How Fire Defined the Bronx, and Us

I still can’t watch the news about the fire on East 181st Street in the Bronx.

The minute I saw the texts from friends with the initial reports and images, I put down my phone, drove to Orchard Beach and just sat there. I relived how my father carried me down five flights of stairs one night in 1969 when a fire broke out on the floor below us: the light flickering on the window, the heat from the narrow hallway where the fire burned, me hugging my father’s neck.

That fire was on East 181st Street and Mapes Avenue, a mile east on the same street as the Twin Parks fire and a few blocks north of the Happy Land Social Club blaze in 1990, where 87 people died.

The most recent fire, where 17 people died, is horrific, but not without context in the Bronx, a borough whose very mention still conjures images of fire and decay. Five decades ago, as the flames spread — month after month, year after year — thousands of families were displaced, having to raise children and juggle low-paying jobs just to survive in this burned-out landscape that some compared to a war zone.

Those of us who grew up in the South Bronx during the 1970s and ’80s have been defined by the fires that incinerated our neighborhoods, which had already been set up to fail by disinvestment, redlining and eminent domain — which resulted in a trench gouged through the community by Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway.

Instead of intergenerational wealth, we inherited trauma.

My generation defines itself differently: We are the internally displaced children of the Bronx, uprooted every few years because of fires, decrepit apartments and absent landlords. Our lives were defined by impermanence.

Many of us have the memories: firefighters tossing mattresses out of windows; the stench of charred wood and dead rats. We played in rubble and basements and tossed bricks at TV sets. I remember standing in a friend’s apartment, looking up at the sunshine streaming in through the broken roof, making the place glow.

As children, we didn’t have much choice, but neither did our parents. Yet our families were often blamed for the borough’s decline, while policymakers and planners reduced entire communities to cold statistics and map lines. The neglect from city officials played out on the dirty streets and inside the inadequate schools.

We were not resilient, we were resisting death. At the worst of it, we had only one another.

But growing up, we didn’t know any different. A landscape of half-collapsed buildings lined many streets in the South Bronx. Scenes of entire blocks reduced to rubble endured — for years — in mute testament to decay, from Mott Haven to Fordham.

It wasn’t the flames that endangered us. It was the indifference.

The blocks around where I grew up — in the neighborhood we called Crotona — were alive and the buildings packed with families from Italy, Puerto Rico and Ireland, as well as Holocaust survivors from Germany. Behind each door was a life, another family.

Venturing to other blocks sometimes involved calculating the risk of being jumped by a gang or a mugger, but the block where I grew up on East 181st and Mapes felt safe. People looked out for each other, shared food and helped one another through hard times with, for example, word of a job. Heat was sporadic, with a balky boiler that belched black smoke. We warmed ourselves with open ovens, pots of boiling water and space heaters, brown boxes with a lattice of strips that glowed a mesmerizing orange.

No matter how safe one tried being inside, the fires came. We noticed it slowly, with two-family homes and small apartment buildings emptying out, then stripped for pipes and wires, and finally torched — there was more money in insurance than rebuilding. Arsonists working for landlords would at least warn tenants of impending fires so they would not be asleep at home. Some people took no chances and slept with their clothes on.

This was home.

And then it crumbled, building by building, house by house. In early ’80s, the block across from my old building was an empty lot. By 1983, Astin Jacobo and his neighbors in Crotona had had enough. During a town-hall meeting with Mayor Edward I. Koch, Jacob — as he was known to everyone — stood up and said, “All politicians are liars.” He was done with failed promises to provide basic services, like enforcing sanitation laws or getting landlords to make repairs and provide heat.

Jacob, a former baseball scout in the Dominican Republic, had been the custodian at St. Martin’s, my old school, running sports programs and counseling students. The school was a haven, even if the lessons taught us nothing about discrimination or social unrest. The only thing we learned about Puerto Rico was that the United States seized it in 1898 as spoils of the Spanish-American War. In eighth grade, new construction started nearby, where we heard the toot of the safety whistle before the muffled explosion of dynamite blasting the foundation of what would become Twin Parks.

That school and the church that ran it helped neighbors mobilize to challenge the policies of lenders, developers and governments that left many of these communities vulnerable to speculative real estate investment. The Catholic Church — alarmed by the exodus of parishioners — inspired many of these efforts, especially the South Bronx Vicariate, where Cardinal Terence Cooke told the Rev. Neil Connolly to focus on community organizing in the 1970s, encouraging other clergy who had been invigorated by the theology of Vatican II and its “preferential option for the poor.”

Father Connolly was close to cops and firefighters, celebrating Mass for them, sometimes in a storefront. They gave him tips about the fires, which he suspected were set by landlords conspiring to collect insurance money. He said city officials didn’t want to hear it.

