The Bronx (Columbia History of Urban Life)

Great book about the general history of the Bronx and how it became the borough it is today. Highly recommended for any historical references dealing with the Bronx. It's great to see how the different neighborhoods evovled

Very comprehensive and interesting history of my Borough of origin.

The book goes into detail about the building of apartment Houses in the Bronx and subsequent changes in neighborhoods. There is very little information about the neighborhoods, different ethnic groups, and the multiple institutions in the Bronx, such as schools, churches, shopping areas, and movie theatres.

In the 1970s, the South Bronx became a national symbol of urban decay. Neighborhoods such as Hunts Point and Morrisiana lost over half their population in the 1970s alone, as landlords burned low-rent buildings in order to cash in on insurance policies. This book seeks to answer the question: what went wrong?To start off, the South Bronx was already a working-class industrial neighborhood even in the 1940s. Thus, it was the sort of neighborhood that people were not eager to live in if they could live somewhere else. Gonzalez seems to think that these areas simply were not suburban enough; she implies that when they were built in the late 19th century, South Bronx neighborhoods were already too dense, too renter-oriented, and too mixed-use to satisfy some consumers' tastes for larger dwellings and more suburb-like places. But her theory begs the question- why were so many urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan more successful than the South Bronx?Gonzalez also points out that government investments accelerated the South Bronx's decline. She notes that even before the 1950s, subway extensions opened up the northern Bronx for development, shifting middle-class commuters away from the South Bronx. In later decades, expressway construction both opened up suburbs for development and caused the destruction of much of the South Bronx's housing stock, while public housing construction in both Harlem and the Bronx destroyed even more housing, causing poor people to switch neighborhoods and making their new neighborhoods less appealing to the working and middle classes. At the same time, government subsidized middle-class housing projects in the east Bronx, creating another avenue of middle-class flight. All of this makes sense- but again, a comparative perspective would have added depth to her discussion. Did the South Bronx suffer more than other working-class neighborhoods in other cities? Why or why not?Finally, Gonzalez discusses the stabilization of the South Bronx over the last thirty years. Rather than building housing projects itself, government subsidized housing built by nonprofits in a variety of ways- an experiment that, at least in the South Bronx, appears to have been successful. But the South Bronx has been stabilized in part due to Hispanic immigration to New York City. It is not clear whether the government subsidies would have mattered in a declining city with less immigration, or whether poor neighborhoods in other immigrant-heavy growing cities have stabilized without as much government support for housing. Again, a comparative perspective would have made this a better book.

Not what I expected. From the Bronx but disappointed

intersting

The Bronx is a polished, well-researched scholarly work on the development of the Bronx in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the borough's decline after World War II, and urban renewal efforts from the 1970s to the present. The book is crisply written, with an extensive bibliography and index. Numerous maps and charts enhance the argument, and there are sixteen pages of historic photographs, including some "before" and "after" shots of the same locations. It's important to note that this is not a comprehensive history of the Bronx, as the title suggests, but a highly focused history of city planning, real estate development, the arrival of sewer lines and mass transit, and so forth. The lack of a human story line occasionally makes for a puzzling narrative, as when Gonzalez jumps from a discussion of real estate development to a discussion of urban renewal with only the slightest discussion of the urban blight that necessitated the urban renewal. I closed the book feeling like I still had very little understanding of the lives of the men and women who populated the Bronx, either in the first generations of settlement or in its severely troubled phase in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. But if you are interested in the expansion and development of New York City and don't mind a rather dry narrative, this book is definitely worth a look.

What a factual book on the growth of THE BRONX!! A must for all Bronxites!!! Daniel J.DeNapoli