The most romantic bridge in New York reaches from cliff top to cliff top, joining two neighborhoods forged by dreams and disappointment. On a damp, tropical day, I’ve ridden my bike to High Bridge,*1 a disused aqueduct in Washington Heights, dominated on its Manhattan side by a stone water tower that looks out over the Harlem River like a medieval fortification. A festive outdoor pool and a set of basketball courts stretch across the crown of the hill. Tinny radios emit competing soundtracks of salsa. From here, Highbridge Park, a picturesque wilderness of weeds and rusted stairs, tumbles down a steep escarpment toward the Harlem River Drive. Topography matters little in most of New York, where straight streets march up hills, trains burrow beneath them, and the roughest terrain was long ago flattened into gentle inclines. Here, though, a great ravine defined the area’s destiny. Once, altitude meant affluence.
On the Manhattan side, the park follows the bluff south along Edgecombe Avenue to the Sugar Hill neighborhood, where for a glorious couple of decades African Americans seemed poised to overcome injustice by force of talent. On the Bronx side, the bridge hits a precipitous, village-like neighborhood, also called Highbridge, which dips and rolls and climbs to another great, hopeful ridge crested by the Grand Concourse. At different times and to different people, these two high points on opposite sides of the canyon represented the apex of the American dream, which has nothing to do with owning a private house with a white picket fence and everything to do with transcending the limitations of one’s birth. On both sides of the river, that dream died violently and is now flickering back to life. High Bridge links two tragic and inspiring parts of the city that had to rescue themselves from decades of abandonment, racial hostility, and other forms of urban misery. Edgecombe Avenue and the Grand Concourse, two roughly parallel ridge roads on opposite sides of the river, were both nobly built; both saw their populations turn over and their architecture degrade. Both have now started to recover their old prosperity, though at dramatically different rates, and always at a cost.
High Bridge and water tower
I wheel my bike onto the span’s handsomely restored brickwork, grateful that it’s open again after years of neglect and closure. The view is majestically industrial, a panorama of mid-twentieth-century big thinking in the form of highways and housing projects. From here we can gaze onto the ambitions of New York’s master builder Robert Moses, who from the early thirties to the early sixties put into practice his belief that if he could move enough cars quickly enough, demolish enough slums, and pack enough poor people into enough plain brown towers, the city could be manageable again. The bridge itself comes to us from the previous mid-century, another great industrial age, when it seemed as if society’s ills were primarily problems of engineering.
Built in 1848 as an aqueduct to channel fresh water toward the Croton Reservoir at Forty-second Street (see Walk V, “City of Ideals”), High Bridge marched across the Harlem River in a stone parade of fifteen Roman arches, recalling the majesty of the ancient aqueducts in Segovia and Nîmes. In the nineteenth century, New Yorkers who enjoyed at least a day of leisure came to stroll back and forth between rural Upper Manhattan and the even more rural Bronx. Down below, within spitting and tossing range of the bridge, swells raced their carriages along the Harlem Speedway. Edgar Allan Poe is said to have hiked to this spot over the Bronx’s rocky terrain from his cottage on the Kingsbridge Road, where his wife was slowly expiring of tuberculosis. The route became part of his mythology, thanks to a lithograph by B. J. Rosenmeyer that shows the writer trudging through the snow over a wind-whipped viaduct, the cliffs behind him plunging to the river below.
Fishing at Macombs Dam Bridge, with High Bridge in the background, 1869
Shippers hated High Bridge, as they resented anything that slowed the smooth passage of their freight. Though the tall arches allowed sloops and ferries to pass between them, property owners and shippers needed clearance for ever-bigger boats. In 1928 they finally persuaded the city to rip out five arched segments and replace them with a broad steel span, splitting the bridge’s personality in two. (On the walkway, the two sections are demarcated by different patterns of pavers.) The water was rerouted, the tower decommissioned. In the seventies, when the unlit bridge became a drug dealer’s haven, the city handled it with the despairing shrug that was typical of the time: The gate was locked and High Bridge left to decay. The bridge spent forty-five years derelict and abandoned, a bit of nineteenth-century glory that had outlived its use. Then, in the spring of 2015, after a $61 million renovation, it reopened to pedestrians and bikes.