By the 1980s, activists and nonprofit housing groups in Crotona took to rebuilding the community, putting up affordable two-family homes, turning empty lots into community gardens and transforming abandoned buildings into affordable cooperative apartments. The lot that had been a dump was now a busy ball field.

Then came the Happy Land fire, which took place a few blocks south of where I once lived and which left dozens dead, most of them Honduran immigrants. I remember that Jacob, upset by the deaths, started a soccer league on an empty field that decades earlier had been seized by the city for a hospital that was never built. His group also pushed for a new community center, which among its activities now houses a traditional Honduran dance troupe.

In 1998, the year of New York City’s centennial, Jacob stood at Mapes and 181st, right by my old building and near another his group had saved. “This corner is historic,” he told me, beaming. “We started with these two buildings, and from here we renovated the whole neighborhood. And to think we started from ashes.”

Decades before a global pandemic emptied our streets, long before the buildings crumbled into fetid piles of brick, plaster and garbage, we felt love inside them. We had our families, our parents often had work, even if well-meaning people pitied us for having to live in such conditions. A lifetime later, where are we?

Entire neighborhoods were reclaimed from the rubble in the final decades of the 20th century, turning city-owned properties into housing, gardens, playgrounds and ball fields. Affordable two- and- three-family townhouses became the norm.

The borough’s fortunes and image have rebounded in recent decades, thanks to the efforts of organizers like Jacob and coalitions of neighbors and clergy. Private investors and equity groups have been buying groups of apartment buildings that are home to working families and others who receive guaranteed rent subsidies under Section 8, where by law they pay only a third of their income. The Twin Parks complex was among those in private hands: It was sold to its current owners, a group of investment companies, in 2020. Housing advocates, who saw homeownership decline in communities of color already during the subprime crisis in 2008, were worried about so many units being controlled by private investment groups. The majority of Bronxites — 80 percent — are renters, which increases competition in housing lotteries.

And in addition to the Bronx’s being ranked the state’s least healthy county and having the state’s highest rate of unemployment, tenants there spent more than 35 percent of their income on rent in 2019, the highest rent-to-income ratio in the city, according to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. Half the borough’s households earn less than $42,140, some 40 percent less than the citywide average, according to NYU’s Fuhrman Center. A family of four, for point of reference, would be considered as “extremely poor” if making less than $35,790, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The once-desolate streets of Port Morris continue to be transformed, with glass towers touting luxury housing and new night spots — at least before the pandemic. It wasn’t that long ago that the developer Keith Rubenstein tried renaming the area the Piano District, a nod to a long-gone industry. He also hosted an A-list warehouse party in 2015, “The Macabre Suite,” which featured an installation of crushed, bullet-ridden cars and a flood of celebrity selfies with the hashtag #thebronxisburning, and a photo of the director Baz Luhrmann warming his hands over an trash-can fire.

Among the party people that night was the Bronx borough president then, Ruben Diaz Jr., and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, the two most influential Bronx Democrats at the time.

Jacob and a lot of the activists from the ’70s and ’80s have died. The priests and nuns who accompanied their parishioners during funerals and fires, and celebrated alongside them at baptisms, weddings and home blessings, have also moved on, retired or died. The Rev. John Flynn, Jacob’s partner in reclaiming the streets, died in 2012, lamenting in his final years that today’s conservative priests dismissed his lifelong ministry as “social work.” The field they got from Mayor Koch is now a full-block city park and baseball field named after Jacob.

It was hard to feel joy looking at pictures of Crotona just days after a fire about which I know almost nothing. I can fill in the rest. So can my friends. We hope the children who lived through this — who, along with their parents, endure the daily indignities of never having enough money or time — heal and move forward with the support of family, friends and faith communities, too.

We were a generation raised with our noses pressed against the windows of home, wondering why it looked nothing like the pristine white suburbs we saw on television. Yes, hip-hop arose from this pain and chaos, but I sometimes wonder if it was worth it. Some of us tell our children stories about those days and they respond with disbelief.

As do I: How was a generation of children in the Bronx — not to mention other neighborhoods like Williamsburg, East Harlem and the Lower East Side — consigned to live amid such squalor? Many of our homes were spotless inside, smelling of King Pine and Café Bustelo, but we had no control over the economic, social and political forces that shaped our destinies.

Tales of trauma do not help. You can look at my generation and feel sad. We do, sometimes. We wonder about friends lost, buildings destroyed, neighborhoods gentrified. But the melancholy gives way to an angry disbelief that has festered for decades.

My generation — like the children and the families who survived the most recent fire — knows the fear that gnaws at us at night. We can achieve all we want in life and work and still feel powerless to control the social and economic crises that shaped the borough of our birth.

Decades after fleeing down the stairs of a burning building, I still wonder how far we’ve come.