The history of the Bronx with writer Ian Frazier

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Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne.

My next guest, Ian Frazier, is a writer who, for lack of a better term, does the thing.

In the 80s, he was fascinated by the Great Plains, the broad swath of flat land that extends from the north of Texas all the way to Canada.

So he got in a car and drove there.

He talked to people, looked at monuments, read every book he could find on the plane.

And then in 1989, he published a book about it called Great Plains.

Then in the late 90s, Siberia caught his attention.

Frazier again got in a car, drove it from St. Petersburg to the eastern edge of Russia,

talked to everyone he could find there, and checked out every book he could find.

He also flew on a plane from Alaska to the Russian coast and had to eat oatmeal that was full of dead mosquitoes.

He called that book Travels Insanely.

It's Siberia.

Frazier's latest is Paradise Bronx.

It's about, and perhaps this should be obvious, the Bronx.

The New York City borough that is home to the Yankees, the birthplace of hip-hop, and also the home of many, many highways.

Frazier writes about its story, its geography, its sights, sounds, and smells, both past and present.

It's a book that took Frazier 15 years to write.

In that 15 years, he read about the Bronx.

He ate in its restaurants, talked to its residents.

and historians, and walked pretty much every literal city block in the borough.

Now that Paradise Bronx is published, he joins us to talk about it.

Let's get into it with Ian Frazier.

Ian Frazier, Sandy, welcome to Bullseye.

It's nice to talk to you.

Well, it's great of you to have me.

Thank you.

I mean, this is like the most thuddingly obvious question that anyone could ever ask, and I apologize for asking it so directly, but why the Bronx?

Why the Bronx?

I'm glad you asked that.

I think I will be asked it again.

The Bronx is a—I look at places that I think are, I guess you could say, undervalued or people don't know as much about them as they should.

I did a whole book on the Great Plains, which was, at that time, people were referring to that part of the country as flyover country.

And people would say, well, there's nothing there.

And there's—

There's an enormous amount there, and it is a great place and a great part of America.

The Bronx is a really important part of New York City, and it has been undervalued.

People have thought of it in negative terms, and in fact, in some foreign countries, the word Bronx means slum.

And I wanted to set people straight and tell people what a great place this is.

And how much it has contributed to the city and to the world.

You don't live in the Bronx.

When you first—before you were interested in it as the subject of a book, what brought you there?

I did a bunch of stories for the New Yorker magazine that took place in the Bronx.

I did a story about Co-op City, which is, I think, still maybe the world's largest co-op development.

It has, what, 15,200 and some apartments.

Which is in the Northeast Bronx.

And then I did a piece about the Stelladoro Bakery, which is—was on, like, 236th Street, pretty far up in the Bronx.

And about a strike that took place at that bakery.

And the strike took 11 months.

And so I was up there a lot for a long period of time.

And I got to know the Strikers, and I got to know that neighborhood.

Which is—

Which is Kingsbridge.

And I was very interested in the smell of the cookies.

If you've ever been any place that has a bakery, like lived in a neighborhood with a bakery, it's a great addition to a neighborhood.

The smell of something baking.

And the smell of those cookies baking was just wonderful.

And it was pretty much all the time.

And, you know, some of the cookies were chocolate cookies.

So it smelled like brownies.

And you could walk for a long distance from the factory.

And still smell brownies.

And so I took these walks.

Ian, I don't want the audience to not know that you set out on a project to measure how far you could walk and still smell the brownies.

Yeah.

I mean, but it just seemed like, what is the radius of this?

Because it's a benign thing.

I talked to people who lived farther up and came up on the Major Deegan.

And the Major Deegan, which is I-87, which is one of the big interstates.

It goes through the Bronx.

Runs up all the way, actually, to Canada.

But people who would drive that regularly, I talked to people who said they would be in traffic jams on the Deegan, which is not an uncommon occurrence, and smell the cookies.

And it would be like, okay, this isn't so bad.

And I wanted to know how far that, you know, that benefit, that great addition to the neighborhood extended.

And it extended sometimes.

It was like over a mile.

It might even be two miles someday.

If the wind was right.

As a guy who reported all over New York, and indeed all over the world, but certainly all over New York, what did you notice when you were reporting in the Bronx was special about the Bronx in particular?