Height always conferred privilege. The British colonel Roger Morris, whose 130-acre estate was draped over the headlands, built his farmhouse on the loftiest point in 1765, and it still stands as the Morris-Jumel Mansion*2 on Jumel Terrace, an evocative enclave of the eighteenth century. After the loyalist Morris family decamped to England during the Revolution, George Washington moved in for a month in 1776 and his forces won a short-lived military victory, the Battle of Harlem Heights.*3
As the country aged, it was entertainers, rather than soldiers, who earned the right to occupy the summits, and few addresses represent the aristocracy of showmanship better than the white-stone château at 10 St. Nicholas Place. With its deliberately roughened stone, carved vines, turrets, corbels, and stumpy cone-roofed knockoff of High Bridge Tower at the corner, the freshly restored 1887 house is a picture-book fantasy of a medieval stronghold plunked down on a Manhattan hilltop. The late nineteenth century abounded with these Romanesque Revival spectaculars, but it somehow doesn’t come as a surprise that its builder was a circus tycoon.
James Bailey’s mansion, 10 St. Nicholas Place
The outlines of the owner’s life might have been plagiarized from a collection of fairy tales. Jimmy McGinnis was born in Detroit in 1847 and grew up a penniless orphan. He ran away with the circus at thirteen, working his way up from the kid who ran ahead of the wagon train and slapped posters on clapboard walls to the head of a massive entertainment company. Early on, he attached himself to father figures and even took the name of one: Little Jimmy became James A. Bailey, the peevish behind-the-scenes workaholic who allowed his partner, P. T. Barnum, to soak up all the fame. It was Bailey who decided that their joint venture, Barnum & Bailey, had to have London’s largest live attraction, Jumbo the elephant, and in 1882 sent a man over with ten thousand dollars to bring him back. It was Bailey, The New York Times reported years later, who had the idea of marching the star and twenty of his fellow pachyderms back and forth across the brand-new Brooklyn Bridge to trumpet the structure’s strength (and the circus’s delights). “It was Jumbo here, Jumbo there, and Jumbo everywhere,” the paper recalled in 1891.
The circus eventually squeezed so much energy from the joyless autocrat that he suffered a nervous breakdown, decided to quit the business, and built himself a retirement home on top of Harlem’s hill. His retirement lasted barely longer than construction. With his castle finished, he was soon back at work.
By the time Bailey died in 1906, a businessman named Philip Payton had formed the Afro-American Realty Company and begun renting apartments exclusively to black tenants, starting near the corner of West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Within a couple of decades, black Harlem belted Manhattan from river to river, from 110th Street north. The boundaries were debatable, but the epicenter of power was not: That sat on Edgecombe Avenue, atop the cliff known as Coogan’s Bluff. Doctors, lawyers, writers, and celebrities dwelled in airy apartments overlooking the huddled tenements below, and the sweet life they lived up there cemented the name of Sugar Hill. It was an easy situation to mock, and even Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the fair-skinned son of a famous pastor, described it with sneering admiration in 1935: “On Sugar Hill…Harlem’s would-be ‘sassiety’ goes to town. ’Midst paneled walls, parquet floors, electric refrigeration, colored tile baths, luxurious lobbies, elevators and doormen resplendent in uniforms, they cavort and disport themselves in what is called the best ofay manner.” The tinge of venom in Powell’s tone makes it clear how tenuous and contradictory the position of the Sugar Hill elite was. Its members embodied racial pride yet sought the approval of whites, who embraced the small fellowship of talent and ignored Harlem’s masses.
Nearly half a century after Bailey built his mansion, another poor but ambitious Midwesterner introduced himself to an older man, who became his employer and adopted father and led him to a magnificent residence on Harlem’s highest hill. In 1938, the young pianist and composer Billy Strayhorn showed up in Duke Ellington’s dressing room at the Stanley Hotel in Pittsburgh, while the master was getting his hair styled, and wowed him by playing “Sophisticated Lady.” In his biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life, David Hajdu quotes the two musicians’ mutual friend George Greenlee, who set up the meeting:
“Billy played it exactly like Duke had just played it on stage. He copied him to perfection.” Ellington stayed silent and prone, though his hair work was over. “Now this is the way I would play it,” continued Strayhorn. Changing keys and upping the tempo slightly, he shifted into an adaptation Greenlee described as “pretty hip-sounding and further and further ‘out there’ as he went on.”
