← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Ian Frazier Wins Gotham Book Prize For 'Paradise Bronx'
00:22:31
Author Ian Frazier's new cultural and social history of the Bronx just won the Gotham Book Prize.
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- [00:08]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. I wanted to preview some of the conversations we'll be having on the show later this week. Grammy Award winning musician Maren Morris has just released a new album. It's called Dreamsicle. And tomorrow she'll join us for a listening party. On Wednesday, former District Attorney Katherine Christian will be here to discuss the case of Sean Diddy Combs. And on Thursday, we'll talk about a new exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden that brings Vincent Van Gogh paintings to life with flower installations. That is in the future. Now let's get this hour started with a book about the Bronx that just won an award. We have exciting news from one of our recent guests. This morning it was announced that the writer Ian Fraser won the Gotham Book Prize for his work called paradise the Life and Times of New York's Greatest Birth. Fraser has spent the last 15 years walking the Bronx, mastering its geography, researching its history and getting to know its culture and people. Those neighborhood strolls were the bedrock of his writing. In Paradise Bronx, Fraser writes that for many, living in the Bronx has often meant surviving, quote, in between, in between the American continent and the islands that make up New York City, in between two opposing sides of the resolutionary war, in between the destructive construction of expressways, and in between times of paradise and times of struggle. While announcing Fraser's book as one of this year's two winners, the co founders of the Gotham Brook Prize called Paradise Bronx, quote, a compelling narrative that sweeps the reader up in the pulsing culture, diverse lives and fascinating past and present of our northernmost borough. Ian Fraser, who likes to go by Sandy, joined me to talk about his research. And I started by asking Sandy what you can observe about the Bronx by walking as opposed to just driving through, around it or taking the train.
- [02:11]
Ian Fraser
Well, you don't know what the geography is like. If you just look at it on your phone, you have no idea. And if you drive through it, you're not aware that your car is going up and down as much as it is. But when you're on foot, you see this is a, it's a hilly place and it's also quite, it's also varied. So it's kind of hilly along the Harlem river. And then in that is east of that. And then it gets, it becomes oceanfront. If you keep going, it's only like seven miles across. As you keep going, suddenly there you are, you're on the east river, which is also Long Island Sound, which is also the Atlantic Ocean. So you're Kind of going from an upstate geography, a hilly and kind of challenging geography, to a shore geography, to a coastal geography in one place. So that's another kind of in between quality of the Bronx, that it's between the ocean and the upstate woods, almost.
- [03:17]
Sandy Frazier
The Bronx, as you write in the book, is at the edge of the continent, connected to the mainland. How do you think this dynamic has driven its cultural and physical development over history?
- [03:28]
Ian Fraser
Well, it was a place that you had to pass through, and it still is a place that you have to pass through if you're coming from these islands. And the islands are, I would say, kind of propitiously laid out there in the water for people coming from elsewhere. And so to get from these islands up into New England, up and to the continent, you had to go through the Bronx. And I think people, if you live in New York City and you see it as an urban place, you don't realize that. You may not realize that it is as just a work of nature. It's a wonder. It's just. It has so many different environments that it incorporates. It has salt water and it has fresh water or brackish water. It has ocean and it has land. And the combination is just. I mean, I don't even. I think it's one of the most blessed places geographically on the planet. And when you, when you walk it, you see, you can see those different, you know, sides of it. And when people first came here, the description of what they saw is just, you know, what's now New York harbor was just full of fish. I mean, just all different kinds of fish. And, you know, if you see when they did archeological digs of the Lenape village sites, what the Lenape ate. I mean, the Lenape are just having surf and turf every night. You know, they're having. They're eating everything from elk to conchs to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, countless numbers of oysters. This, before this was settled, there were three. It was estimated there were 350 square miles of oysters in the New York waters. Now, the city itself, the land of the city, is only 300 square miles. So you're imagining this was Oyster city. And if you go to places where there were Lenape villages, you'll see there are middens, oyster middens, where people just kept. You had to eat a lot of oysters to get calories because they're not a high calorie food. And you would create these big mounds of oyster shells. So it was, as I say, a blessed place. And the Bronx is kind of the pivot point of it. That's where you go from the ocean environment to a land environment in really the space of not very many miles.