What were the things that stood out about it?

That's an interesting question.

I think what stood out about it was the way people fit themselves into oppressive.

That is, you go most places, like, you know, I spent years, a lot of time in Russia, and you go to places where people live, and it isn't so much, I mean, the places I went to, with infrastructure over top of them, like these elevated highways that go through the Bronx.

And the way that people manage to fit themselves in and have really interesting lives.

Or it's just like, no, no, no, traffic going by, you know, or, and not just traffic on the interstates, but this is just a nexus.

I mean, all New York is, but, you know, you have planes going overhead and you have lots and lots of trucks on surface streets because the Hunts Point market is there.

There's just all of this and how you fit yourself in there and how, I mean, there's a lot of cool stuff going on.

And it manages.

It manages to live within this, to me, overly oppressive infrastructure.

Let's talk for a second about geography, because certainly folks listening to this on WNYC in New York know about where the Bronx is and what defines it.

But I'm in Los Angeles, and I'm sure a lot of folks listening on LAist don't know, and to say nothing of Georgia Public Radio or anywhere else in our audience, right?

So New York is island.

Right.

And Manhattan is the end of a little kind of spit down the middle between the mainland and another island.

To the east of that island, I'm looking at the picture, is Brooklyn, and then sort of continuing east and northeast is Queens.

To the north of Manhattan, on the same island Manhattan's on, is the Bronx.

What was that like before Europeans came?

What was it like when it was popularized?

Well, as I kind of begin the book, I say that the Bronx is the continent.

And New York City, the rest of New York City, is an archipelago.

It's islands.

Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens are on Long Island.

So the Bronx, as I describe it in my book, it's like a hand reaching down to hold on to these islands that otherwise might float away.

It's a little bit impressionistic.

But that's sort of it.

That's sort of how I've thought of it.

Before Europeans came, it was a hemlock forest.

It was, it's a very, it's both rocky and coastal.

So it's like, it has the geography of upstate New York, which is rocky and hilly.

And it also has the geography of, you know, Staten Island, where it's just kind of, you have miles of beaches on Staten Island.

You have miles of beaches in the Bronx.

But the Bronx is part of it.

And Native people who lived there lived both by resources of the forest and they got a lot from the waters around them.

When Native people lived there, the waters of New York contained 350 square miles of oyster beds.

Well, that's what Native American people that were here ate.

And then all kinds of other things from the sea.

And these were Lenape Indians.

And they still exist.

You know, there were Native people living there.

There's digs that have showed evidence of residents there back 7,000 years.

So there are Native people living there for a really long time.

And the amount of time that Europeans have been there is comparatively quite short.

We'll be back in just a second.

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Welcome back to Bullseye.

I'm Jesse Thorne.

My guest, Ian Frazier, is the author of the books,

Great Planes, Travels in Siberia, and Coyote vs. Acme.

The latter most of which is the basis for the still yet to be released

Warner Brothers comedy of the same name.

Frazier just released a new book called,

Paradise Bronx.

It's an epic history and exploration of one of New York City's

most diverse boroughs.

Let's get back into it.

What was the Bronx like in the 18th century,

in the times when it was being run by European colonists,

rather than as the United States, as it would later become?

What was going on?

Well, it was Westchester County, which goes back to,

you know, when this was a British colony.

And it was a very prosperous and good place.

It was a place that raised, you know, it was like a garden for Manhattan,

which at that point was substantial as a city.

I mean, it was only like the downtown part of the island now,

but the Bronx was an agricultural place.

Westchester County was agricultural.

And then the revolution started.

And the Americans,

the American lines were just north of what's now the Bronx.

And the British lines were just south of what's now the Bronx.

So the place that's now the Bronx was called the neutral ground.

And the neutral ground was where all kinds of people just kind of mixed it up

in various impromptu battles because you, and more like skirmishes, really,

because you had these two contending forces there.

And you had partisan bands of,

you know, Yankees and Brits.

And it was actually quite a terrifying place.

The sets of terrifying guys,

skinners and cowboys,

it's like the Warriors,

cowboys being named because they stole cows,

and skinners being named because they robbed people down to their skin.

