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.

The Spectacle of the Ruins

DJ Spooky was asked if he thinks young artists should study history. His reply: “As someone who’s very into history, I would say yes. Then again, many of the more interesting developments happen when people don’t pay any attention to history.” [a]

As a casualty of the postwar urban crisis, the South Bronx was exceptional only for the scale of its ruins. By the end of the 1970s, neighborhoods from Mott Haven up to Fordham Road had reached a state of near-total loss.  Officials, landlords, and torches-for-hire abandoned, leveled and burned both derelict buildings and sound ones.

Marshall Berman wrote noted sardonically that “urban fires make great visuals.”  Indeed, for the millions watching from afar, the crumbling, emptying, burning South Bronx was a remote spectacle--fascinating, and sad perhaps, but not directly concerning. [1] For the absent middle class who toured the urban maelstrom through newspapers, magazines, and movies, the disintegration of the South Bronx confirmed that big-city culture had no place in the future America. The city, or so many believed, had only ever been a place to leave.

“The South Bronx is a remnant, a left-behind, for which there is no economic base and no economic need. It is a place that people avert their eyes from and use as a dump heap for our society." [3]

George Sternleib, 1973

“…the postwar highway era is here…” [4]

Robert Moses, 1945

In the urban north, the civil rights movement crossed invisible lines—it waged its battles in the theater of white-controlled public space, where the very presence of African Americans in numbers constituted a form of protest. But by the late 70's, in the wake of white flight to the suburbs, those public spaces had given way to private ones such as shopping malls in distant suburbs, and no-less-exclusionary virtual spaces such as the local nighttime news. Add to this the internal dislocations of the black community caused by “slum clearance,” the ethnic diversification of poverty after the Puerto Rican migration, and the estrangement of the black middle class from inner-city culture, and it is easy to see why in the 1970s, the civil rights movement lost much of the cohesion that accounted for its historic gains.

New York's mid-century migrants arrived to a city in the spasms of deep structural change. The enormity of this migration was rivaled only by the rapidity of low-skilled labor outsourcing.  From an industrial port city, New York was fast becoming a corporate capital with little to offer working-class people. From 1947 to 1976, the city lost a half million jobs to the enticement of cheaper labor in the South, in Mexico, and overseas. But in the optimism of the postwar years, few could see where this moving ground would take them, least of all perhaps the thousands of Puerto Ricans and Southern African-Americans who flooded the city in the forties and fifties, eager to escape their respective experiences of rural poverty and oppression. [5]

Citywide, New York's black population rose from 450,000 before the war to 750,000 after, while the Puerto Rican population increased from 61,000 to 246,000. The Bronx, meanwhile, was home to 160,000 Puerto Ricans and African Americans in 1950, with ninety-one percent in the South Bronx, clustered around Prospect and Westchester Avenues. By 1960, the Bronx housed 350,000 African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, 267,000 of whom were crammed into the southernmost neighborhoods. [6]

Among the 60,000 Puerto Ricans in the Bronx in 1950, only one in ten had finished high school, seventy percent had not finished the ninth grade, and hardly any arrived speaking English; Southern African-Americans were hardly better off. Hoping to find a land of opportunity, the majority only escaped their rural hells to end in more alien, more labyrinthine urban ones. As a welfare official of the time observed, “It is a great migration of people on the march towards dreams that have no foundation.” [7]

Absent jobs for which they were qualified, and in the face of poverty reinforcing prejudice, the only means of support for most was “welfare and, from 1964 on, the little that would trickle down from the federal government's 'Great Society' programs.” [8]

The South Bronx of the sixties was a place in rapid decline, but not a place without hope. In the heady days of grassroots activism and ethnocentric militancy, people from within and without fought doggedly for small gains, and a sense of community held in defiance of great adversities. But by the end of the decade, a sense of exhaustion had set in among residents, and a more overt display of cynicism prevailed among policy makers. The latter widely relinquished the South Bronx as a place “not worth saving.” [9]

