It is kind of different

If you see what you're looking at You're looking at all of this There's the Major Deegan And beyond that is the railroad tax And beyond that is the river As you're looking west And this is just blasting to the skies And it's not surprising

That music that began With that kind of an environment Would go around the world I mean you could practically hear it around the world I'd like to think that like some of the jams where they did it over on the Taft High School playing fields, which are just wide open, that you could see them from space, you know. But they were really, these are important moments.

And I consider it the Bronx's response to all the infrastructure that we were seeing. You know, just powerful machines came here and plowed and tore down and bulldozed and crushed. And then the Bronx answered back. with hip-up. That's how I kind of configure the beginning of hip-up and why I think it's got a real heroic element to it. By now, what had looked like just a little bit of drizzle was starting to get more serious, so it was time to wrap it up. It is pouring, I would say. Yeah, out of nowhere. Well, the thunder was a clue. The thunder was a clue, but it did look like it was going to go that way, but it didn't.

So do you plan on continuing your Bronx walks now that the book is done? Probably not. I'm like an actor who plays a role and then I'm on to the next. I'm sorry, but I really, I will always, you know, I feel such an attachment to it. And I'm so happy to have the geography of the Bronx in my mind because it's a complicated geography. And I'm really happy at the people I met here. the people that I went on walks with here. And I will, those people I want to,

I want to continue to go on walks with my friends here. But probably I'll move on to something else. Ian Frazier's new book is called Paradise Bronx. And you can find so much writing by Ian Frazier at New Yorker.com, humor, reporting, and so much else. He spoke with editor and writer Zach Hellfan. I'm David Remnick, and that's our. program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.