Impressed but unsure what to do with the kid, Ellington told Strayhorn to look him up if he came to New York and jotted down directions to his home at 409 Edgecombe Avenue.*4 Strayhorn, eager to dazzle Ellington again, turned the instructions into a song: “Take the ‘A’ Train.” A few months later, when he did in fact take the A subway line to the 155th Street stop, Strayhorn moved into Ellington’s apartment at the top of the tallest building on Sugar Hill. There he found an Olympus of black America that was astonishingly pale—in skin color, in customs, and even in décor. He immediately called his friend Greenlee to report on its snowy color scheme. “You won’t believe it,” he said, “this place is completely white, even the rugs! I’m talking to you on a white telephone!”
From the street, 409 Edgecombe Avenue is architecturally undistinguished, except for its bulk. More than twice as tall as its six-story neighbors, it rises high enough that, until the late fifties, some residents could watch a Giants game in the Polo Grounds from their bedrooms.
More important, the building had inner beauty. A liveried doorman watched over a marble-lined lobby, and the spacious, high-ceilinged apartments sported luxurious touches like crown moldings and hardwood floors. Thurgood Marshall lived there, and so did W.E.B. Du Bois and much of the leadership of the NAACP.
Ellington’s downstairs neighbor was Walter White, the pale, blond, blue-eyed black man who led the NAACP. His apartment, 13A, always abuzz with New York’s integrated intelligentsia, was known as the “White House of Harlem.”
“We had a full-sized grand piano at one time, because almost everybody had a piano at one time,” White’s daughter, the actress Jane White, recalled many years later.
George Gershwin played “Rhapsody in Blue” on our piano soon after he wrote it….Another person who was there, at some of our parties, was Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian director. He was heard to say that my mother was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. I saw Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Harold Jackman coming to our parties….It was only by hindsight that I realized I was moving in Harlem society.
Even during the Depression, Sugar Hill was the setting for a vivid dream, one that took some time to dissipate. “There was a sense that if you kept your nose clean, and if you went to school, and you held a good job, and you made a little money, and you washed and ironed your clothes—that it was going to turn out all right,” Jane White said. “This turned out to be a fallacy.”
In August 1943, a white cop shot and wounded an unarmed black veteran in the course of a botched arrest in Harlem—such a depressingly familiar scenario, even all these decades later. Rumors that the soldier had been killed triggered a riot. Within minutes, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called Walter White, who in turn grabbed his neighbor and fellow NAACP member Roy Wilkins. Together, White and Wilkins hopped in a cab and rushed to the epicenter of violence, outside the Twenty-eighth Precinct on West 123rd Street at Eighth Avenue (Frederick Douglass Boulevard, today). For hours the mayor, along with White and other black leaders drove around, shouting at looters and exhorting them to get off the streets. “Don’t destroy in one night the reputation as good citizens you have taken a lifetime to build,” White pleaded with a megaphone. “Go home—now!” He might as well have been nagging a hurricane. The police killed five African Americans that night. A sixth died in the melee, and seven hundred people were injured.
A year later, the great poet Langston Hughes, a frequent visitor to White’s home, pointed out that the physical separation between the cliff and the lowlands was also a social gulf. The privileges of the few did nothing to attenuate the misery of the many:
It is, I should imagine, nice to be smart enough and lucky enough to be among Dr. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” and be a race leader and go to the symphony concerts and live on that attractive rise of bluff and parkway along upper Edgecombe Avenue overlooking the Polo Grounds, where the plumbing really works and the ceilings are high and airy. For just a few thousands a year one can live very well on Sugar Hill in a house with a white-tiled hall.
But under the hill on Eighth Avenue, on Lenox, and on Fifth there are places like this—dark, unpleasant houses, with steep stairs and narrow halls, where the rooms are too small, the ceilings too low and the rents too high. There are apartments with a dozen names over each bell. The house is full of roomers. Papa and mama sleep in the living room, the kids in the dining room, lodgers in every alcove, and everything but the kitchen is rented out for sleeping. Cooking and meals are rotated in the kitchen.
