and inner city blues marvin gay welcome once again to the radical magination i'm your host jim brad ose i'm a sociologist who started john j college and he shaved adversity here in new york the geographical definitions of the south bronx have evolved and are disputed but as its name implies it comprises neighborhoods in the southern part of the bronx such as belmont castle hill croteau in a park east longwood and soundview originally populated by an influx of german and irish immigrants by the thirty's and forty's jews  five percent of the population in the south bronx the bronx itself was considered the jewish borough and then its peak in one thousand nine hundred eighty was forty nine percent jewish after world war two as white the area traditionally has been a place for working class families its image as a poverty ridden area developed in the latter part of the twentieth century by the one nine hundred seventy s the bronx experience some of the worst ravages of urban decay with the loss of three hundred thousand residents and in the structure of entire city blocks worth of buildings the media attention brought the south bronx into the national spotlight politicians like jimmy carter and ronald reagan visited the area and the cleared them disaster areas charlotte street at the time of carnets visit had been so ravaged that part of it had been taken off official city maps in had fled leaving the precinct house as the sole building on simpson street that had not been abandoned or burnt out the one hundred seventy or one hundred eighty seven novel and movie the bonfire of the vanities by tom wolfe put trade the south bronx as a nightmare world not to be entered by middle or upper class whites we are so proud and thrilled to have in the radical magination today the two directors and producers a groundbreaking harrowing and heartbreaking documentary on its history of the south bronx it's called decade of fire and in contrast it tells the truth of the devastatingly beautiful narrative of the vibrant and supportive community where residents who lived in the south bronx during the fifty's and sixty's grew up work and raise their families this was a mecca of diverse cultures and people of widely varying ethnicity that not only harmoniously co existed but flourished and thrive side by side under the most challenging of conditions it's a testimony to the human spirit and even with some of the nostalgia thrown in the decade of fire makes the south bronx still seem like an incredible place to have been at that time so thank you so very very much for being here old so how was it how was living there what did you experience and how did this come to be manifested in this incredible documentary when i was little growing up in the south bronx i thought it was wonderful normal and then it got a little scary but as a child i remember my neighbors we sang the black national anthem literally voice and sing along with the store spangled banner we sang the voting king now which was a puerto rican national anthem and i remember my family and my mom and my dad being part of a community in my building you know i literally was able to travel to the next apartment upstairs downstairs kind of barefooted back for rice sugar  and it was just quite all right by the time i was in middle school things had changed in the south bronx you know i began to notice and there was just a greater awareness of danger  i was born in one nine hundred sixty three so that by the by the mid by the early seventy's in the mid seventy's the south bronx was a firestorm you know you can talk i talk to my sister or other people that we grew up with and i remember the fires during the day my sisters remembers the fires at night we just knew that there were fires like yours mine and that there were abandoned buildings right all the time  frankly i think that for many of us we thought it was normal i thought it was normal i played in rubble with lots of bricks and glass and you know god bitten by dogs and my sister got  dog we just i thought it was normal to live that way what seem out of the ordinary i mean we kind of knew something was going on because whenever we turned on the television for the brady bunch we realized that our lives this was we bunches and so you know i left the neighborhood went to college came back began to raise a family in the bronx began to work in the bronx and thought that i had left that part of my life behind me although i always worked for community based organizations serving the community i don't think that you know i sort of took a very serious critical look or an analysis of what happened in the neighborhood you know until the early two thousand where when my coworker julie allen who happens to be our co producer ok in the film and i began to work together and we started to write a curriculum for students about the history of the bronx and she took over like writing this curriculum and the curriculum was young people expressing their frustration at the time we tried to introduce hip hop that came out of the bronx out of as a way that young people began to express their frustration and it wasn't it wasn't accepted so we never really got to teach it nevertheless my colleague julia kept asking questions like really you guys have to sleep with your shoes on at times so you tell me what happened and so the more i talked about growing up in the bronx the more she encouraged  me to talk more about what happened in the bronx and made me realize that those those things were normal but it was kind of like wow the that happens here between that's not it's not normal it's not good and so the vivian becomes the main character in the story and said to one of the new right immediately i mean honestly we started working on this as a shorter project we didn't really know where it was going to go i had just moved to new york i was learning about this history for the first time i had as a kid i had seen images of the south bronx and i had no idea what they were about were going to go in a couple minutes right show in the world i think you have th all and you know but i've always loved new york and i was you know kind of thrilled to get a chance to like understand where i was living in this very complex and city with such a kind of tangled