Customer Reviews

The Bronx (Columbia History of Urban Life)

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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.