- [06:08]
Sandy Frazier
We're talking to Sandy Frazier. His new book is called paradise the Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. Let's get this out of the question now. The Bronx, where does the name come from?
- [06:19]
Ian Fraser
The Bronx comes from the Bronx River. And the name of the Bronx river, the Bronx river, runs through the Bronx. It divides it really in half, and it runs north and south from a reservoir up in Westchester county, and it empties into the east river, eight miles long in the Bronx. And it's the only. It's the longest river in New York City. And it got its name from Jonas Bronck, who owned land next to it. He came in the 1600s, mid-1600s, and people would refer to his where he lived. They would say, well, that's Bronx land. And then they said, that's Bronx River. So we have the Bronx River. We had Bronx land. And pretty soon, I mean, that name was just sort of out there ever since Jonas Brock lived there. And then in the early 1900s, a poet named Joseph Rodman Drake wrote a poem called Bronx. That's the title of the poem.
- [07:29]
Alison Stewart
That's it.
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Ian Fraser
That's it. He knew a good word when he saw it back there in 1805. I mean, it's a cool word. And you think that it begins almost at the beginning of the Alphabet, and it ends almost at the end of the Alphabet. So you're kind of there. You have another. It's between the extremes of the Alphabet. But the name came from the Bronx river and from Jonas Bronck, and I think also from this poem, which was a famous poem of its time, and it's an ode to the Bronx River. It's like somebody saying, oh, my dear Bronx river, how much I love you. And it's kind of a good poem, even. But when they went to the place had a bunch of other names. And when it finally became part of New York City at the end of the 19th century, that was the name that they gave to it.
- [08:27]
Alison Stewart
Now, was Jonas Bronck a man of means?
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Ian Fraser
Well, he must have been, because he had his own ship. He came here on his own ship, which was called the Fire of Troy. Seems like kind of an unlucky name maybe, to get a ship. But he came in 1639 and bought land from the Munsee, which was a tribe of the Lenape, and also paid the Dutch, who by then had established themselves in Lower Manhattan. He sort of, I guess, kind of gave them money to let him just settle there. And he didn't live there all that long. I think he died in, like, 1643 or something like that. And he wasn't there all that long, but he just had a real catchy name like Bronc. You know, America likes the word Bronc, if you think about the west, you know, but so he. I don't even. He wasn't even the first European settler, as far as I know. I'm not sure that he was, but he was the one people knew.
- [09:39]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Ray from Fordham Road. Hi, Ray. Thanks for calling, all of it.
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Ray
Hey. Hey, Allison. What's up, Sandy. Honored to talk to you both. Long time. Listen. And a lover of the Bronx. Lived here all my life. Right now to give you a picture, Sandy and Allison, I'm on the BX17, headed down Katona in the heart of the Bronx. Let me see if I can get everybody say what's up? I'm on the radio, wnyc. They doing a piece on the Bronx. Y' all want to say what's up to the Bronx? Tell the people in the world that the Bronx is dope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, just like the Bronx. Everybody's not gonna participate, but we love the Bronx. What we need in the Bronx, though. What we need in the Bronx, though, especially when you're talking about redlining and stuff like that, that's kind of like the business I work in. But what. What people need in the Bronx is the dignity brought back to. To living. The way that the situation of living is concerned is that it's being. That the people in the tenants are being. How you can say, they're subjected to live a certain way. Why are the public hallways not clean? Why is garbage not taken care of? It's because there's a decision decided that the Bronx has to stay like those movies and has to be filthy when people want to live in a clean place. But I'm definitely getting a book. Love y' all. And just continue on. I'm at work.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you, Ray. Thank you so much for the shout out. Love that, too.
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Ian Fraser
So this was a. He was on a BX17 bus.
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Alison Stewart
What's coming up? Yeah, he was. How did the Bronx become part of New York City?