history and i just really appreciated that vivian she invited me over with she had a number of friends who just sat around and talked about what they remembered and that's really was our starting place well here's a little bit of that tangle so we yeah so it's a project that that really came to life over the course of ten years and i would say for the first three or four years you know we were living our lives and working other jobs and kind of slowly trying to figure out what story we wanted to tell because none of us are historians and honestly i don't think any of us really came to this with that much of an agenda except maybe you want to speak about what your intention was when we started or i think that never really sure what the intention for let's talk about the south bronx from let's talk about the fires but i think one of the  the things that happened was that gretchen would come to the community with me she would come back to the neighborhood with me and meet all these people that talked about how great it was to grow up in the south bronx and how we supported each other and you know the fun we had but she also heard the crazy the devastation she also heard a lot of sad stories so i think she began to hear about the you know the people dying little you know falling into drugs the gangs the gangs and i timers who talked about the beauty of growing up in the south bronx but at the same time that collective pains and and the stories that sort of the painful stories that we all share and i think that we began to do was sort of unravel why was it so hard and you know sort of looking at the fires as a way to try to describe how the fires impacted our lives  then you know we began to do the research right and we began to learn a lot about what actually happened in the south bronx and so you know there was a collection of books in the collection of the searchers that were you talk to which is a park where i spent a lot of time as a kid growing up and so we began to sort of on this try to understand some of the context by which those fires occurred and what was going on so we're again to learn we grew up in rubble burn out to the south bronx was burning down around us and nobody seemed to know why this is a story of what happened to my neighborhood we had come here from the south and from puerto rico searching for the american dream our families live side by side in the most integrated neighborhoods in the country but after the fires it would all be gone this story is not just about the bronx there are places like this and every major city in america places that everyone has given up on except for us we came from this so called terrible place the south bronx but we would never leave it behind mom's your dad's closet in puerto rico so the very first shot of that trailer is a vivian and her older brother and sister on a street in the bronx how old would you say you were in there in the fall three and so vivian at maybe four years into this project and this is a mean it's an interesting window into how we started out really trying to talk about history and we found that the way that people could really relate to that story and really enter the world of the bronx and understand it from the inside is for to really be through vivian's own story and her lens and family and bringing others and friends and share right so one really important piece is that at a certain point i asked vivian well did your dad ever you know i had seen all these photos and but there was always kind of like more stuff coming out of the corners and at one point i was like did your dad ever shoot any film of you guys and she's like oh yeah he was always shooting film of us and so it turns out there's these hidden reels of super eight films that were in a closet in puerto rico really yeah yeah and i think that what was interesting is the super eight of the vasquez family with all the other archival footage that places us in that time period so there are the fires but there we were as well to you know here's the migration florrie but there we are two hanging in there and trying to flourish and trying to live and survive and touch some some of the political economic conditions i mean was there much talk about that and wondered why why are these fire houses closing i mean what impact was the cross bronx expressway  lining i mean there's so much going on that the section eight housing the decline of property values i mean this was happening all around you white flight polarization of the city ethically racially was this part of the community discussion or i having little yeah i mean i think that there was a community discussion but i certainly as a kid was not a part of that s t you know my parents struggled to make ends meet they work constantly my dad or my dad worked for a furniture company in prospect avenue and my mom was a eventually she went to work as a clerk downtown on wall street for an insurance company but they were always working and we were five and so we went to school all were part of community events but you will never buy a building survive so you you were able to stay and you had that yeah yeah we had a couple of fires in my building but the building never came down the buildings up on the same block fell the two of our buildings fell from fire but our building survived but i think that we had you know from would have been active group of tenants in our building we had people who clean the building aside from our landlord in our suburban you know we were made the sponsible for for the cleanliness right even myself and you know what he did in the neighborhood yeah if you want to i have to tell you that normally it wasn't it wasn't like oh my god is right so scary it was just watch the nails you don't want to step on honest rusty nail that was a big deal  dad did not allow us to jump on mattresses that were massive does all the time we john mcclane you know that was just something we knew that when my dad came home from work not to get caught jumping on a mattress you know we knew not to walk in certain areas that night but it wasn't like we lived in the community you know we were among our neighbors and so we you want to pack it was about panicking but we didn't want to make it as if to ration is  o natural is possible