A new book chronicles the history of the Bronx, ‘the Greatest Borough’

Writer Ian Frazier has spent the last 15 years walking the Bronx, mastering its geography, researching its history and getting to know its culture and people.

The result of his walks is a new book called " Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough ."

"The Bronx is the continent, and once you're on it, you can go for thousands of miles without seeing ocean again," he writes in the book. "The other boroughs, for their part, cling to the Bronx for dear life. The chafing and strife of this connection have made all the difference to the Bronx."

Frazier talked to WNYC's Alison Stewart on a recent episode of "All of It." Edited excerpts of their conversation are below.

Alison Stewart: What is something that you can only observe about the Bronx by walking it?

Ian Frazier: Well, you don't know what the geography is like. If you just look at it on your phone, you have no idea. If you drive through it, you're not aware that your car is going up and down as much as it is. But when you're on foot, you see this is a hilly place, and it's also varied. It's hilly along the Harlem River, and then, east of that, it becomes oceanfront. If you keep going, it's only like 7 miles across.

As you keep going, suddenly there you are: You're on the East River, which is also the Long Island Sound, which is also the Atlantic Ocean. You're going from an upstate geography, a hilly and challenging geography, to a two-way shore geography, to a coastal geography in one place. That's another in-between quality of the Bronx, that it's between the ocean and the upstate woods, almost.

The Bronx, as you write in the book, is at the edge of the continent, connected to the mainland. How do you think this dynamic has driven its cultural and physical development over history?

Frazier: It was a place that you had to pass through. And it's still a place that you have to pass through if you're coming from these islands. The islands are, I would say, propitiously laid out there in the water for people coming from elsewhere. To get from these islands up into New England, up and to the continent, you had to go through the Bronx.

If you live in New York City and you see it as an urban place, you may not realize that it is as just a work of nature. It's a wonder. It has so many different environments that it incorporates. It has saltwater and it has fresh water or brackish water. It has ocean, and it has land. I think it's one of the most blessed places geographically on the planet. When you walk it, you can see those different sides of it.

If you see when they did archeological digs of the Lenape village sites, what the Lenape ate, the Lenape are just having surf and turf every night. They're eating everything from elk to conchs to countless numbers of oysters. Before this was settled, it was estimated there were 350 square miles of oysters in the New York waters.

Now, the city itself, the land of the city, is only 300 square miles.

The Bronx, where does the name come from?

Ian Frazier: The Bronx comes from the Bronx River, which runs through the Bronx. It divides it in half. It runs north and south from a reservoir up in Westchester County, and it empties into the East River, 8 miles long in the Bronx. It's the longest river in New York City.

It got its name from Jonas Bronck, who owned land next to it. He came in the mid-1600s. Where he lived, they would say, "Well, that's Bronck's Land." Then they said, "That's Bronck's River." Then in the early 1900s, a poet named Joseph Rodman Drake wrote a poem called "Bronx." That's the title of the poem.

That's it.

Frazier: That's it [laughter]. It's an ode to the Bronx River. It's like somebody saying, "Oh, my dear Bronx River, how much I love you." It's a good poem. The place had a bunch of other names. When it finally became part of New York City at the end of the 19th century, that was the name that they gave to it.

Was Jonas Bronck a man of means?

Frazier: He must have been because he came here on his own ship, which was called the Fire of Troy. Seems like an unlucky name, maybe, to give a ship? He came in 1639 and bought land from the Munsee, which was a tribe of the Lenape, and also paid the Dutch, who by then had established themselves in lower Manhattan. I guess he gave them money to let him just settle there.

I think he died in, like, 1643. He wasn't there all that long, but he just had a real catchy name, Bronck. America likes the word "Bronck" if you think about the west.

Let's talk to Mark, calling in from Westchester.

Mark: Thank you for taking my call. I was born in 1942 and lived [in the Bronx] until 1964. When I was living in the Bronx, that part just east of the Concourse at 167th Street was an extremely Jewish neighborhood. I've read that especially in the '30s, '40s, '50s, it was one of the most Jewish places in the world.