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Ian Fraser
Well, originally, it was part of Westchester county, and then people from New York City started moving into the Bronx because it offered a lot of open space. And at first, it was sort of like the Hamptons in that People went there and had fabulous estates, and it was a place where you had a lot of land so you could have polo fields, fields, you know, it was a place where you could have racetracks. The Tiffany's of Tiffany's had a beautiful estate up there. A lot of people would visit up there. It was a place with a lot of parkland. And then they began to buy up old estates and land that had been part of people's estates for parkland. And. And the idea was that it was going to. That it was going to become part of New York City. And then in, like, the 1890s, they voted and whether they wanted to be part of New York. And overwhelmingly, both the city and this part of Westchester county voted that this part of Westchester county would become part of New York City. And that was before Brooklyn was a part of New York City or before Staten island or Queensland. That was before you had. Before Manhattan became just one borough among others. And when the Bronx became part of New York City, it also became. Soon after that, it became its own county. So by, like, 1905, it was part of the city. It was its own county. And it was a place with a lot of possibility where people could expand, could build apartments. And the subways reached it. In 1905, the first subways got up there coming up from Manhattan. And once you had the subways, you had the number one, you had the number four, you had the two and the five, and then you had the six. And those subways, I used the analogy of, like, there was, like, garden sprinklers, you know, that. That it nourished this place, and apartment buildings sprang up all along those subway lines. And that was again, when I talk about the paradise Bronx. That was when you had all this wonderful new housing that people who lived especially like on the Lower east side, which was the most densely populated place on the planet, could move up there, get nice apartments, and it became a place that people would move to. If you remember the last. I believe I've been told this, but the last episode of the Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason says, baby, we're moving to the Bronx. And I want that positive view, you know, like, this is every. You need a place where people can live that is not outrageously expensive. And the danger is that the Bronx will become another expensive part of the city.
- [14:11]
Alison Stewart
From text, it says, my memory of the Bronx is buying two cars in one afternoon at the police car lot. A Buick for 250 and a Thunderbird for 125. Someone else wrote, both my parents Grew up on Coney island back in the 1930s. My dad's mom had a bad sinus condition. The doctor said she should move to a drive climate. So they moved to the Bronx.
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Ian Fraser
Yeah, that is a pretty interesting thing. People used to move there for their health. And Edgar Allan Poe moved there for the health of his wife who had consumption, which is tb. And they moved there for that reason. And it didn't particularly help her as she died not that long after they moved there. But it is funny that the Bronx had. Was the people would go there because it was a rural place. It was like a country place that you could recuperate. Now the Bronx has the worst air in the city and it has very high rates of asthma. So it's. And it has bad air. To go back to the question of being in between because so many vehicles run through there. It has the big market, the produce market there, Hunts Point and lots and lots of trucks coming and going. So it has changed.
- [15:26]
Sandy Frazier
The Cross Bronze expressway, which carries I95 from New Jersey through Connecticut, runs right through it. The final cost of the highway was $238 million. That's about. That's in 1946. That's 2 billion in today's dollars. It is the most expensive road in the history at the time of construction. Robert Carroll writes about it in the Power Broker, obviously about Robert Moses. How did the expressway alter what it meant to live in the Bronx?
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Ian Fraser
Well, it cut the Bronx in half. And what it did was first knocked down a lot of neighborhoods. It separated people. It like physically separated people that like people who had been friends didn't see as much of each other, especially during construction because it was hard to get across the. It remains hard to get across the Cross Bronx if you're going north to south. So. And it was just sort of insulting, I mean, that you're going to put this kind of road through. I mean, I say that, that it. People say that it was the worst thing that happened to the Bronx and contributed the most to the decline of the Bronx. But you know, it was a violent process of construction and tearing down and dislocation and for what, for 6.5 miles of highway, it is tough to get across the Bronx east to west. And what I was saying before about the geography of the Bronx and the up and down quality of it, those ridges run north and south, so it makes it hard to push a highway through. And in a way it was an amazing achievement also. But yeah, the Cross Bronx was almost fatal. I say the highways almost destroyed the Bronx in 1976.
