The Uncertain History of the Bronx Fires

"Few images from the 1970s still resonate like those of the destruction of the Bronx. Block after block of once-doughty apartment buildings, abandoned and burned; whole streets, even neighborhoods, left strewn with charred remains and blackened ruins; just a few churches, storefronts, or other survivors spiking up from the fields of rubble. Scenes like this—repeated across New York and other postindustrial cities—stood in for the very idea of the Bronx,"

"It was arsonists of some kind—bored and lawless kids, maybe, or the borough's notorious street gangs. Or it was vandals bent on harvesting metals from the blitzed ruins of torched apartments. Sometimes it was welfare cheats, too—families who burned down buildings to get city relocation funds and new apartments. Or maybe it was just negligence, the consequence of a cigarette left burning or an oven left on."

Images of burned, abandoned blocks and neighborhoods became the dominant representation of the Bronx and of urban decay. Those scenes were repeated across postindustrial cities and turned the borough's ruin into a cultural synecdoche. Common explanations for the fires include bored youths, street gangs, metal-salvage vandals, welfare-related arson, and accidental negligence. Such explanations circulated widely and fueled clichés and memes about urban collapse. Some of those causes did occur in individual cases, but they do not, by themselves, account for the pervasive scale of destruction witnessed.

Read at The Nation