By the 1950s, Sugar Hill had lost its magic. Edgecombe Avenue remained a high and pretty street, but the black elite scattered to the Upper West Side or to the semi-suburban Queens community of St. Albans. As federal redlining made it harder and harder to invest in, borrow on, or insure property in African American neighborhoods, the owners of 409 Edgecombe Avenue allowed the building to slide into genteel decrepitude, though it still kept bleeding money. Down below, the Polo Grounds began falling apart, the Giants moved to San Francisco, and the baseball field eventually gave way to a forest of public housing. The Harlem Speedway, a scenic strip where horses and, later, cars raced beneath High Bridge, turned into a multi-lane highway. In 1979, the city took over the building at 409, adding it to the heap of municipal property on which landlords had stopped paying taxes.
On the highest point around stands the latest incarnation of the neighborhood’s distinction, 898 St. Nicholas Avenue,*5 designed by the African-born British architect David Adjaye.
If the Bronx ever invaded Harlem, its forces might hesitate at the sight of Adjaye’s gloomy, fortress-like affordable-apartment complex. The medieval-looking structure looms like a ruined bastion, a pair of great squared-off boulders stacked slightly askew, as if a defending army had readied it for toppling. The west façade is pitted with small square windows that glint like mica in the granitic mass.
David Adjaye’s Sugar Hill housing, 898 St. Nicholas Avenue
It’s hard to fathom why Adjaye would evoke a hilltop citadel or clad it in storm cloud–colored concrete so that even on a perfect summer day it glowers forbiddingly against the sky—after all, the building’s intentions are exactly the opposite. This castle is a home—124 of them, actually, built by a nonprofit developer to provide a struggling neighborhood with desperately needed affordable housing. Below the apartments are two institutions geared to kids: an early-childhood center and a children’s museum, separated by a narrow court. It’s a shame that the building turned out so grim, because it could have been a model for the kind of high-design, low-cost homes that the city needs. Adjaye rightly rejects the brick-box model of public housing and public schools. Why, then, replace it with a dead-eyed guard tower?
It’s time to cross the Harlem River to the western edge of the South Bronx, which is, in a way, Sugar Hill’s fraternal twin. On one side were the Giants and the Polo Grounds; on the other is Yankee Stadium. Harlem had its speedway in the lowlands; the builders of the Bronx planned to lay a new one out along the ridge. Where African Americans found temporary bliss along Edgecombe Avenue, Jews established their heavenly beachhead on the Grand Concourse. Both neighborhoods declined; Sugar Hill started first, but the Bronx fell faster and harder.
The Park Plaza Apartments, designed by the architect Marvin Fine in 1929—and then redesigned when the new building burned suspiciously to the ground shortly before completion—was the first of the Bronx’s Art Deco residential buildings. Brick piers shoot up between the window bays. In Midtown skyscrapers of that period, such vertical lines, like airstreams, made it look as though an immense rocket ship were tearing itself from the earth. Here the building’s mass sits closer to the ground, an eight-story community of families located in the hollow between the Grand Concourse and the Highbridge bluff. Marvin Fine encrusted the exterior with polychrome terra-cotta reliefs and adorable gargoyles, turning the façade into a celebration of ornament and architecture. In several panels, a Beaux Arts turret rises into the sky from an Italianate apartment building—not the Park Plaza—crowned by the sun’s rays. In other panels, ropes of water from a tall, slender fountain braid together on their way back to the basin. Beneath one corner window, a relief depicts an architect kneeling humbly before the Pantheon, offering a scale model of a skyscraper as modernity’s paltry tribute to the past.*6
The Park Plaza Apartments expressed in solid materials its residents’ flickering, anxious pride. As on Sugar Hill, comfort and social status were hard-won and tenuous; Marvin Fine literally set them in stone. While the world economy turned to ash, architects and developers studded the neighborhood with brightly colored emblems of good spirits. In medieval Europe, Gothic cathedrals had promised spiritual redemption by telling symbolic stories in stained glass; in the twentieth-century Bronx, modern apartment buildings promised material prosperity by telling symbolic stories in mosaic, limestone, and terra-cotta.
I pedal over to the Grand Concourse*7 and north to 1150, a phantasmagorical Art Deco palace known as the Fish Building. It’s an architectural essay on happiness. The wavy façade ripples up the block. Near the entryway, an aquatic-themed mosaic, as bright and cheery as a coral reef, wraps a corner and ducks beneath a shiny metal awning. In the lobby, circles, triangles, and thin metallic lines turn the polychrome floors into a Kandinsky-like fantasia. A mural portrays a robed musician bowing a double bass while a chorus line of naked nymphs scamper by. Not many buildings in New York express such random joy.