- [17:15]
Alison Stewart
The number of fires of all kinds that year totaled more than 33,000. You write extensively about this moment in Bronx's history, but what is something you think people get wrong or misperceive about the Bronx fires of 1970s? Of the 1970s?
- [17:31]
Ian Fraser
Well, the idea was this was arson, and some of it was arson. But if you look at New York City fire marshal reports, they say it was only a small percentage of those fires were arson. The idea that the people burned down their own housing for who knows what reason. And that was an idea propagated by Senator Moynihan who said the people of the Bronx must not want housing or they wouldn't burn it down. Well, that, that was just untrue and unfair for the senator to say about people he represents. That's something people get wrong. It burned for a lot of different reasons. In a way, it was a panic. It was like the buildings went up in the early 19th century in almost a rush of enthusiasm to build here. And they kind of came down in a panic of fear, like, this is all going to fall apart. And the buildings were redlined, I repeat. And so it was hard to get money to repair them. It was also just an idea on behalf of the city that, well, we're just going to let this place go. And they closed firehouses in the Bronx when those at the height of this plague of fires. So the idea that the people of the Bronx burned down their own buildings is largely nonsense. And that's a major thing that people get wrong about the Bronx.
- [19:03]
Sandy Frazier
Sandy, toward the end of the book, you write about the present and the future of the Bronx, especially luxury apartments rising along the Harlem River. The rents have gone through the roof 26% in the past decade.
- [19:16]
Alison Stewart
What do you think the city needs.
- [19:17]
Sandy Frazier
To do or getting right to ensure that the Bronx doesn't fall into further gentrification?
- [19:25]
Ian Fraser
Well, a fact that I think everybody should just keep in mind. I keep in mind 34% of renters in the Bronx pay more than 50% of their income in rent. And go back to Governor Morris, if you had said to him, is that the kind of country that you're looking for is something where people are basically back to back? I mean, what is that? How does that differ from serfdom? I mean, that's just. That's too much rent. How do you deal with that? And I am not a housing expert. I can't say how it can be done. I have no, you know, prescription. But I know that it is important that somehow that number, 34% paying more than 50%. That has to change. It just can't be how people live. And what you look for in the future is this is a place with extremely good infrastructure in terms of the subways to begin with, railroad access. They're now building Metro north stations on the southeast part of the Bronx. It is a great place. It's a great place. Easy access to the city and people will want to live there. They will continue to. It should be a place that is affordable. How one goes about that, I don't know. I know that the idea is you're going to gentrify Jerome Avenue and make it so that you can't have auto shops on Jerome Avenue. What else is Jerome? I mean, Jerome Avenue is a perfect place for auto shops. They've been there forever. They support a lot of people, a lot of people who come in from other countries. You can make a better wage in an auto shop than you can in food service, which is the other kind of entry level job that people get. Why not have auto shops on Churro?
- [21:19]
Sandy Frazier
It's kind of what happened at 10th Avenue.
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Ian Fraser
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [21:22]
Alison Stewart
Can you give us a reason why hip hop came out of the Bronx?
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Ian Fraser
It was an answer. It was an answer to all the stuff that had been done to the Bronx. It was like, well, you brought massive machines in here to flatten us. And look at the size of these speakers. We have speakers that one of the guys said you could live inside of those speakers. And we're going to turn it up so loud that the street light that we're draining power from gets dim. We're going to blast this to the skies. And it's like an answer. Hip hop is like an answer to like, oh, you're going to do planned shrinkage on the place where. That was an idea that they had. You're going to push highways through here and not care about who lives here. Well, we have an answer. And here it is.
- [22:08]
Alison Stewart
That was Sandy Frazier speaking about his book paradise the Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough. It won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize. The other winner, she was a guest on the Brian Lehrer Show. Want to give her a shout out? That's Nicole Jelinas. The name of her book is New York's Long War to Take Back its Streets. From the car. Congrats to both.
- [22:32]
Unknown
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