and normal is possible yeah even in the face of these really difficult conditions right there were difficult conditions and there were you know bad things that happen to people as well  but as a kid we are i think our parents were the most if you have my mother sitting here or my dad sitting here he might tell you a different story but as a kid that was our playground this is where we you know we played and you know we threw bottles at each other for fun you know because that's what we had and you know we ended up actually starting a softball league we had various softball teams and they were started by the young people you know people what do you bring to this analysis or is a documentary about the politics of all this the economic conditions that were going on the the  sure i mean it's it is undeniable that what happened in the bronx was a manmade catastrophe was not an act of nature it wasn't there's a you know a lot of people talk about neighborhoods and you hear this today in the context of gentrification and inequality in the city that you know that neighborhoods are they kind of have a life cycle and they're just bound to rise and fall and it's just out of the hands of people which is just you know once you start looking at the facts as absolute fabrication and so it was really important to like look past some of the really pernicious myth ology they get attached to the bronx and the fire specifically in this time because beyond this idea of like it wasn't anybody's fault is actually this idea that it was the fault of the people who lived there and that  ology covered up a very deep and extensive structural history that created the bronx turned it into a ghetto and then left it to burn really clearly and that's really mean just push people out i mean what impact is that as a start it isolated an entire community it cut off an economic vibrancy right there were stores there were merchants who live there there was housing that was good housing it didn't have to be destroyed and so it destroyed all of that and it cut off not just the cross bronx but where i live b donated the other side of southern boulevard and hunts point which you know then became a place for you know for dark things to happen on the right side there were no resources because you  leave shredded the sofa come out really completely and it just isolated us from the other side and then it let those folks who were working in manhattan to just drive up all the way to upstate new york and connecticut without paying any attention to agriculture a lot was happening right was that that that how did the the property values also begin to diminish so in the film we talk about white flight as a strategy that was used to you know sort of fear the people of color so you know the neighborhood is changing there are people of color people from puerto rico in the south moving into the south bronx  we all of a sudden see that our neighborhoods are being that lined and we see that white folks are also being that line when that red line is going to already it's you're not able to get the loans the insurance or from the banks because they are choosing not was a very significant media campaign about how dangerous blacks and puerto ricans were living in these inner cities and folks became afraid they became afraid of us right because that was the story that was told to look at those people there they carry knives you know especially like you know look at west side story right there gang knife holding people who  their pigs on a spit outside and you know are there on fire vanity right and so actions that lead to a fear fear mongering you know of people of color in the south bronx and people wanted to leave people wanted didn't want to have that been want to live among folks like us in the actual fires themselves that started are a result of who's starting to do  sit here and say this is the thing that caused the epidemic of one failure right but there was a confluence of things but you know what we learned and we all kind of when we came through those buildings were old there were pre war buildings and the wiring where were the wiring in these buildings were not being maintained they cannot be replaced they were not being maintained and at the same time you have people moving in from moving you know you know a lot more stress into the buildings no way to upgrade and so people and at the same time you have when you see urban renewal what is  the city coming in with various plans to take care of the population that now was being displaced or left there in renewal as well just yet urban renewal would have never about taking care of people it was always about building building a new city on top of the old city and that you knew that i mean it's kind of the precursor of gentrification today but it was really deeply funded by the federal government and really big civic projects and we see them all over new york today lincoln center and why you columbia university you know there's there's these big projects and they built either institutions or they built middle class housing and they built them on sites where people of color lived in manhattan mostly they they built in some other places in new york but mostly in manhattan and what vivian mentioned is that in this era that you mention from the fifty's the sixty's where the population really shifted in the bronx that was a time when a hundred thousand people were basically kicked out of their homes their homes were destroyed in manhattan and they pretty much didn't have anywhere else to go in the was more of a venture for middle class right renters and so on cooperates with so how does that impact in terms of section eight housing i mean this gets a little comp people wanted to get into co op city now that their housing was going right and what we've often heard that accelerate some of the well just going back to our being my old urban renewal was used as an excuse to get rid of what we often hear historian thought about was that it was just like i'm back you know that sucked up all the middle class white people from the bronx into the structures because at that time east ro and so you know i know at that time it was very difficult for people of color to get an apartment in a co op city so again you have you