Fish Building entryway, 1150 Grand Concourse
Art Deco design indulged a craving for gratuitous dollops of merriment. There was still plenty of physical space in the Bronx of the late 1920s, and the combination of airiness and architectural icing had a special appeal for a generation of Jews who still remembered the congested alleys of the Lower East Side. The Concourse became for them what Sugar Hill was to African Americans, a place where the sunlit present mattered more than the shadowed past. Here was a corridor of doctors’ offices, synagogues, and rental palazzos, where poorly educated but successful entrepreneurs cushioned their families from prejudice and misfortune. By 1930, Jews made up 82 percent of some neighborhoods along the Concourse.
They had Louis Aloys Risse to thank for their coveted addresses. Born in Alsace, France, in 1850, he emigrated at seventeen. Arriving in the United States with a talent for drawing and not a word of English, he settled in the countryside outside New York: the Bronx. In her history of the Grand Concourse, Boulevard of Dreams, Constance Rosenblum describes a young man intoxicated by a wild green landscape freckled with tiny towns. Risse became a civil engineer, gripped by the belief that a well-designed road could shape an ideal city, or at least guide the growth of an imperfect one. He looked out over the craggy hills and saw that the inclined streets on the slope above the Harlem River would quickly fill in, and a multi-lane tree-lined boulevard would provide a dignified link between Manhattan, the new precincts, and the chain of parks beyond.
To today’s urban dweller, the idea of a long, wide road built for the pleasure of driving it, or walking along it, seems staggeringly naïve. The twentieth century taught us to judge our urban roadways by how quickly we can get off them and how well they handle the monoculture of motor vehicles. But what Risse had in mind was a completely different beast. A century earlier, in Washington, D.C., the civil engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant had envisioned a grand avenue unfurling from the Capitol: That became the National Mall. In Paris, successive sovereigns, starting with Marie de Medici in 1616, extended an allée of trees from the royal gardens, which evolved into the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. In Berlin, a similar combination of vast palaces and martial rows of trees yielded Unter den Linden. As Rosenblum points out, this was the company Risse wanted his Concourse to keep, except that he would have to do without governments, palaces, or royal processions. Instead, ordinary renters would perambulate with princely dignity.
The American habit of emulating the appurtenances of European nobility has often produced awkward results: great knight’s halls in elevator buildings, battlements without enemies to repel, ersatz coats of arms. Risse envisioned the Grand Concourse as a promenade, not a thoroughfare, a place where pleasure trumped efficiency. “[T]he endless procession of the family parties, enjoying the air, beaux and belles, the long array of children in charge of solicitous nurses and anxious mamas, and the other boulevard travelers, do not take kindly to trucks and freight traffic,” he wrote. He began working on his design in the 1890s, when ladies and gentlemen on foot took precedence over commercial traffic. By the time the Concourse opened in 1909, the predominating philosophy had begun to flip, privileging the automobile. Today, the Grand Concourse is a thick cable of eleven car lanes, plus a pair of thin medians and a scraggly line of pollution-resistant trees. Even after a pedestrian-friendly redesign near 161st Street, crossing it remains a trek, and walking along it can feel like a solitary trudge. It’s hard to imagine Risse’s “long array of children” voluntarily coming anywhere near the place.
Diagonally across the street from the Fish Building is the Andrew Freedman Home,*8 a wildly incongruous Italianate palazzo set back from the street in a lush garden, where the living seem out of place among the ghosts. Freedman, a blustering moneyman, subway builder, and owner of the Giants baseball team (not to mention a creature of Tammany Hall) had “an astonishing faculty for making enemies,” according to the long-defunct newspaper the New York World. He also had an idiosyncratic approach to charity. When he died in 1915, his will revealed a tender spot for the elderly and indigent whose misfortune was made more painful by the fact that they had once been rich. Freedman left $5 million (about $119 million in 2016 dollars) to establish a home for the formerly privileged, ensuring that they would be pampered in the style to which they were no longer accustomed. Residents—or “members,” as they were called, to preserve the illusion of a private club—paid no rent or board, took their meals together, and were waited on by white-gloved servants, whom they were not allowed to tip. A few were the kind of down-on-their-luck millionaires that Freedman had envisioned; most had acquired more refinement than money. Opera singers, journalists, teachers, engineers, and, later, cultivated Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe lived there in an atmosphere of doddering luxury.
