\n
![\"early](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/early-view-of-bronx.jpg\")
The view from Broncksland a century after Jonas Bronck\u2019s death. Source: Ephemeral New York<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the 1970s, the South Bronx was the symbol of post-industrial urban blight\u2014a wasteland of rubble, charred buildings, and deteriorating social services. Contrary to the prevailing belief, though, the people of the neighborhood were not setting the fires themselves, nor were they indifferent to their environment. Victims of deleterious government policy and entrenched racism, they nonetheless advocated tirelessly for help for their neighborhood and by the end of the decade began to coalesce into community organizations that finally helped bring about assistance and recovery.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Bronx Before
\nThe view from Broncksland a century after Jonas Bronck\u2019s death. Source: Ephemeral New York<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The borough was mostly rural throughout the 19th century, attracting people who wanted to live in \u201cthe country.\u201d But in the years between the turn of the 20th century and the Second World War, its population grew sevenfold, to 1.4 million people. The construction of the subway in 1905 helped bring people into the neighborhood, leading a journalist for the New York Times to marvel that<\/a> \u201cblock after block of new flats and apartment houses\u2026[are] springing up as if by magic.\u201d During the Great Depression<\/a>, New Deal<\/a> programs helped construct over one hundred housing projects, which were initially viewed as a positive development for the borough because they helped provide housing during a time in which people were struggling to attain a basic standard of living.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Post-WWII \u00a0<\/p>\n A major demographic shift happened after World War II<\/a>. Now, mostly Puerto Rican and Black Americans were moving into the South Bronx, where they joined Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants. The neighborhood was integrated in a way that was healthy and meaningful for the residents. Vivian V\u00e1zquez Irizarry, the documentary filmmaker behind Decade of Fire (2018), remembered<\/a>, \u201cWhen I grew up in the South Bronx, it was integrated. We spoke to so many people who talk about the South Bronx as diverse and vibrant, where you can ask for sugar from your neighbor\u2026There was an excitement to coming to New York and living in the Bronx with people they have never met before. The lady upstairs was my mother\u2019s best friend, and she was Jewish and also our babysitter. And there was the lady who was Irish on the second floor and also in my building there was an African-American and Cuban family. When I was a little girl, I didn\u2019t see that integration as anything but normal.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But, as a result of various factors further detailed below, the neighborhood began to deteriorate. Crime soared, and the murder rate in the Bronx tripled in five years. Drugs became ubiquitous. The city pulled back on essential services. In 1969, the New York City Department of Planning described the South Bronx<\/a> in its Master Plan as \u201can area of turbulence and change\u2026Frequent tenement fires force residents to move and leave gutted buildings or vacant lots. Residential densities are high\u2026Four-story walkups on 60-by-100 lots house as many as 21 families. Most of the housing\u2014grim, crowded tenements\u2014is concentrated between 134th Street and Bruckner Boulevard. The majority of residents are black and Puerto Rican. Mobility is high\u2026An estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the dwelling units in the district will be vacated over the next five years.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Bronx Burns \u00a0<\/p>\n In Game 2 of the 1977 World Series, sportscaster Howard Cosell apparently said<\/a>, \u201cThere it is, ladies and gentlemen. The Bronx is burning,\u201d as the ABC aerial camera panned around the neighborhood. Reports differ as to the veracity of Cosell uttering those words, but the statement, succinct and resigned, seems to sum up what was happening in the borough.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In the 1970s, buildings were indeed beginning to burn<\/a>, and the statistics are shocking: every building saw a fire at least once; 80% of the buildings were lost to fires; 250,000 people were displaced. One resident of the area remembered how the fires came<\/a> about: \u201cWe noticed it slowly, with two-story homes and small apartment buildings emptying out, then stripped for pipes and wires, and finally torched\u2014there was more money in insurance than rebuilding. Arsonists working for landlords would at least warn tenants of impending fires so they would not be asleep at home. Some people took no chances and slept with their clothes on.\u201d A retired firefighter, Tom Henderson, commented<\/a>, \u201cThe smell is one thing I remember\u2026That smell of burning\u2014it was always there, through the whole borough almost.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The narrative in the media, perpetuated by the popular 1981 film Fort Apache, the Bronx, was that residents were lawlessly and callously burning their own houses down. By 1981, the media was declaring that<\/a> \u201cThe South Bronx is now a household synonym for abandonment, hellish crime, devastation, [and] terminal urban disease.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n President Jimmy Carter came to the South Bronx to see the extent of the destruction and pledge federal assistance. Nicole Gelinas recounts this visit in her article \u201cThe Bronx is Up,\u201d writing that Carter saw \u201crow upon row of burned-out buildings, the brick facades scorched black, windows hastily boarded up with\u2026tin flashing\u2026junkies nodded out in vacant buildings\u201d surrounded by \u201ccharred artifacts\u201d such as \u201csmashed-up televisions, wheel-less roller skates, cracked bathtubs.\u201d It was a shocking, sobering scene, and Carter promised aid. The money never came, and the next president, Ronald Reagan, was certainly less inclined to help the beleaguered neighborhood.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n So what actually happened? Did the residents burn down their own homes, or was something bigger going on?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n What Actually Happened: Austerity, Benign Neglect, and Urban Renewal \u00a0<\/p>\n The city of New York was in the depths of a major financial crisis in the 1970s. Officials implemented austerity measures, which meant bringing in consultants to trim budgets. Social services, education, enrichment programs, employment opportunities, and more were weakened. This translated to cutting firehouses, so in the Bronx, it was impossible to fight fires when they occurred. The South Bronx alone lost 12 fire companies between 1974 and 1976.