Book excerpt: "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough"
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In "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), New Yorker writer Ian Frazier takes readers on a twisty and entertaining tour of the Bronx's rich history, landscape and people.
Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Ian Frazier discussing the Bronx with Susie Essman on "CBS Sunday Morning" January 26!
"Paradise Bronx" by Ian Frazier
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The Bronx is a hand reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea. Its fellow boroughs are islands or parts of islands; the Bronx hangs on to Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn, with Staten Island trailing at the end of the long towrope of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and keeps the whole business from drifting away on a strong outgoing tide. No water comes between the Bronx (if you leave out its own few islands) and the rest of North America. The Bronx is the continent, and once you're on it you can go for thousands of miles without seeing ocean again. The other boroughs, for their part, cling to the Bronx for dear life. The chafing and strife of this connection have made all the difference to the Bronx.
No other borough has "the" in its name. We don't say "the Staten Island" or "the Manhattan"; for some reason, no island is ever called "the." Only certain more or less continuous geographic features merit a "the," such as "the Antarctic" or "the tropical rainforest." Before Europeans had any formal name for what is now the Bronx, they referred to it simply as "the continent," "the mainland," or "the maine," distinguishing it from the ocean they came on and the nearby islands where they'd settled first. Concerning the question of whether to capitalize both words of its modern-day name, the city's daily newspapers are divided. In The New York Times and the Daily News, "the" is lowercase: "the Bronx." The Post, however, gives it two caps: "The Bronx." Perhaps the Post has a hidden agenda; the borough is home to the Post's printing plant. In this book I follow the majority and write "the Bronx."
The northernmost part of the Bronx's western border is the Hudson River. Then Manhattan fits up next to the Bronx on its western side for more than half its length, lying approximately north and south. Here, the Harlem River, which is a strait and not a river, and which connects the East River to the Hudson, runs between the two boroughs. Steep hills and bluffs rise above the Harlem River valley. Much of the Bronx is hilly. Stone ridges extend like tendons, knuckles, and fingers from the northern border of the borough southward; these discouraged the construction of east-west roads and make the Bronx difficult to cross from east to west even today. After the Harlem River branches off around one side of Randall's Island, a smaller tidal stream, the Bronx Kill, continues along the borough's southern border. Going along the top of Randall's, the Bronx Kill also flows into the East River, which is part of Long Island Sound, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. The Bronx's entire eastern border is the East River and the Sound. Thus, the borough has a major river that comes from inland—the Hudson—to its west, and saltwater on its east. Some of the Bronx is rocky and wooded like upstate, and some is oceanfront marsh and beach.
A straight line with a few bureaucratic zigzags marks the Bronx's northern border. That line is also the border of New York City. In general, people in the suburbs to the north of this line are richer than most people in the Bronx. By some measurements, large areas of the Bronx are poorer than anywhere else in the nation. But that assumes a population frozen in time. Everybody has to start somewhere, and the poor parts of the Bronx are often where people start when they have very little. They work, and earn, and in time, with luck, they move upward, and new arrivals take their place. This cycle has tended to wear out some areas of the Bronx.
The Bronx is the part of New York where the city merges into the rest of North America. The process has never gone smoothly.
From "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough" by Ian Frazier. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 20, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Ian Frazier. All rights reserved.
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"Paradise Bronx" by Ian Frazier
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For more info:
- "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough" by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats
- Ian Frazier, The New Yorker
Watch Susie Essman's tour of the Bronx:
