Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. A major historical account of the rise, fall and rebirth of the South Bronx has received a timely update. When Jill Jonnes wrote We're Still Here in the mid 1980s, the book declared, "The story of the South Bronx has never been fully explored perhaps because its disintegration occurred in such as swift fury of destruction." That destruction, she writes, does not tell the whole story. While some landlords were paying arsonists to set their buildings on fire and collect insurance payouts, local activists, as she writes, were working to mobilize, to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.

The second edition of Jonnes's book got a new title, South Bronx Rising, and now there's a third edition, an update for the era of gentrification and displacement as major issues in the area. There's been so much progress in the South Bronx, but new struggles complicate the revival. We'll take a long view of the South Bronx now with Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of an American City. She's also the author of Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and its Tunnels and Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World. A wide array of interests.

Dr. Jonnes, welcome to WNYC.

Jill Jonnes: Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Where and how did your interest in the Bronx begin?

Jill Jonnes: In the spring of 1977, I was a graduate student at Columbia Journalism School. We did a full semester seminar about the South Bronx. We went there many times. We met everyone from squatters, Raymond [unintelligible 00:02:08], up to politicians, police, people from the Ford Foundation. Then a few years later, I found myself writing freelance for The New York Times Sunday real estate section, and I did a story on the renovation, rehabilitation of Roosevelt Gardens on the Grand Concourse. I never had such a huge response to any story I wrote. I was, like many people, mystified how this place could be burning down and just disappearing block by block. I guess, I assigned myself this story.

Brian Lehrer: Can you say a bit about the original title of the book, We're Still Here? What does it refer to, and why was it renamed for later editions to South Bronx Rising?

Jill Jonnes: This was the first book I ever wrote. I knew nothing about how titles happened, and that was a title from one of the chapters. My editor, Peter Davison, who's no longer with us, just-- I didn't have an idea for the title. I've since learned you really need to come up with your own title because it's a very time-consuming thing, and you want it to convey what the book is about. By the time I was doing the second edition, I knew a lot more about the publishing industry, and I had a chance to fix it. I think if you look at the two titles, one tells you what the book is about, and the other is a chapter title.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, it's our second history segment in a row on the show today connecting the 1980s to today, this time with Jill Jonnes, whose latest edition of South Bronx Rising is out. Again, we welcome oral history calls. How far back? Who, listening right now, thinks you have the oldest memory of the South Bronx, and what would you like to talk about with respect to recalling whatever might fall into the three categories in the subtitle of the book, The Rise, the Fall, and Rebirth of the South Bronx, or any current residents on what you think we should be discussing when we discuss the South Bronx today? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text to that number.

Jumping right to the present. For all the progress, spoiler alert, you write, "The South Bronx remains the poorest urban congressional district in the nation. From 1989 to 2015, residents' incomes in real terms declined 20%." Has it been an ongoing rebirth and revival?

Jill Jonnes: That is actually really a conundrum to me because the place looks good. It's a rare American city. If you think of the Bronx, according to the last census, it is the seventh largest city in America, if it were not a borough of New York. Its population grew 6%, and is back up at 1.5 million. I'm not aware of any other American city that suffered comparable disinvestment, abandonment, and vacant lots that has rebuilt itself like this. On one hand, the Bronx is fully physically rebuilt. It feels very vibrant, very busy, and yet there are those statistics, and you certainly see plenty of signs of poverty.

I live in Baltimore, and ours is a city that has not recovered from all its disinvestment. It's half the size it used to be. There's just endless acres of vacant housing, empty lots. In any case, when I was up in the Bronx during the pandemic, I saw a lot of food lines. In the end, I ended up writing an additional chapter just about COVID in the Bronx. I don't know. The Bronx is 90% minorities, and just historically, these are groups that through long time discrimination on every level and of every sort, you see it economically. I love going to the Bronx because I just think it has such a fantastic energy. I'm full of admiration for all the people I know there, but I also find them to be great fun. It is a conundrum. I don't know how to answer it. Maybe someone else has a better fix on that.

Brian Lehrer: The new sections in the latest edition of the book deal with, yes, the pandemic, as you say, but also how many in the Bronx have been caught off guard by what you call the scale of big money developers' sudden, voracious interest. How is that process playing out in the Bronx right now? What's the top line, and who's enabling it?

Jill Jonnes: Essentially, what happened is the Bronx went back to being a normal place. When the Bronx was really down and out and disappearing, outsiders had no interest in it. The stunning thing about the story of the South Bronx was its abandonment, real abandonment by city officials and the powers that be. This is the story that is told in the first two editions of the book. It's really the Catholic Church working with the parishes, the social justice priests, and all of these grassroots groups that emerge out of this really terrible situation. They are the ones that rebuilt the Bronx. City government played a significant role, finally, in the era of Ed Koch because he provided a billion dollars, but these groups knew what to do with it. They put it to very good use.

