Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on The Bronx When It Felt Like Paradise)

“In photographs of the Bronx from that period [the 1920s], the new pavements gleam, mostly car-free. So much in the borough was new and splendid and gleaming. In 1923, Jacob Ruppert, the brewer, and his partner, Cap Huston, built Yankee Stadium on 161st Street by the Harlem River. No other ballpark in America was called a stadium or rose to its nosebleed altitude of three tiers. About Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and their fellow-Yankees of that heroic era, the poets have already sung. And at the Kingsbridge Armory, then the largest indoor space in the city, you could see car shows or boat shows or rodeos—bucking broncos and steer ropers in the Bronx! Just a five-cent bus or streetcar ride away! Meanwhile, on any day, you had your local movie theatre. Everybody, practically without exception, went to the movies. You could bowl a few frames at the Paradise Lanes, on the Grand Concourse at East 188^th Street, and then cross the street to see a double feature at Loew’s Paradise Theatre, which seated four thousand dazzled moviegoers. After the evening's feature ended and the lights came up, a date night could adjourn to Krum's, the chocolate shop also known for its delicious sodas, which also was on the Concourse, just one block north.”— American essayist and humorist Ian Frazier, “Our Local Correspondents: Paradise Bronx,” The New Yorker, July 22, 2024

Periodically, my mother’s twin brother would pull out a book called The Beautiful Bronx and peer lovingly at its abundant photos, recalling the borough that meant so much to him and his family in their youth and early middle age.

The New Yorker, the magazine to which Ian Frazier has contributed for half a century, ran an excerpt from his just-published book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. How my uncle and my mother would have loved that subtitle!

I wish that this excerpt might have talked about how, attracted by the extension of subway lines to the borough, immigrants and their children—mostly Germans, Italians, Jewish, and my mother’s family, Irish—made The Bronx their home. But perhaps the full book has more on that story.

Frazier has nicely complemented what he picked up from 15 years of walking a cumulative 1,000 miles around the borough with the kind of historical research highly in the above passage.

The Bronx might have been, as he emphasizes, originally shaped by its unique geography (“The Bronx is a hand reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea”). 

But it was mis-shaped by the erroneously titled “master builder,” Robert Moses, whose mad road-building project, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, ended up displacing thousands of families, at a cost of millions in compensation and far more in mourning for their short-lived urban Eden.