We did the things that kids did then: We played in the streets. We were not supervised directly by our parents. We made up our own games. We had an absolutely great time living there. As obviously many people know, the Bronx changed. I blame it mostly on landlords and not taking care of the buildings properly.

Frazier: In 1930, the Bronx was 50% Jewish, and the percentage in the Concourse was much higher. What's now the South Bronx was 80% Jewish. The idea of the "Paradise Bronx," which is what I talk about, is what this caller is referring to, was unsupervised play in the streets because people are sitting on their stoops and everybody's aware of what's going on.

There is not this huge number of cars that we have today, so the streets, which were beautifully paved, were open in a playground where kids could just play.

The paradise fell into difficulty when the buildings aged. These buildings went up really quickly in the early part of the 20th century. By the time you got into the '50s and '60s, many of these buildings were in neighborhoods that had been redlined.

Why had they been redlined? Because the powers that be — bankers, real estate agents – got nervous about the diversity of the Bronx, and they decided that certain blocks and great big parts of the Bronx were too risky to lend to.

If you wanted to fix up the building, you couldn't really get a loan to do it. That contributed to the decay of the buildings. They were just falling apart. There were a lot of appliances plugged into wiring that wasn't equipped to take that much stress on it. A lot of buildings caught on fire, and that was something that happened very much in the '70s.

Let's talk to Linda, who is calling from the Bronx.

Linda: I am originally from Detroit. I came to the Bronx in 1968. I have lived in three different places in the Bronx. Currently, and for the past couple of decades, I lived in Riverdale. I love the Bronx. It is diverse in every way you can think of.

I'm really glad that our author talked about how the diversity was disliked by the banks. They redlined, would not support landlords who wanted to build in the Bronx, and so it became a very downhill borough, but we have an expression now, the "Boogie Down Bronx." That is positive.

People say, "Where do you live?" I say, "The Bronx." They say, "Where in the Bronx?" I reluctantly say, "Riverdale." Then they go, "Oh, but that's not the Bronx." For so long, movies, etc., etc., have depicted the Bronx as a violent, crime-ridden, poverty-stricken, awful place.

Thank you. Let's talk to Ray from Fordham Road.

Ray: Longtime listener and lover of the Bronx. Lived here all my life. Right now, to give you a picture, I'm on the Bx17, headed down Katonah in the heart of the Bronx.

What we need in the Bronx – especially when you're talking about redlining – is the dignity brought back to living. The people and the tenants are being, how you can say, they're subjected to live a certain way.

Why are the public hallways not clean? Why is garbage not taken care of? It's because there's a decision that the Bronx has to stay like those movies and has to be filthy when people want to live in a clean place. I'm definitely getting the book. Love y'all. Just continue on. I'm at work.

Thank you, Ray. Thank you so much for the shout-out. Love that too.

Ian Frazier: He was on the Bx17 bus, what's coming up?

Yes, he was. How did the Bronx become part of New York City?

Ian Frazier: Originally, it was part of Westchester County. Then people from New York City started moving into the Bronx because it offered a lot of open space. At first, it was like the Hamptons in that people went there and had fabulous estates. You had a lot of land so you could have polo fields. You could have racetracks. The Tiffanys of Tiffanys' had a beautiful estate up there.

Then in the 1890s, they voted on whether they wanted to be part of New York. Overwhelmingly, both the city and this part of Westchester County voted that this part of Westchester County would become part of New York City. That was before Brooklyn was a part of New York City or before Staten Island or Queens. That was before Manhattan became just one borough, among others.

Soon after the Bronx became part of New York City, it became its own county. By 1905, it was part of the city. It was its own county. It was a place with a lot of possibilities where people could expand, could build apartments.

The subways reached it in 1905. The first subways got up there, coming up from Manhattan. Once you had the subways, you had the No. 1, you had the No. 4, you had the 2 and the 5, and then you had the 6.