The sitting room of the Andrew Freedman Home, 1938
The press treated the place with condescending amusement. An article published in The New Yorker in 1933 may capture the eccentric atmosphere but also suggests that in those days the magazine’s famous fact-checking department allowed for some imaginative fabrication:
Meals at the home are sometimes trying, what with socially ambitious members continually attempting to get shifted to what they consider more desirable tables. One old gentleman discovered that whenever he shrieked “Pig! Swine!” at his dinner companion, he was shifted to another table. He kept this up at various tables until he reached the desirable couple who constituted his goal, only to have them shriek “Pig! Swine!” at him until they were moved away.
As the cost of maintenance escalated, conditions in the neighborhood became more dire, and Freedman’s bequest bled away, the home struggled along, its heyday becoming ever more distant. The writer Vivian Gornick and the photographer Sylvia Plachy visited the Andrew Freedman Home in 1980, on assignment from The Village Voice, and found it a dovecote of cooing snobs, each marooned in memories and an inviolable sense of superiority. The great but forgotten artist, the historian of Belle Époque Berlin, the retired advertising execs, the octogenarian political scientist still working on his magnum opus—all these ancient, decorous people were living their last days behind the comfort of a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. “The Andrew Freedman Home is the most civilized institution in New York in which to be old,” Gornick concluded—before adding: “There is no such thing as a civilized institution in which to be old.”
In 2007, it finally closed. I toured the place a few years later, when its members had all moved on to other, more permanent clubs and the rooms had been cleared of furniture and filled with freshly made art. The organization No Longer Empty installed a show called This Side of Paradise, a mournful celebration of a building that had outlived even its days of faded glory. In one room, the artist Nicky Enright had arranged a collection of beat-up typewriters on a ruined piano. Eerie typewriter-and-keyboard music clanked from the wracked assemblage as if some long-dead resident were still furiously entertaining his fellow shades. Elsewhere, Sylvia Plachy re-created the faded Viennese coziness of a room she had photographed more than thirty years before. When I slapped the tufted upholstery, clouds of loneliness puffed out into the room.*9
These days, it’s both shabbier and livelier than it was in its heyday. Every morning, children pack noisily into a basement daycare center. From time to time, the home’s personable director, Walter Puryear, produces African American and Latino–themed plays in the wood-paneled library. On the second floor, where fibers of faded hallway carpeting are slowly merging with plaster dust, a rotating roster of resident artists crams the rooms. Behind one door is a cornucopia of painted sneakers, brightly spray-painted canvases, skateboards, and stacks of hand-decorated leather hats.
I pause at the monument to the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, an eloquent emblem of the area’s shifting identities. After being rejected by Heine’s hometown of Düsseldorf and turned away from sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the poor statue of the water sprite Lorelei landed in the Bronx in 1899, where many residents could probably quote the poet’s work by heart (Und das hat mit ihrem Singen, / Die Loreley getan). Heine’s mythological creature immediately became a victim of violence. Someone lopped off her arms in 1900, five years later her head blew off, and in the seventies the statue became a favorite target of vandals and graffiti artists.
Seeing the restored monument now, it seems to me that the entire avenue was built to preserve disappointed memories in the aspic of decaying elegance. Even during the worst periods, residents of Risse’s promenade continued to raise children, go to work, and spare a smile for a fanciful façade. Today, the buildings are being fitfully renovated, the terra-cotta colors are brightening, and the brick façades are regaining their crispness. This is more than just a cosmetic freshening-up; it’s evidence of a neighborhood slowly recovering from trauma. New York still harbors plenty of horrific poverty. Walls collapse, bullets go astray, homeless people too mentally ill to care for themselves freeze to death in parks. Drugs, vandalism, homelessness, cruelty, and crime—these urban scourges never disappear. But what this corner of the Bronx experienced from the late 1960s through the early 1980s was not garden-variety decline or the orderly replacement of one class by another. It was disaster.
In Boulevard of Dreams, Rosenblum describes how quickly and thoroughly a building that had aged gracefully for a generation could suddenly degrade into a dangerous, waterlogged shell: “In the lobby, leaks left holes in the ceiling, crumbling plaster carpeted the marble floor, and nests of shredded plaster remained where slabs of marble had been stripped from the walls.” All through the area, vacant apartments filled with garbage and elevators died, leaving their shafts as terrifying voids. Vandals methodically ripped out wires and plumbing. Arson and abandonment competed to see which could ravage the Bronx more thoroughly.