I mean, these are some,

and their names are pretty cool.

It's like Fade Donaldson was a notorious skinner.

But they were, you know,

these were fairly ruthless guys that were,

people didn't have the word gangs,

but it was like these were gangs.

They were gangs of the Bronx,

but either Yankee or British or loyalist,

more like it,

that they were Americans that were loyal to the British.

And the skinners were in,

you know, politically,

they were Yankees,

but the Yankees who were actually not going around robbing people

did not approve of the skinners necessarily.

But there was all kinds of back and forth like that.

And the place was just trashed.

It was like 17,

from like 1776 to 1783.

It was just a lawless zone.

I think that that period of history is so significant

because of the,

of the reverberations through the following few hundred years

that have to do with that same kind of geography

that we talked about,

which is to say that like Manhattan and Harlem

are cut off from the Bronx by the Harlem River.

Right.

And the Bronx is sort of the passageway through to,

you know,

what's now Yonkers and Mount Vernon,

Bronxville and Scarsdale

and up into the mainland of the United States.

Right.

Yeah.

So just as it is now the like place

where the biggest truck or train stops

and the little FedEx truck comes to pick up packages

to bring to the rest of New York City,

it was also the place that was defensible and indefensible

and in between the two defensible areas of,

you know,

Manhattan and the body of the United States.

And it is also the place where,

you know,

when people wanted to do master-planned urban planning,

they said,

well,

what we'll need to do is this middle thing here,

we'll need to cut straight through it.

Right.

I mean,

that decision,

the decision to build the Cross Bronx Expressway,

which was actually made like in the 20s,

late 1920s,

was a ruthless decision,

in my opinion.

To this day,

there's no highway,

crossing Manhattan from west to east,

east to west.

And how they just said,

well,

here's where the highway is going.

I mean,

like I'm literally like looking at a map of New York City right now,

because my geography is not as strong as the way that I'm talking about it,

if I'm not looking at a map.

And like,

you can see the Cross Bronx Expressway cutting across the whole of the Bronx,

right?

East to west.

Yeah.

And then,

in Manhattan,

you see these other freeways that come from the east,

cross the water,

and then stop,

and then pick up on the other side of Manhattan,

and continue west into New Jersey,

right?

Like,

there's like five of them.

It is quite remarkable how Manhattan managed to dodge that.

And a lot of people had a hand in that.

I mean,

it wasn't just the original planners.

It was people later,

who managed to stop across Manhattan highways.

And you can see their point.

I mean,

Ed Koch,

when he was a Congressman,

later Mayor Ed Koch,

but when he was a Congressman,

he and others stopped a highway being built right straight across the village,

or kind of the south,

the southern part of Greenwich Village.

And he said,

well,

this will just,

if there's a highway here,

this will just be a paradise for cars at the expense of the people who live here.

Well,

yes,

that is exactly what had already happened with the Cross Bronx Expressway.

And there was nobody at that time who took that.

I mean,

people oppose the Cross Bronx Expressway with all their might,

but that was when,

you know,

America was building highways and it was after World War II.

And it was a very,

very tough position to take.

Like,

please don't tear down,

my apartment building.

Well,

let's go back in time before we get into the second half of the 20th century and talk about,

I'm going to say Governor Morris,

because you say that is an accepted pronunciation in the book.

That's fine.

You can give me your,

what's yours again?

Well,

I,

it's hard to find a pronunciation for the guy.

I decided on Govoneer,

but it is a little tough because it's two accented syllables in a row.

So it's Govoneer Morris.

So Govoneer Morris is fine too.

Okay.

So who was he?

Well,

he was a,

you know,

patrician of,

uh,

a very old family.

By the time he came along,

the,

the Morrises had been in the Bronx since the 17th century.

And,

uh,

he had a huge influence on the country and on the city.

He wrote,

uh,

the preamble to the constitution.

It would,

it would not say we the people of the United States if it weren't for him.

And he was the guy,

uh,

who came up with,

uh,

in order to form a more perfect union,

which I think is such a great thing to put in there because he was very anti-slavery,

although he owns slaves himself,

he was very anti-slavery.

And,

uh,

he did not,

he did not want slavery to be part of the U S constitution.