You had all this wonderful new housing that people – especially those who lived on the Lower East Side, which was the most densely populated place on the planet – could move up there, get nice apartments. It became a place that people would move to.

If you remember, I believe I've been told this, but in the last episode of "The Honeymooners," Jackie Gleason says, "Baby, we're moving to the Bronx."

I want that positive view. You need a place where people can live that is not outrageously expensive. The danger is that the Bronx will become another expensive part of the city.

Someone else wrote, "Both my parents grew up in Coney Island back in the 1930s. My dad's mom had a bad sinus condition. The doctor said she should move to a dry climate, so they moved to the Bronx." [laughs]

Frazier: Yes, that is a pretty interesting thing. People used to move there for their health. Edgar Allan Poe moved there for the health of his wife, who had consumption, which is TB. It didn't particularly help her as she died not that long after they moved there. It was like a country place where you could recuperate.

Now the Bronx has the worst air in the city, and it has very high rates of asthma. It has bad air, because so many vehicles run through there. It has the big produce market, Hunts Point, and lots and lots of trucks coming and going, so it has changed.

The Cross Bronx Expressway, which carries I-95 from New Jersey through Connecticut, runs right through it. The final cost of the highway was $238 million in 1946. That's $2 billion in today's dollars. How did the expressway alter what it meant to live in the Bronx?

Frazier: It cut the Bronx in half. What it did was first knock down a lot of neighborhoods. It physically separated people. People who had been friends didn't see as much of each other, especially during construction, because it was hard to get across. It remains hard to get across the Cross Bronx if you're going north to south.

It was just insulting that you're going to put this kind of road through. People say that it was the worst thing that happened to the Bronx and contributed the most to the decline of the Bronx. It was a violent process of construction and tearing down and dislocation, and for what? For 6.5 miles of highway.

In 1976, the number of fires of all kinds that year totaled more than 33,000. You write extensively about this moment in the Bronx's history, but what is something you think people get wrong about the Bronx fires of the 1970s?

Frazier: The idea was this was arson, and some of it was arson. If you look at New York City fire marshal reports, they say only a small percentage of those fires were arson. The idea that the people burned down their own housing for who knows what reason.

That was an idea propagated by Sen. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan, who said the people of the Bronx must not want housing or they wouldn't burn it down. That was just untrue and unfair for the senator to say about people he represents. That's something people get wrong.

It burned for a lot of different reasons. In a way, it was a panic. It was like the buildings went up in the early 19th century in almost a rush of enthusiasm to build here, and they kind of came down in a panic of fear, like this is all going to fall apart.

The buildings were redlined, I repeat. It was hard to get money to repair them. It was also just an idea on behalf of the city that, well, we're just going to let this place go. They closed firehouses in the Bronx at the height of this plague of fires. The idea that the people of the Bronx burned down their own buildings is largely nonsense. That's a major thing that people get wrong about the Bronx.

Toward the end of the book, you write about the present and the future of the Bronx, especially luxury apartments rising along the Harlem River. The rents have gone through the roof, 26% in the past decade. What do you think the city needs to do to ensure that the Bronx doesn't fall into further gentrification?

Frazier: A fact that I think everybody should just keep in mind: 34% of renters in the Bronx pay more than 50% of their income in rent. Go back to [early U.S. Senator from New York and founding father] Gouverneur Morris. If you had said to him, "Is that the kind of country that you're looking for?" How does that differ from serfdom? That's too much rent. How do you deal with that?

I am not a housing expert. I can't say how it can be done. I have no prescription, but I know that it is important that somehow that number, 34% paying more than 50%, that has to change. It just can't be how people live.

This is a place with extremely good infrastructure to begin with in terms of the subways, railroad access. They're now building Metro North stations on the southeast part of the Bronx. It's a great place. Easy access to the city. People will want to live there. They will continue to. It should be a place that is affordable. How one goes about that, I don't know.