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBenign neglect\u201d is a term most likely coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an advisor on urban and social policy to President Nixon. It advocates doing nothing to address social issues in the hope that they will resolve themselves. Scholars Roderick and Deborah Wallace claim Moynihan looked at the arson happening in the Bronx and concluded that \u201cthe poor people of New York [were] lawless, pathological, and irredeemably locked into an antisocial behavior pattern.\u201d This meant that it was okay to take resources from their areas, and, regarding the fires specifically, not answer alarms when they went off in poor minority neighborhoods. As a senator in 1978, Moynihan fought against constructing new buildings in the South Bronx, stating, \u201cPeople in the South Bronx don\u2019t want housing or they wouldn\u2019t burn it down. It\u2019s fairly clear that housing isn\u2019t the problem in the South Bronx.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Another almost interchangeable term for benign neglect is \u201cplanned shrinkage,\u201d which the Wallaces explain was the withdrawal of city services from \u201csick\u201d neighborhoods that were seen as unfit or undeserving of survival. Roger Starr, the executive director of the Citizens\u2019 Housing and Planning Council and later Mayor Beame\u2019s Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development, advocated for this policy in order to, as the New York Times said in 1976, \u201chasten the population decline already begun in those neighborhoods so that, ultimately, cutbacks in city services could be concentrated in a limited number of areas.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Starr\u2019s plan was a lot more insidious than those words suggest, especially as he\u2019d argued that community wasn\u2019t a real thing\u2014\u201cAmerican communities can be disassembled and reconstituted about as readily as freight trains.\u201d The Wallaces write that \u201cBy denying the existence of the community social fabric and by evoking dysfunctional poor families, [Starr] helped provide the intellectual basis for massive demolition of the housing of the poor.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cUrban renewal\u201d was another term bandied about during this era and referred to the tearing down of \u201cslums\u201d to replace them with middle-class housing and civic centers. James Baldwin <\/a>called it \u201cNegro removal,\u201d and it\u2019s not hard to agree with him. Landlords sold their buildings to speculators, who divided the apartments into even smaller spaces, which is where those people displaced by the loss of their housing congregated. Drugs and crime began to proliferate under these strained circumstances.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n What Actually Happened: Redlining \u00a0<\/p>\n Redlining was the New Deal-era government policy of sending government surveyors into cities and drawing up maps for use by insurance companies and mortgage lenders that indicated which parts of the area were home to mostly Black or Brown people. The red areas were \u201cundesirable,\u201d and thus those companies and lenders refused to make it possible for people of color to attain home ownership there. At the same time, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized developers who produced all-white neighborhoods<\/a>, furthering this de facto segregation in American cities. Ultimately, many people of color were pushed into housing projects.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Richard Rothstein explains in his study of redlining, The Color of Law (2017), how there were white projects, but they had a lot of vacancies, while the Black projects had long waiting lists. Eventually, this was so conspicuous, he notes, that \u201cpublic housing authorities in the federal government opened up the white-designated projects to African-Americans, and they filled with African-Americans. At the same time, industry was leaving the cities, African-Americans were becoming poorer in those areas, the projects became projects for poor people, not for working-class people. They became subsidized, they hadn\u2019t been subsidized before\u2026 And so they became vertical slums that we came to associate with public housing.\u201d All of this was relevant to the Bronx, which found its Black and Brown residents crammed into deteriorating public housing.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Neighborhood Response Tired of the racist, demeaning, and false narrative that suggested the fires were the fault of the residents themselves, and equally exhausted by the physical destruction of their homes, neighborhood organizations rallied using culture and community programs to reshape the Bronx. They pressured the city to create an arson investigation team, which was assigned to the area in 1982 and resulted in a reduction in the number of fires. In 1986, Mayor Ed Koch funded a $4.4 billion program to rehabilitate 100,000 units of housing. In the 21st century, the Bronx is a safe and stable area to the point that gentrification is starting to become a real issue for the borough, with poorer residents being pushed out.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n![\"bronx](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/bronx-burned-public-housing-projects.jpg\")
Public Housing ruins, South Bronx, Camilo Vergara. Source: Library of Congress<\/p>\n
\n![\"child](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/child-rubble-south-bronx.jpg\")
\u201cMy Playground,\u201d from South Bronx by Perla de Leon, 1980. Source: Latinx Project at NYU<\/p>\n![\"burned](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/burned-down-buildings-cars.jpg\")
Burned buildings and rubble in the early 1980s, David Gonzalez. Source: New York Times<\/p>\n
\n![\"putting](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/putting-out-fire-south-bronx.jpg\")
\u201cFirefighters in the South Bronx\u201d by Joe Conzo. Source: Latinx Project at NYU<\/p>\n![\"destroyed](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/destroyed-city-block-bronx.jpg\")
A northeasterly view from Charlotte Street and Boston Road in the Bronx featuring the immense destruction of abandonment and arson on the borough\u2019s urban landscape, 1984. Source: Camilo J. Vergara, Library of Congress<\/p>\n
\n![\"redlining](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/redlining-map-new-york.jpg\")
Redlining in the Bronx. Source: Segregation by Design<\/p>\n
\n![\"aerial](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/aerial-view-bronx-new-york.jpg\")
Aerial view of the Bronx, New York City. Source: Ajay Tallam via Flickr<\/p>\n