Why?

He was,

he did not want slavery to be part of the U S constitution because he was anti-slavery at the constitutional convention.

And,

uh,

so to say a more perfect union is to acknowledge that this is far from perfect,

but that that's what we're working toward.

And I think that's one of the great phrases of American history,

along with,

uh,

life,

Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

You mentioned governor Morris is conflicting perspective on slavery.

Right?

I mean,

I,

which is to say he was dead set against it as a matter of policy.

He also owned slaves himself.

And he faced very directly one of the most significant developments in the,

the history of people in bondage in the Americas,

which was the enslaved people's revolution in Haiti.

Right.

What did he have to say about that?

Well,

I mean,

he fell down,

right?

Rather drastically at that the slave revolution in Haiti scared the hell out of him.

And he gave a speech in Congress where he was briefly a Senator after the revolution.

While the Haitian revolution was going on,

he told the Southern people,

the Southern slave owners,

they had to contribute to suppressing this revolution because he said,

you know,

the slaves have to know that this is not possible.

And it's something like,

you know,

they have to know despair.

We have to inflict despair on them.

So they will never,

I mean,

it was just such an appalling speech.

It's that fear is not enough,

right?

Like it was fear and despair.

Like he wanted them to have both.

We have to get them,

they have to be afraid,

but they also have to despair.

And to me,

that's like almost,

I mean,

that's just,

I don't know what to say.

That was really,

really not good.

And I think he was very much influenced by George Washington.

And I think after George Washington died,

which was in 1799,

Gouverneur Morris kind of lost his armature,

or he lost his sense of right and wrong in a way,

because he then,

he also decided that New York and the New England states,

should secede from the union when at the approach of the war of 1812,

he just thought,

you know,

well,

we don't want to fight this war.

That's only going to benefit the slave owners and the people on the other side of the Alleghenies.

We don't want to mess with them.

So we're not going to be part of this.

We're going to secede.

And fortunately he didn't follow through because the war ended the war of 1812 ended.

But,

I think he would never have done that if Washington had still been alive.

Washington would have just said,

that's a mistake.

Don't do that.

When did the place become the kind of place that we would recognize as New York City now?

I mean,

I'm talking about when did big apartment buildings get built and brownstones with stoops and all of those kinds of things that are like in our imaginary world,

you know,

in our imaginary version of New York.

Well,

the thing that really created the Bronx was the subways and they're elevated mostly in the Bronx,

but they're still called subways.

And,

uh,

as the subways built into the Bronx and the first subway got to West farms,

which is the last stop,

uh,

was the last stop on the two and the five train.

Uh,

and that's kind of in the middle of the Bronx.

And that was in like 19 five.

So the subways came in,

they were by 1930,

all the subways that are there now were there.

So those subways,

as they went in,

it was just as if you'd put,

you know,

garden hoses out.

It was like they watered this place and apartment buildings just sprang up everywhere.

And these were nice apartment buildings.

And this is happening in the 19 teens,

twenties and thirties.

So that period of time that you're talking about,

isn't,

isn't inflection point like the end of the twenties,

beginning of the thirties is important,

not just because that's when cars started to happen,

but because that's when the regional plan started being concocted.

So what was the regional plan and who was coming up with it?

Well,

the regional plan was something that was come up with by eminent men of the

city who were volunteering their services.

To think of how the city should be improved and what they thought was,

you know,

they would create this network of highways.

And the idea was that the highways would go from a central point,

which would be like Manhattan,

which would be an office center,

not a manufacturing center anymore,

but a center for offices.

And then it would radiate,

radiate out into these nice green suburbs.

I mean,

that was sort of basically the,

the point and then also how would you move?

Because they said the future will belong to the motor car.

So how will you blue move motor cars through this area?

So they came up with this system that,

I mean,

if you look at it kind of metaphorically,

it was like New York city would grow like a tree and each,

you know,

there would be these rings of highways and then there would be highways

radiating out through these rings.

And that was the beginning of the,

the concept of the metro area,

the concept of the metro area.

We'll wrap up with Ian Frazier in just a bit when he's out walking the streets

of the Bronx,

what's his EDC everyday carry notepad,

multi-tool sunblock catch us on the other side of the break and find out

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fun.org.