I look back on those years with horrified awe. When observers remarked that the Bronx of the seventies looked like a war zone, they were not merely using a figure of speech. It would be easy, at this remove, to confuse photos of the South Bronx in 1978 with views of Aleppo, Syria, today: an inhuman landscape of scorched concrete and naked rebar. There is something surreal and apocalyptic about the degradation visited on all these buildings, about the desperate people who kept living in them. Standing here now, it’s hard to understand how the lung-filling expectations that built this area gave way, only thirty years later, to a time when New Yorkers wrote off large sections of their city as a toxic wasteland—or how vigorously, if gradually, it is coming back.
Even as it collapsed, the South Bronx nurtured a hardy cultural ecosystem. Graffiti and hip-hop, the two exuberantly confrontational art forms that came out of this period of deprivation, were resilient and tough, like the trees growing along the Grand Concourse. Young men boasted in rat-tat-tat rhymes over an implacable beat or asserted their cockiness in oversize coded signatures. The story of hip-hop has been baked into a mythology of the block party that begat a billion-dollar business. But it wasn’t the entertainment industry that healed the Bronx or cleared the rubble and rebuilt. That unglamorous task fell not to the people who made money and moved away but to the activists, neighbors, and do-gooders who stayed and battled decay one stoop at a time. They found a powerful partner in Mayor Ed Koch.
On October 5, 1977, President Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street in the South Bronx (a couple of miles from where I’m standing) and strolled dolefully onto a rubble-strewn field to contemplate the ruins of the American urban dream. “See which areas can be salvaged,” Carter told his housing secretary, with a hint of hopelessness. He could just as easily have been referring to the rest of New York, where lots lay fallow, office towers sat unfinished, and nobody was building a thing. By the mid-eighties, with Carter evicted from the White House and Koch in his second term as mayor, Charlotte Street sported a row of trim suburban houses—some with white fences, even!—and the city was in the throes of a construction spree that was practically choking the skyline. The Koch administration (1978–1989) took over fully a third of the buildings along the Grand Concourse, parceled them out to nonprofit developers, and watched the Art Deco dowagers reincarnated as decent, if basic, affordable housing.
In 1982, the Times columnist Anna Quindlen visited the Concourse Plaza Hotel,*10 famous in the 1930s as the spot where Yankees, gangsters, and politicians held court and where prosperous furriers vied to hold the most magnificent bar mitzvahs. Like most other epicenters of glamour, the hotel had had a rough couple of decades, and the bands had fallen silent long ago. But Quindlen found poetic justice in the building’s new life as housing for senior citizens:
There are no vacancies, and the lobby is full, and some of the same people who danced in the ballroom in their best clothes have returned….It seems right that Edna Mandelbaum, who shook hands with John F. Kennedy in the lobby and lived in one of the hotel’s suites with her husband, should now have a studio apartment on the top floor, overlooking Yankee Stadium. It seems right that Mary Markowski, who spent her wedding night at the Concourse Plaza, a great extravagance in 1939, should have a neat one-bedroom apartment there.
Quindlen’s glowing report didn’t mean that the borough had fully recovered—or even reached bottom. The crack epidemic was just getting going, and with it came a wave of crime that made the previous decade seem quaint. Even as painters and electricians were getting the Concourse Plaza ready for its new/old guests, popular culture was getting a thrill by dramatizing the Bronx’s slide into savagery. Paul Newman starred as the last good cop in Fort Apache, The Bronx, a movie that portrayed the black and Latino population of the area as an undifferentiated sea of hookers and thugs. In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s ruthless vivisection of New York in the mid-eighties, the Bronx County Courthouse (the big gray cube on the west side of Grand Concourse, just across from the Concourse Plaza) stands as an emblem of a soured civic pride:
Bronx County Courthouse, 1930
The building was a prodigious limestone parthenon done in the early thirties in the Civic Moderne style. It was nine stories high and covered three city blocks, from 161st Street to 158th Street. Such open-faced optimism, they had, whoever dreamed up that building back then!…Its four great façades were absolute jubilations of sculpture and bas-relief….Noble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such a golden dream of an Apollonian future!
