The Fire Next Door

This afternoon I made a trip to the Lincoln Center library to see The Fire Next Door, CBS Reports with Bill Moyers (1977, produced and directed by Tom Spain), a TV news documentary that is probably the most vivid record of that era in any medium, and sadly one of the least accessible. My lingering impression, writing now on the 1 train back to my apartment, is of an eviscerated, sheet-white winter sky casting its cold light on brown and gray husks of buildings. Light that does not contrast with the darkness from broken windows but extends from it. The footage reminds me of downtown Providence in the 1980s, my walks to the central library or variety store with my grandmother in the sonic shadow of I-95, and the yawning emptiness of the streets, their suspension from the treadmill temporality of functioning society. Life on a broken treadmill floating in space.

The film opens with a team of firefighters battling an apartment blaze that is consuming the upper walls. The building looks sturdy and well-kept. A mustachioed man is carried down the smoky stairwell, looking dazed.

Then a panoramic shot of some erstwhile neighborhood, another tenement roasting on the horizon, and Bill Moyers says, "Once that smoke on the horizon signified industry..." In a span of ten years, we are told, 30,000 buildings destroyed by arson. A fire every hour of every day, for ten years.

Then we are introduced to officer Tony Bouza (sic?), former Bronx borough commander who was demoted to beat cop for his "unorthodox views." Tony reappears throughout the film, ruminating from behind the wheel of his patrol car in a slurry Italian-New York accent that makes you like him.

Some Tony quotes:

"We are creating here what the Romans did in Rome--we are creating a permanent underclass of unemployed and desperate people. They're kind of invisible you don't see them because they drop out of...they stop looking for jobs. They drop out of everything except the welfare rolls."

"...and if these people weren't permanently pacified on alcohol, they'd be a lot more visible."

"I would like to rub America's nose in this and say, take a look at it, if you wanna reject it go ahead, I just don't happen to think that that's the kind of society we live in...our inescapable responsibility is to bring society's attention to it."

Another scene: Moyers walks trough a lightless shithole in his tan-colored overcoat, explaining that a woman and her six children once lived here, paying three-hundred dollars a month for six rooms with "rats, roaches, leaky plumbing, and junkies urinating in the hall." He reports that she moved all her valuables, left some junk furniture, and torched the place to get pushed to the top of the waiting list for subsidized housing. Explains that the city of New York paid two-to-three-thousand dollars cash to families displaced by fire.

Another scene: Street-level pans while Moyers breaks down the real estate market in the South Bronx: "You can buy a large apartment building in the Bronx for less than a thousand dollars. By taking advantage of the city's three-year tax moratorium, you can collect several thousand a month while paying no taxes. Provide heat and services infrequently and only under duress. No maintenence. A few promises will keep the rents coming in until the tenants give up in disgust. Then, two-hundred dollars will buy you a first-class arson job. Federally subsidized fire insurance is required by law. A quick settlement, with few questions, puts you ahead by seventy or eighty thousand."

Another scene: Davidson Avenue in the West Bronx, a tree-lined street that, from what little the camera shows, seems to be holding up well. Moyers walks with a elderly black woman who is nicely dressed and half-smiling. She explains her very dire situation as if telling a funny story about something that happened once to someone else in some other place:

- When I moved over here as little as two-and-a-half years ago, it was quite a beautiful place. And serene, so I thought, until nightfall.

- You live alone?

- Yes...with my dugs.

- With your dogs...

- Three now...I had five, three were thrown off the ruf. I had six.

- Thrown off the roof?

- Yeah.

- By whom?

- Some pathetic little boys.

- Threw your dogs [downward hand motion]...off the roof!?

- Five flights, yes. Killed 'em.

- ...Why don't you move?

- There's people that don't wanna accept me with three dugs. So, rather than give them up, they're my friends, I stay in that abandoned building terrified.

- You stay in that abandoned building?

- Alone.

- Do you have heat?

- No heat [its wintertime], no hot water, no electricity, no....facilities.

- Well, howdya live, Miss Tat!? [sic?]

- Well, I have friends across the street. Two as a matter of fact. I go there and cook, and bring the food home. 'Riginally I had a hot plate and I could heat the food when it was cold but now I don't have that so mostly I eat out of restaurants...and I go to my friend's house to take a bath. Heh. One has to be social! [asthmatic laugh] Hah! Hah! Hah! [Moyers laughs too, more charmed by the woman than amused by her situation]

(This exchange takes place across from 1995 Davidson Avenue, a large horseshoe-shaped building that had also been abandoned. I am curious to see what it looks like today.)

Another scene: Moyers is in the apartment of a young mother, her hair wrapped snugly in a headscarf. The building has changed hands six times in nine years, and no one is sure who owns it now. The woman's apartment is very tidy, and many of the family's belongings are tucked away in boxes. A mattress still wrapped in plastic leans against the wall. The woman explains that the mice destroyed another mattress and so she will hold off using this one until they can find a better place, subsidized housing. The bathroom ceiling is partially collapsed and the wall looks badly stained with mildew. Written in neat black handwriting on a wall where the camera pauses are the "Supreme Mathematics," the numerology of the Nation of Gods and Earths (a spinoff of the Nation of Islam that would later influence a generation of rappers like Rakim, Nas, and the Rza):

1. Knowledge
2. Wisdom
3. Understanding
4. Culture or Freedom
5. Power
6. Equality
7. God
8. Build or Destroy
9. Born
0. Cipher

In the next scene, we meet a bedridden mother of eight who looks thirty-something but too weak to lift her head. She mumbles, "The bible says that...this system not gonna last too much longer anyway, so I don't worry about my health to that extent."

Moyers then talks to an elderly Irish woman, Mrs. Sullivan, while kids from her building watch idly. She is moving the next day, she says, because "They [other kids from the building] beat me up, they threw me down the stairs...all my windows are broken."

Suddenly, some cops whisk by Mrs. Sullivan, Bill Moyers and the CBS crew and into the building. The camera follows, and as it turns out, they were headed up to Mrs. Sullivan's apartment, where some kids had taken advantage of her absence to tear the place apart and upend all the moving boxes. She cries and trembles. "I can't stay here tonight!" she says as the police are halfway out the door. Moyers stops them and, aware of the camera, they help arrange for her to leave that same day.

Towards the film's end, we meet Maoist/activist Ramon Rueda and his group The People's Development Corporation. Rueda looks young beneath his unkempt beard and afro as he talks spiritedly about the group's first project, the unauthorized rehabilitation of a city-owned building. In Jill Jonnes' book South Bronx Rising, I remember reading that the basement of the PDC's adoptive building at 1186 Washington Avenue was rank with stagnant water where dead dogs were left to rot. The PDC made the place like new, and even added solar panels in the hope of one day making the neighborhood an entirely self-sufficient, Fourieresque city within a city. The construction crew was also to be the building's future residents, who earned their co-ops through sweat equity.

More about The People's Development Corporation in a later post.

Enough for now about The Fire Next Door, which can be seen by appointment at The New York Public Library Center for the Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center, Manhattan.