It's bullseye.

I'm Jesse Thorne.

I'm talking with Ian Frazier.

He's the author of the new book,

paradise Bronx.

You write in the book that there are two kind of times of terror,

terror for the Bronx.

One of them is what we talked about at the end of the 18th century during the

revolutionary war when it was,

you know,

the meeting point for these two opposing forces.

It was the neutral ground.

The other is almost exactly 200 years later when the Bronx suffered its most

immense economic hardships and like physical hardships.

What happened in the,

in the 1960s and beginning of the seventies that changed what you described as

paradise Bronx in the fifties into rubble of buildings in the 1970s.

Well,

the people point to that moment,

the construction of the cross Bronx expressway as really severely depressing

real estate values.

But I think what preceded that was where you had a lot of,

a lot of mixed neighborhoods.

Lenders got nervous about it and they somehow thought that just because you had

these,

you know,

neighborhoods where there were people who maybe the lenders weren't quite sure

they approved of.

And it wasn't just,

you know,

black and Puerto Rican people.

It was also like Jewish people who were communists.

I mean,

there were,

a lot of communists and,

you know,

but I mean,

it was not a major thing.

The neighborhoods were all working and everybody seemed to be living happily

together,

but these areas were redlined and that meant you couldn't get a loan to improve

your building.

And that pre well preceded the South Bronx catching on fire.

So the people were unable to improve their buildings because the buildings

had been redlined.

And when you can't improve a building,

that has stood for,

by this time,

you know,

the Bronx building boom had been in the 1910s and 20s.

Well,

now you've got an apartment building that's 40,

50 years old.

You have to improve it.

You have a whole lot of people then move to the Bronx through urban renewal.

And it put a lot of very poor people in the Bronx because it was a place where

they could be moved from neighborhoods like the neighborhood that used to be

where Lincoln center is now.

That was just cleared out.

People moved elsewhere.

And so you had an influx of people.

You had buildings falling apart.

You had higher occupancy of these buildings.

You had bad heating.

You had people buying space heater.

You had all kinds of appliances that were too much for the wiring.

You had too many people in too short,

too small a space of dilapidated buildings and buildings started catching on

fire.

You know,

just astonishing that a city would let that happen.

What's wild about this part of the Bronx is history is that obviously this was

one of the most difficult times to live in the Bronx.

This was a time when a lot of like physical infrastructure was destroyed

either intentionally by planners or unintentionally by fire.

It also,

it was when the Bronx made probably its greatest contribution to the world.

Like one of the greatest cultural contributions that any city at any time

has made to the world,

which is hip hop,

right?

Like there was also a real explosion of American Latin music at the time.

You know,

the New York salsa of the 1970s was obviously a really,

really big deal culturally,

but I don't think you could top the invention of hip hop.

Well,

the Bronx was always really musical and there were all kinds of stars,

you know,

uh,

there were,

you know,

Celia Cruz was like the most famous person in the,

you know,

uh,

in the Americas,

music in the world.

I mean,

people in Finland,

you know,

like Celia Cruz and a lot of jazz greats live there.

Thelonious bunk,

you know,

there was all kinds of music happening in the Bronx,

but hip hop was the,

uh,

this major discovery and it was discovered in a place like they will put a

date on it.

Like August 11th,

1974,

when,

uh,

DJ cool,

Herc,

Clive Campbell and his sisters had a party in the rec room of this building

on Cedric Avenue in the far West Bronx.

And like,

that's where hip hop started and it just took off really fast in the,

in the Bronx.

Kids knew about it and there were places in the Bronx.

You could go playgrounds where you could go and hear this music.

And it was like nothing anybody had heard before.

And so you had really big speakers.

You had the beat as the records,

as the instruments and the beat as the song.

It wasn't just like ragtime was a new beat.

Hip hop was the beat.

And the idea that music came from records was a new idea that had,

that was also animating disco,

right?

The idea that you didn't have to have a big band to have a party.

Right.

And that you would play the records as instruments,

which is like a modernist concept.

Wow.

The record is the instrument.

And like DJ cool,

Herc would blank out the labels on his records.

So the people couldn't see what record he was playing.

And,

and they couldn't copy him.