Today, if one of those lovely classical lads ever came down from up there, he wouldn’t survive long enough to make it to 162nd Street to get a Choc-o-pop or a blue Shark. They’d whack him out just to get his toga.
And yet here I am, twenty years later, unmolested astride my bike, surveying a landscape of tenuous recovery.
The new county courthouse,*11 which was designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects and opened in 2008, evinces a different kind of positivity. It appears at first too fragile to be a criminal courthouse. Greenish glass panes form its corrugated outer walls, and the grand glass curtain wall at the entrance leads to an open sunlit lobby. Inside, too, there’s a profusion of glass. The place looks like no match for an irritated juror, let alone a repeat offender.
But just as we recognize the protective value of transparency in government and in the justice system, literal transparency can be a security feature, too. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham envisioned a prison—the panopticon—in which inmates could be under constant, surreptitious observation. Viñoly’s courthouse is a collective panopticon: It allows everyone to observe everyone else. This doesn’t obviate the need for cameras or guards, but it limits the possibility of nasty surprises.
Everybody knows what impregnability looks like: massive stone walls, slits for windows, and a single gate, preferably behind a moat. But safety is partly a matter of perception. After 9/11, when New York was suddenly pocked with bollards and barriers, every security measure reignited nervousness. Such fortifications intimidate the very people they are meant to protect. But Vinõly’s Bronx courthouse suggests that we can plan for worst-case scenarios without living in their grip, that we can build public places where citizens know they’re being watched over yet don’t have the feeling that they’re on parole.
Two unanswered questions hang like banners across the Grand Concourse: Why did the neighborhood slide so quickly from comfort to total ruin? And can it happen again? The answers to the first question have multiplied in the last forty years: racism, suburbanization, redlining, drugs, the deindustrialization of the economy, fiscal collapse, black and Latino migration, slum clearance and public housing, profiteering landlords, gangs, the trauma left by the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the allure of the new Co-op City in the borough’s northern reaches—each of these separate forces whirled together into a terrifying tornado of hopelessness. And none of them quite explains why, when a middle-class family packed up its overstuffed sofas and moved out of a gracious building in, say, 1965, a few years later that same structure should have turned into a blackened shell filled with garbage and despair.
In a sense, there’s comfort in a phenomenon whose very complexity makes it unlikely to reoccur. New York proved sturdier than other devastated cities, like Newark or Detroit, just as Sugar Hill fared better than the Bronx. But the seventies haunt a generation of New Yorkers who see dysfunction as a submerged monster ready to pull us all back down again at the slightest show of weakness. Whenever a budget shortfall leads to diminished library hours, whenever a homeless man paws through the garbage or a subway car’s air-conditioning fails, whenever a backyard party ends in a shoot-out, the savage city reappears.
The story of the South Bronx offers no neat parable of redemption. The Grand Concourse never became as splendid as Risse intended it to be, and now it’s neither as grand nor as bleak as it once was. The same is true of Sugar Hill. Both struggle on: Privilege makes inroads against deprivation on one block and is beaten back on the next. Here and there, the hard, boring work of activism and social justice gets traction, and suddenly a family has a kitchen and a bathroom and a safe walk to school, where all those things were out of reach before. At the same time, thousands more families live imprisoned within high walls of circumstance. They speak little English, know only other immigrants from their own town back home, and face futures foretold by grim statistics. The South Bronx remains the nation’s poorest congressional district, where nearly a third of its residents live below the poverty line. The borough’s residents get sicker, die earlier, lose more infants, and struggle harder than most other Americans.
Even such a frail and troubled place has New York’s unfathomable resilience. Someone is always complaining that the city is dying or dead, someone is always willing to write it off as too poor or too rich to matter anymore. But the South Bronx today still stands, ready for its old beauties and ambition to be rediscovered. It’s already happening, and when newly inducted members of the bourgeoisie find their way back in large numbers, putting pressure on long-standing Latino communities who see no reason to leave, then a new kind of conflict will open up, one of real estate prices and chain stores. And then New Yorkers with selective memories will start to complain that the Bronx is losing its character. Of course it is; it always has been and always will be. All over this city, some dreams blare while others fade to a quiet mutter. On block after block, if you listen for a moment, you can hear one group’s aspirations rub up against another’s in a constant bleat of yearning.
