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.

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on the ‘First Creative-Writing Class’)

“Creative writing matters because the human species is hardwired for narrative. In caveman days, we sat around our fires and spun stories, just as creative-writing students today sit around seminar tables and play video games. Recently, I had the uncanny experience of regressing to one of my former selves—a caveman. There was the old campfire. Another caveman walked into the circle of light and proceeded to hold me and my fellow cave people rapt with narrative. However, I quickly stopped him. I said I thought he should interrogate the beginning of that narrative, the part with the ice bear. He left the circle of light, came back, and began again, skipping the ice-bear part. All of us sitting around the fire agreed that the narrative worked better and was much clearer without the ice bear.

“And so the first creative-writing class was born.”—American writer and humorist Ian Frazier, “Shouts and Murmurs: Creative,” The New Yorker, May 27, 2019

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on Why Mummies Are Better Workers Than Zombies)

 “I often remind personnel directors at competitive companies that mummies work eighty per cent cheaper than zombies. Mummies are also slightly more articulate, and they are easier to deal with if they become enraged. If a mummy starts to chase you, merely pull on a loose end of one of his bandages and spin him like a top, unwinding him until he collapses in a pile of bones. Unlike zombies, ninety-seven per cent of mummies are not unionized, and some have even been known to threaten union organizers with bloody butcher knives.” —Ian Frazier, “Why Mummies?”, The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017

The image accompanying this post shows Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932).

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on That Romantic Triangle, Post-‘Casablanca’)

“December 10. Mrs. Laszlo still does not seem to be her old self—I’m not sure why. Last night in her sleep, she kept saying something like ‘Looking at you kids’ over and over. Once, I heard her say, distinctly, ‘Here’s looking at Yul, kid!’ Who could that be? Yul Brynner? How does she know him? Then she woke up, saw me, and burst into tears.”— Ian Frazier, “Shouts and Murmurs: Victor Laszlo’s Blog,” The New Yorker, Sept. 18, 2017

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on Christmas and the ‘Grand Transcendence’)

“A grand transcendence drawing near

Reminds us to Love One Another:

Everybody’s (gulp) our brother

And sister, too—a saying true,

Though easier to say than do.

Look to the star, keep spirits high.

Good times are coming by and by.”— Ian Frazier, “Greetings, Friends!”, The New Yorker, Dec. 19 and 26 issue

(Photo of Ian Frazier taken by Larry D. Moore at the 2010 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Oct. 16, 2010.)