He knew what the record was and it was like an instrument.

Suddenly it wasn't the song that you might know and might've heard on the

radio,

like Apache by the incredible bongo band.

If you want to get a sense of like what early hip hop is,

listen to Apache by the incredible bongo band,

and then listen to grandmaster flashes version of Apache.

And it is just like,

it's Apache.

It's this bongo.

This song basically is just bongos.

But what I also,

what I say in the book is all this stuff had been,

had been done to the Bronx.

And now the Bronx is answering back.

When you're writing a 550 page book about wandering through a city of one

and a half million people and telling its entire history and cultural history

and everything all mixed together.

How do you know when you're done?

Well,

I had a whole bunch of things I wanted to find out and I found them out.

When did I know I was done?

I think it was like,

I guess when I was taking walks and I realized I've been to this place a

bunch of times and I know this place.

When you're walking around,

what's your,

what's your EDC?

What's your everyday carry?

What do you got with you?

What do I have with me?

I have a mobile phone charger,

you know,

a juice pack or whatever you call it because it was hard to keep my phone

charged.

And I did use my phone a lot for map.

So I wanted to keep my phone going.

I carried that.

And then I would just carry my notebook,

water,

not much.

Extra suntan lotion.

Suntan lotion.

Definitely.

I did that.

And,

and I would take,

you know,

my lunch and stuff.

Having spent all these years now wandering around the Bronx,

meeting people,

picking up marbles,

looking at rocks,

asking around in churchyards and having written this book.

How do you experience the borough differently now when you are there?

Well,

I love,

I love it.

I mean,

you know,

I go places and I,

I just feel like I know I just have,

it's like a home.

I don't know quite how to explain it,

but there are places I go up there and I just feel like this is great.

I don't know.

It's hard to explain,

but I feel much more like,

well,

obviously I just feel connected to it in a very emotional way.

So how would that not,

how would that not happen?

It would,

it would be expected to happen.

Well,

Sandy Ian Frazier,

I sure appreciate your time.

Thank you so much.

Well,

thank you for talking with me.

Ian Frazier,

everyone.

His book,

Paradise Bronx is out now.

You can get it at your local bookstore or on bookshop.org.

Thank you.

That's the end of another episode of Bullseye.

Bullseye is created from the homes of me and the staff of Maximum Fun in and around greater Los Angeles,

California.

This week at my house,

we said goodbye to an old friend of mine,

my 15 year old dog,

Sissy,

who was a part of many episodes of this show back in the day when it was called the sound of young America.

She had a good life.

We were so grateful tonight.

Don't hurt.

Our show is produced by speaking into microphones.

Our senior producer is Kevin Ferguson.

Our producers are Jesus Ambrosio and Richard Roby.

Our production fellow at Maximum Fun is Daniel Huesias.

Our video producer is Daniel Spear.

Special thanks to the crews at WBEZ in Chicago and WNYC in New York this week for recording our interviews with Tyrese and Ian Frazier,

respectively.

We get booking help from Mara Davis.

Our interstitial music is by DJW,

also known as Dan Wally.

Our theme song is called,

Huddle Formation,

written and recorded by the Go Team.

Thanks to them and to their label,

Memphis Industries.

Bullseye is on Instagram,

where we have pictures from behind the scenes and videos and more.

Find us there at Bullseye with Jesse Thorne.

We are also on Twitter,

YouTube and Facebook.

And hey,

go subscribe to our YouTube channel because we are posting video of our interviews there.

Go look there.

You can watch the show there.

You can share it with friends.

Just search for Bullseye with Jesse Thorne.

Both of these interviews are on our YouTube channel,

and you can find this week's interviews on full video on our YouTube page.

Go check it out.

I think that's about it.

Just remember,

all great radio hosts have a signature sign-off.

Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of MaximumFun.org

and is distributed by NPR.

On this week's episode of Wildcard,

actor Jeff Goldblum sings his way through our conversation.

One, two, three.

One is the loneliest number.

Two.

Oh, just the two of us.

We can make it.

Oh, good.

Three.

Oh, we three.

We're not alone.

I'm Rachel Martin.

Join us for NPR's Wildcard podcast,

the game where cards control the conversation.