The Bronx (Columbia History of Urban Life) [Hardcover]

Evelyn Gonzalez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2004 | Series: Columbia History of Urban Life

The Bronx is a fascinating history of a singular borough, mapping its evolution from a loose cluster of commuter villages to a densely populated home for New York's African American and Hispanic populations. In recounting the varied and extreme transformations this community has undergone, Evelyn Gonzalez argues that racial discrimination, rampant crime, postwar liberalism, and big government were not the only reasons for the urban crisis that assailed the Bronx during the late 1960s. Rather, a combination of population shifts, public housing initiatives, economic recession, and urban overdevelopment caused its decline. Yet she also proves that ongoing urbanization and neighborhood fluctuations are the very factors that have allowed the Bronx to undergo one of the most successful and inspiring community revivals in American history. The process of building and rebuilding carries on, and the revitalization of neighborhoods and a resurgence of economic growth continue to offer hope for the future.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The title is misleading: Gonzalez is really focused on the South Bronx--its history, decline and fall, and rise. (She doesn't examine the North Bronx neighborhoods at all.) She recounts in clear if pedestrian prose, based on her own Ph.D. dissertation, the beginnings of the city borough in the mid-nineteenth century when Jordan Mott founded Mott Haven and Lewis Morris the Morrisania villages. Street plans, public transportation (the subway arrived in 1905), and services were created in a city framework, not a suburban one. Waves of immigrant apartment dwellers moved into the Bronx, and into newer and better housing, as the borough grew. But by 1934, with half its housing stock built before the 1901 Tenement House Law, the pattern was set. The South Bronx's wretched housing sheltered wave after wave of poorer and yet poorer immigrants, until it imploded in the 1960s and 1970s. Gonzalez traces its rise again, too, through a workable mixture of public and private, church-related and city-funded initiatives. Suitable for urban-planning and city history collections. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Gonzalez's reporting and research are excellent, and scholars will appreciate the extensive bibliography... recommended for public and academic libraries." -- Library Journal

"Gonzalez has given New York and the Bronx a historical snapshot of the sometimes forgotten borough in The Bronx." -- New York Resident

"Ms. Gonzalez has created a text, not only of historic value, but also one that should serve as a contemporary study of urbanization.... for serious students and teachers of Bronx history or urban studies. Every library should have a copy.... It's well worth a read." -- Bronx Times Reporter

"This is must reading for any historian interested in exploring the process of suburbanization's impact on New York City...Recommended." -- Choice

A soberly thoughtful, statistic-filled study of that neglected borough, replete with maps and charts. -- Phillip Lopate, New York Times Book Review

"This book tells a thoughtful story of urbanization in a place that most Americans know only stereotypically." -- Darrel E. Bigham, American Historical Review

"A superior book, well worth reading." -- Lloyd Ultan, The Bronx County Historical Society Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; First Edition edition (May 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231121148
• ISBN-13: 978-0231121149
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,502,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars careful scholarship on urban development and urban renewal, December 19, 2011

By 

hmf22 (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bronx (Columbia History of Urban Life) (Paperback)

The Bronx is a polished, well-researched scholarly work on the development of the Bronx in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the borough's decline after World War II, and urban renewal efforts from the 1970s to the present. The book is crisply written, with an extensive bibliography and index. Numerous maps and charts enhance the argument, and there are sixteen pages of historic photographs, including some "before" and "after" shots of the same locations. It's important to note that this is not a comprehensive history of the Bronx, as the title suggests, but a highly focused history of city planning, real estate development, the arrival of sewer lines and mass transit, and so forth. The lack of a human story line occasionally makes for a puzzling narrative, as when Gonzalez jumps from a discussion of real estate development to a discussion of urban renewal with only the slightest discussion of the urban blight that necessitated the urban renewal. I closed the book feeling like I still had very little understanding of the lives of the men and women who populated the Bronx, either in the first generations of settlement or in its severely troubled phase in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. But if you are interested in the expansion and development of New York City and don't mind a rather dry narrative, this book is definitely worth a look.