Between '87 and 2000, these nonprofit housing groups created 60,000 new units of apartments, but actually, in a way, almost more important or more consequential was the creation of all these home-owning opportunities. There were about 10,000 units of housing that came in these two and three unit houses that were built. You see them all over the Bronx. It's a real change in the cityscape and the scale of housing.

What's different is the Bronx suddenly became of interest to outside developers, and what drew them was the rezoning of the Harlem Waterfront. All of that land along there, if you go along and see it, that is where you see these mega developments going up. Some of them do have local partners, but they're very junior partners, and many of them have no local partners, and they're geographically discreet from the rest of the borough because they are on the Waterfront. If you look at the prices on them, these are not by and large for people who already live in the Bronx. The dynamic is the same dynamic as all over New York. There's a demand for housing, and suddenly this opens up, and when the request for proposals goes out, the people who have the money and can outfit everyone else are the mega developers.

Brian Lehrer: Right. You write, "For 50 years, the powers that had also driven new development in Brooklyn and Queens had shown minimal interest in the Bronx with its communities of color, its immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Jamaica, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, except when it served as a handy place to put undesirable things. The Bronx has 298 homeless shelters, three times as many as Manhattan, twice as many as Brooklyn, and four times as many as Queens," from your book, and of course, it's got a smaller population than any of those boroughs. Per capita, it's even more homeless shelters. You continue, "Two vocal camps have emerged. One side denounces almost anything new, whether housing, stores, eateries, transit, or activities as a prelude to gentrification. The other side believes that all this new investment and energy promises a better future for all Bronx sites."

Can you say a bit about this dynamic and who's on each side, and if there's a way to have development in a poor neighborhood that doesn't displace.

Jill Jonnes: First of all, who's on these sides? I think that the local activist groups, it depends on who they are and where they're located in the Bronx, and how they're trying to navigate all of this. There's certain things that unify everyone when some outside interest comes in that truly is not interested in the locals at all. It's complicated by the fact, I think that so much of this is happening on the Waterfront. As I said, physically separate. What I found interesting is if you would go online and look at the comments as this battle played out online, there just seemed to be always people who felt that this was good, and then always people who felt this was inevitably going to lead to pushing up prices.

I think realistically, it's true. Prices are going to rise because of the proximity of these wealthy enclaves along the Waterfront. What would mitigate this, a much more activist role on the part of the city in terms of how these developments get dolled out. That really depends on what administration it is. Some administrations are far more friendly to community activists and others are not. One person said to me, "New York is really a hyper-capitalist city, and it's just hard to see in that reality, in that atmosphere, unless you have a very deliberate, intense policy by City Hall." How this narrative ends up changing. At the moment, all of these big developments either are in the final phases of being finished or they're being built. I think the number of units along the Waterfront is something like 5,000. That's a lot. Throughout the rest of the Bronx, there are another 10,000 units coming online. I should say that the ones that are further into and integrated into the neighborhood, those often are genuinely affordable housing.

The Bronx is well suited to do that because they do have these longstanding powerful groups. The Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition, which has always played a really significant role, has expanded its organizing to be citywide and statewide. They have had some significant wins in things like eviction rules and regulations, the rent laws, they got preferential rents done away with. All of those things are really significant for people who were already in housing. Going forward in terms of what gets built. Again, what you don't see in this last round of building is almost any opportunity for home ownership. These are not condo buildings, they're rental buildings.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City, a book that started life in the 1980s and is now out in its third edition, including new material as, for example, what Jill was just discussing. Here's NB in Montclair. You're on WNYC. Hello, NB.

NB: How's it going, Brian? Great to have you, have a chance to talk with you. I've listened for a long time, and so excited just to be talking with you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

NB: I just wanted to bring to attention of Jill and to the rest of the listeners that there's a new game that's going to be coming out next year, a board game, a historical board game called Cross Bronx Expressway, which is really just about the issues that are talked about in Jill's books and across a bunch of the different pieces of scholarship. That really just goes through the history of the South Bronx from 1940 to 2000, and it really is a way of exploring all of the dynamics that were at play between the three sides of the community that was actually there, the public service workers that were being able to do stuff, and then also the private interests that were there.

What you see through the play of the game is a lot of the stuff that Jill is talking about right now, it's just there's a lot of complex dynamics that are just not situated in a way that allow for the people of the Bronx to really have those opportunities to develop and rise the way that everybody thinks that it has the potential to do because of these conflicting interests. I'm not sure that there's necessarily a way that has presented itself for the course of all of those years to be at this point right now, still seeing the same type of things that are happening in 2023. It's just really disheartening, but also you go into the Bronx and you talk to the people, and you talk to the folk that are there, that's where I grew up as well, and you just realize that that spirit is still there. I really do appreciate Jill's original title for the book because I think that is the truth, is that those folk are still there, and they are still trying to survive and thrive through all of this. That's the most important part, regardless of all the other political and economic situations that's being created.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the original title was We're Still Here. NB, before you go, a board game?

