People who have never been to the Bronx or New York, for that matter, seem to know so much about where i live for so long. This knowledge was garnered through media – books, movis, videos – but i can’t locate it anywhere here, in the Bronx, where we live.
Ever bother to pay attention to history? For instance the actual histories of the people and neighborhoods that comprise a city. Take, for instance two Irish neighborgood and a Jewish one, in the city that i live. Two are close by my home in the Bronx, and i often talk to people who lived there and grew up there. The other, Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, is entirely familiar since i spent so much time the in the 1980s and 1990s.
So many talk as though they are experts. Maybe they are, but they’re experts with short memories trimmed, perhaps, by an honest rightesouness.
History is a continuum without a beginng, end or middle, but gets used selectively, and usually, by considering only the recent history of one’s own existence, getting shortened with descending age.
Unexpected history from the website of Sacred Heart Church in Highbridge, Bronx. Apparently the Irish first settled there when tey built the bridge that gave the neighborhood its name. Tey stayed until aroun 1970.
The well-documented conditions of Hell’s Kitchen.
Deep into the history of the west side of Manahattan where Irish and black citizens found affordable housing.
Charlotte Street has a history chronicling the shifting nationalities and religions of the west Bronx.
From people who were there and also lived there. Perhaps some immigrant groups might come here as broke as anyone else has, but many came from modern developed countries, and also had strong ties to centuries old rrligiouls institutions, while others arrive in the city from a lineage of slavery or more underdeveloped places, who are simply looking for a better way of life, like all the others moving from a ghetto situation of the Lower East Side, Manhattan’s west side or the South Bronx, into fresher territory.
Blacks were living with Irish both of whom had to live in the least desirable sections of Manhattan because it was cheaper. Because the conditions of Hell’s Kitchen were horrific enough, without race riots, amongst these pooorest of New Yorkers, blacks actually began the movement into Harlem from the west side of Manahattan, and, when the 1920s Bronx building boom of livable, affordable apartments happened, the Irisish and Jews fled their lousy tenements in Manahattan in the traditionally poor areas of the lower East Side of both Jews and Irish, and the heavily Irish west side of Manhattan.
Speaking of ethnic neighborhoods – Irish Jewish Italian, Black and Spanish – somehow the Cross Bronx Expressway, which was always caught up in social myths, has a new, as they say, narrative. The Cross Bronx Expressway, is racist infrastructure, and, as such, is another symbol or racism, that is, if the CBE is purely a symbolic image, and not existent, and set in something by definition isn’t so willy-nilly, or subject to use by the causes of today.
Another myth is that Robert Moses with the CBE, broke the back of the Bronx, and all the Jews, Italians and Irish fled, as if they weren’t primed already as an upwardly mobile mass, and moving north anyways as a matter of course. Built in a time of leaded gas and little pollution control and under a sweeping eminent domain editct, families that were there since the Bronx boomed in the 1920s, and before, had to get out of their beloved homes. They were white, in case your unread and woke.
I’ve driven it, and over it, shot it and walked around it and the neighborhoods it slices through, then gone back to my apartment that sits right above the Deegan, an expressway of equal size set in the Harlem River Valley, that is still industrial and with many trains. There were huge gas holder tanks at the bottom of my street and the ancient fossil-fueled Sherman Creek Power Plant was just across the river in Inwood, torn down in 1998.
For most of my life i lived on Union Avenue in Brooklyn, particularly when it was a poor, dirty industrial paradise with the BQE – elevated, – and three blocks from my home that itself sat on a block of polluting factories. At the time Willainmaburg even had a facility that hanndled radioactive waste. Does your groggy surprising wokeness not realize its mostly a matter of money. Affordable housing in the city is often not in the best sections, and that’s capitalism, and, until that day, when socialism, flourishes, which it won’t, is the fact of life in America, whether anyone likes it or not.
Over the years i have met a ton of people who became sussessful professionals, because they found affordable housing close to whee they worked and went to school in Mamhattan, in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, which were, along with Bushwick, the most toxic, in the city.
The view out my window in Williamsburg, 2002. I lived here, in this building longer than anywhere else. So much for “environmental racism” and “racist infrastructure.”
Wherei i lived, my home was the most polluted place i have ever lived. Every male on my block and the surrounding blocks, cut-off form the rest of the neighborhood in the fifities beacuse of the construction of the BQE, which also took out the original Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, a cathedral-like centerpiece of Italian Willimasburg, died of cancer in their late sixites and early seventies..
“Black people are nearly four times as likely to die of exposure to pollution than White people. According to “Fumes Across the Fence-Line,” a recent study by the Clean Air Task Force, African Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than White Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live in communities that border a plant or factory.” As reported in Bloomberg News as the EPA.s Michael Regan tours black neighborhoods boredering industrial areas. Because RealStill has lived and worked in these places a long time, commonly referred to as a life, or living it, i would use the term poor people, since it’s noth my experience and also the path to solving problems in a democracy.
Regardless, the wokey ones should read some history and experience some life, and, live and work as working-class people if you can’t understand the larger simple truth all poor people must find cheap housiong which is located in the least desriable places in the city. The place could be polluted, industrial or both, noisy, crime-ridden, with gangs, drugs and many members of the felonius class. I’m not feeling sorry for the people down by the CBE, only because i have the Deegan, and the industrial section of the Harlem River below me and it’s also where we are known for our drugs, guns, noise and mayhem.
I’ve been shooting the CBE from 12 years, not far from where i live. I wouldn’t mind living anywhere along the CBE. By the time it gets even with Tremont Avenue around Clinton Avenue you cannot see it, and, there, all the streets have overpasses to cross it, becaue the expressway has left the ridges of the west Bronx and is in the flatlands of the east Bronx. In fact there are covered sections and one is here, where the highway goes beneath a school and a park and playground.
But can you believe what it was like to live in the path of the Cross Bronx Expressway while it was being built? At that time, and through those years, it was predominantly Jewish and had some Irish, and, the Italians. Where are these ethnic groups today? I know. Speaking of the Jews who have spread north further than the other two nationalities and have prospered beyond belief, ask them about the racist infrastructure of Auschwitz or the Warsaw ghetto, and what it means to pick yourself up and move on, because no one will help you anyways.
I went through forced displacement, and that makes basic big city pollution as nothing much in comparison. The shock of being forced from a place you love and have lived most of your life, could easily kill you. The place I loved and was displaced from, was the most polluted neighborhood in the city with a glorious history of heavy indfiuatry industry, not to mention, I live three blocks from the elevated BQE. The place I ended up was in the Bronx directly above the Deegan Expressway, which is the same size as the Cross Bronx Expressway. I have to say, it’s the noise, not the pollution, which I don’t notice at all, that bothers me about the Deegan. But the crazy thing is,, I just walk out of my building on Fordham Road and rush-hour, and, I can hardly breathe from the fumes, and this is an expressway, but one of the busiest roads jampacked with trucks, buses, and automobiles. Just below the parallel to it is an industrial area, as well as the metro north train tracks, which turned into industrial trains at night, including railroad crossing where the motors are required to pull their horns. In the Bronx, particularly the wax Bronx, you actually don’t wanna live next to a park, because of the explosive noise. One thing about the Bronx, and, when native Bronxites speak of it, the first thing is the noise which everybody recognizes as the noisiest borough and I consider one of the worst forms of pollution and existence. Then they speak of its vibrance and street life, where we all escape our apartments.