know like  of people moving into co op city but the folks that remained in the south bronx were the poor working class who did not have any option but to stay living in subsistence share of gangs i mean but you know i don't know we can talk a lot about the gangs but the gangs were young men who had nothing else to do and the reason why young people join gangs is because they want to feel membership into something where they feel important when they want to have you know you go along with them and they want to you know that there is a hierarchical structure because they want structure they want organization they want to be able to feel like they're contributing to something and that's where young people join gangs the same reason when people join gangs back then and if you know their words or turf issues and of course you know back in the fifty's in the sixty's young people needed to also form gangs to protect them their own selves from being attacked by others in other neighborhoods throughout the city and in the bronx so you know you have the famous story of bronx tale that was very true all right you don't and we've actually interviewed a lot of men of color who talked about not walking along certain parts of the bronx by themselves because they would be attacked just for being black or puerto rican and so then you know these gangs were formed and the gangs you know were behaved in ways that gangs doing and  this a little three year old was walking a mile and five and what i want to say about the gangs is that you know this is just my own personal story but the gang leader there was a gang leader who was a super of my building so he took care of the building and then when we moved to the next building you know they also took care of the next building the following building and they protected my mom and they protected us and they formed like i've mentioned before a softball team and we were a you know i don't know whether i could say that the gang was a horrible experience for me growing up for me they were members of my community we went to school with them they went to school with us my mother so they've gone to the girls you know we also shared sugar yes they they were part of the community and that's important to get out into so gosh what is happening to this documentary that you are trying to get where we're going to have it the m m barrio  fire around here next week of the tell us about how people can see this and yeah i think we've weathered everybody's interest here well we're having we are having like a series of community screenings throughout new york city and really our our goal from the beginning with this project between the within our team of producers has always been to connect with people facing what we see as very similar issues in their community day even though the landscape is different and the economics of displacement are different today than they are in the seventy's back then people were losing their homes to fire and abandonment and neglect and today they're losing their homes because they just can't afford them anymore and that's the places you know everybody is facing that as a crisis in this country which doesn't seem to get much play but it is a widespread crisis that nobody can afford to live in their hope their housing anymore not that it's in the movie you never know nobody mentions but but the people who feel this most acutely are people like in those communities like the bronx who you know they stood and they fought for that community and this is part of the film is how they saved that community and today the threat is them being pushed out by landlord harassment by illegal raising of the rent and by city policy going on that is allowing developers to you know build more housing market rate housing in extremely low income communities without any protections for the people who live season is happening on the right and we all know that in new york but i think it's very important to connect the dots to our history in this i mean that's been my experience with this project that the moment we're experiencing today of extreme inequality extreme in affordability especially in housing but also another realms of our lives and we're kind of you know that we are given many tools to understand why these situations are happening and what we can do as people to get something different to happen and so i think we're really interested in helping people you know connect the dots between the struggle of their experiencing today and what people face you know thirty or forty years ago and how they succeeded they actually w absolutely yeah they saved the bronx the city wanted to give up on the bronx that was very clear they they pulled out fire houses they pulled out sanitation schools they stopped running a lot of the trains through the bronx i mean they there was unofficial plans on the books so just like shrink it really move people out it was called planned shrinkage and the reason that it was actually it's very interesting there's many different reasons but the main reason is that people they refused to give up on their neighborhoods and it was these were their homes they didn't have anywhere else to go and they they stuck together and they fought to save it and they won still there so you going around to many of the services last week we're going to be here a picture of the homeless next week we're going to be a casa in the bronx for community action for safe apartments we're going to be with but now to kelly they're also fighting because there are turnin groups all over the city and quite frankly i was in pittsburgh not so long ago who are fighting to interpretation who are fighting evictions who are fighting i'm fair practices in their housing and they're looking for inspiration they're looking for tools they're looking to have shared conversations about what we can do together to stop this this nonsense believe justice we just got a few more seconds to go  most street in this going to be in early may so if you don't if you can't make it to a community screening which you can find out about on our web site it is decade of fire dot com and if you but if you don't catch a community screening which are you know you're welcome to come to come to the the theatrical run in the metro