NB: Yes, a board game. Cross Bronx Expressway from GMT Games. It is a board game for three players.

Brian Lehrer: I will definitely look for it. Thank you so much. Please call us again. Jill, your thoughts on NB's call?

Jill Jonnes: I love that idea. I too will get this board game. One thing I should say about the Cross Bronx, I would like to give a shout-out to [unintelligible 00:18:35], who actually wrote the new preface to the third edition, because she has what I think is just a wonderful idea, which is to cap part of the Cross Bronx Expressway. There was a lot of enthusiasm manifested for that during the pandemic. I think it's in a study phase, but I truly hope that that is something that comes to pass. Because it would create many new acres that would have potential to be all kinds of things. Yes, the Cross Bronx Expressway, ugh, wow. What a tale. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: One of the things that you do in the book is you trace the history of a place in the Bronx called Charlotte Gardens. By way of a little bit of background, Jimmy Carter went to Charlotte Gardens and called it the worst slum in America. Then years later, Reagan went and told America and the Bronx that the federal government was not the answer. Can you talk about that Democratic and Republican presidential relationship with the South Bronx, and how different they were or were not?

Jill Jonnes: Right. What we now call  Charlotte Gardens is 92 suburban-style homes that were built by Ed Logue, but originally, what there was was Charlotte Street. My book actually is organized by telling the story of three neighborhoods, a working-class neighborhood, which was centered around Charlotte Street in the southeast portion of the Bronx, the Grand Concourse, which was the Fifth Avenue, the fancy place to live, and then the Northwest Bronx, it's just much more a place, a combination of houses and small apartment buildings, but a more middle-class place and a grander place than Charlotte Street.

When I talked about the complete abandonment of the Bronx, the way it manifested itself so dramatically was when Genevieve Brooks, who was the founder of the Mid Bronx Desperadoes. It's a community development corporation. In 1974, she gathered, invited, and had there, on Charlotte Street, 200 of movers, and shakers, and power brokers of New York. She had this very thorough presentation and then bus tour through all of these vacant and burned-out buildings. She gathered these people to say, "This is why this is happening, and we need to intervene and stop it." She just was stunned, as was everyone else there who was not one of these people, by the just complete lack of interest and subsequent action. Eventually, Ed Logue, who's probably best known-- I don't think many people remember him, but the thing you would most know about him is if someone said, "Oh, this is the person who brought you Roosevelt Island."

He was a big deal in New York State in redevelopment. He got in the doghouse and he ended up in the South Bronx. This was his swan song to prove that something really great could happen there.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Jill Jonnes: He came up with this idea of these houses. It was the ultimate American dream, the white picket fence, and the suburban house.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, do you want to finish the thought real quick?

Jill Jonnes: Yes. People said, "No one in their right mind would want to buy a house in the South Bronx." In fact, thousands of people vied to be the person who could buy one of those houses.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, [unintelligible 00:22:47] inventory.

Jill Jonnes: He showed them wrong.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great story. We just have two minutes left in the segment. Let me get one more caller in here. Craig in Queens. Craig, you're on WNYC. Hey there, we have one minute for you.

Craig: Hey, Brian, good morning. I just want to say, as a kid coming from Queens, half my family is from the Bronx. I would go there in the '70s, the late '70s, early '80s, and the contrast from growing up in Jamaica, Queens to going to the Bronx and seeing the vacant lots, the buildings with people living in it but it looked half empty. If anybody want to get a clear reference, see the movie The Super with Joe Pesci, but the people were so nice.

I think through the years, there's never been a concerted effort to employ the people of the Bronx. When I first got put on to your show, they were redoing the [unintelligible 00:23:42] from upstate, and Puerto Rican got called in and he said, "They don't give those jobs to the people from the Bronx, they give it to undocumented people." The person from the state was like, "Oh, no, that's not true. They don't employ undocumented people." He was like, "Oh, that's the [unintelligible 00:24:01]."

Brian Lehrer: Me?

Jill Jonnes: Yes, you. Then funny, last year, the people were like, "Governor Hochul did a fund for undocumented construction workers." I was like, "This thing is like full circle."

Brian Lehrer: Craig, I've got to leave it there for time but I appreciate it. I don't think reacting to that without skepticism sounds like me, but I don't remember that exact moment.

Jill, last question, in 30 seconds, because some of the material that's new in the book is about COVID. You seem to position it as, for all the devastation and the disproportionate impact of COVID in the South Bronx, that somehow it has left it positioned for something better than before? Real quick.

Jill Jonnes: I think there was hope for the child tax credit. That unfortunately did not last. I think that many groups in the Bronx put that time to organizing, and were busy making things happen. I always feel that the energy, the persistence, and honestly, just the smarts of the community organizers and the people who live in the Bronx, I will vote [chuckles] expectations of good things from them always.

Brian Lehrer: Placing her bet on the future of the South Bronx is Jill Jonnes, whose book, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City, is now out in its third edition. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jill Jonnes: Thank you.

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