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When Citizens Rescue Neighborhoods

vitalcitynyc.org · 1,625 words · saved by 1 readers

Nothing demonstrates the magnetic pull of a doom loop — or the power to reverse it — like the Bronx in the 1970s. By the end of that decade, the borough had become a byword for disaster. The Bronx’s decline had taken a few steps: redlining and deindustrialization, highway building and white flight, dramatic cutbacks to fire service even as incidents and intensity of fires climbed, a sclerotic political machine. If faith in the idea of the city faltered in the postwar years, and just about died during the fiscal crisis, the Bronx was the case in point for those who argued the urban project was in terminal decline. By the time President Jimmy Carter’s motorcade took a detour into the South Bronx on his way to address the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1977 and the president was photographed in the desolate rubble of Charlotte Street, money and people had been fleeing the borough for more than 15 years. By 1977, the Bronx had starkly fewer manufacturing jobs and fewer p

Nothing demonstrates the magnetic pull of a doom loop — or the power to reverse it — like the Bronx in the 1970s. By the end of that decade, the borough had become a byword for disaster. The Bronx’s decline had taken a few steps: redlining and deindustrialization, highway building and white flight, dramatic cutbacks to fire service even as incidents and intensity of fires climbed , a sclerotic political machine. If faith in the idea of the city faltered in the postwar years, and just about died during the fiscal crisis, the Bronx was the case in point for those who argued the urban project was

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