South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City

The book tells the story of the borough's development as a New York suburb and boomtown with the influx of hundreds of thousands of German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, which became a major base of political power for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his powerful lieutenant, Boss Ed Flynn. After World War II, the Bronx underwent its second boom, beginning with immigrants from Puerto Rico and African Americans from Manhattan. On their heels came the camp followers of modern urban poverty: drug dealers, real estate pirates, arsonists. By the 1970s, the Bronx was burning. Block after block of formerly working-class and middle-class housing was now abandoned and destroyed. This borough, which in its heyday had produced such notable Americans as Clifford Odets, Paddy Cheyefsky, Lauren Bacall, Herman Wouk, Jules Feiffer, Jake LaMotta, Stanley Kubrick, E.L. Doctorow, Neil Simon, and Tony Curtis, now lay in ashes, visible mainly as a dreadful object lesson.