The Bronx (Columbia History of Urban Life)
The title is misleading: Gonzalez is really focused on the South Bronx--its history, decline and fall, and rise. (She doesn't examine the North Bronx neighborhoods at all.) She recounts in clear if pedestrian prose, based on her own Ph.D. dissertation, the beginnings of the city borough in the mid-nineteenth century when Jordan Mott founded Mott Haven and Lewis Morris the Morrisania villages. Street plans, public transportation (the subway arrived in 1905), and services were created in a city framework, not a suburban one. Waves of immigrant apartment dwellers moved into the Bronx, and into newer and better housing, as the borough grew. But by 1934, with half its housing stock built before the 1901 Tenement House Law, the pattern was set. The South Bronx's wretched housing sheltered wave after wave of poorer and yet poorer immigrants, until it imploded in the 1960s and 1970s. Gonzalez traces its rise again, too, through a workable mixture of public and private, church-related and city-funded initiatives. Suitable for urban-planning and city history collections.GraceAnne DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.