Crime rates in the borough had quadrupled by the end of the sixties, owing in large part to an outbreak of heroin addiction among the city’s poor. In the Hunts Point section, as a New York Times study showed, only one in twenty residents could expect to die a natural death—“Most were dying in homicides or from drugs.” [10]

Job loss accelerated. Between 1970 and 1977, three-hundred companies had either folded or moved to the suburbs, and taken ten-thousand jobs with them. Already by 1973, unemployment in the South Bronx had reached thirty percent, and forty percent of residents were on relief. [11]

As if to fill the employment gap, a new generation of youth gangs proliferated. The Savage Skulls, the Cypress Bachelors, the Black Spades, the Spanish Mafia, the Reapers, and others collectively boasted about 9,500 members in 1973, who roamed the streets attacking addicts and pushers, and hiring themselves out to torch buildings for landlords.

All this while the social collapse of the South Bronx found graphic expression in a skyline writhing with a nightly average of thirty-three fires between 1970 and 1975. [12] By 1977, thirty-thousand buildings had been abandoned or burnt down, while garbage-strewn rubble heaps stretched all the way up to Fordham Road. [13] The fires claimed not only derelict buildings, but structurally sound and rehabilitated ones as well. On Charlotte Street in East Tremont, the housing was “far from substandard” only a decade earlier, but here as elsewhere, deliberate destruction led to a near-total loss of the built environment. [14]

Through these apocalyptic ruins, the South Bronx suddenly became “an international metaphor for human misery and collapse.” [15]  Incredibly, though, both the press and government officials blamed residents for the fires. Officials pressed to speak on the destruction sang a standard refrain: “the victims of the fires were 'fouling their own nests.'” Or as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan phrased it bluntly: “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down.” [16]

Media echoed officials in shrugging off Bronx residents as crazed nihilists, but people were not burning their houses down, or at least not many.  As every tenement dweller knew, it was in fact their absentee landlords and the torches that the latter hired who set the great majority of fires.  As Evelyn Gonzalez explains, “When low-premium fire insurance became available in the 1970s, many investors bought Bronx apartment buildings with the express intent of burning them, while an untold number of Bronx property owners bought policies that made their buildings worth more dead than alive.” [17]


“For a generation,” writes Marhsall Berman, New York's ruins were its greatest spectacles.” So it was that in the seventies, all eyes were on the city once again. But the measure of fame was inverted, and a pageant of failures stole the show. In this post-industrial dis-order, the South Bronx became the new downtown, and Charlotte Street the new Great White Way. The ruins fascinated no less than the luminescent boulevards of years past, but what the spectators didn't perceive in this case were the hidden wires of causation that made them silent actors in the show.



a. Carol Becker; Romi Crawford, Paul D. Miller. “An Interview with Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky—That Subliminal Kid.” Art Journal, Vol. 61, no. 1. (Spring 2002), p. 85.

1. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid, Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 72.

2. Martha Rosler in Mel Rosenthal's In the South Bronx of America, (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000), 112.

3. George Sternleib, Director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. Quoted in Martin Tolchin, “Future Looks Bleak for the South Bronx, ”New York Times 18 January, 1973, p. 85.

4. Quoted in “285,000,000 Roads Planned for City: The Folks Back in the Old Country Are Proud of New York City's Mayor-Elect,” New York Times, 26 November, 1945, p. 23.

5. Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004),118. Jill Jonnes, South Bronx Rising: the Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 91-93; For a thumbnail sketch of the changing city, and the place of new migrants within it, see “Episode 7: The City and the World (1945-present),” of Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film (PBS, 1999).

6. Gonzalez, 110-111. Though statistically lumped together, blacks and Puerto Ricans often occupied separate streets. Evelyn Gonzalez writes : “Between 1950 and 1960, blacks filled in Central Morrisania, from Webster to Prospect avenues and from 163rd Street to just beyond Crotona Park South, an area that would remain predominantly black for the rest of the century. Puerto Ricans...fanned out from 138th Street, Southern Boulevard, Westchester Avenue, and Claremont Parkway, following the subway and elevated train routes into central Mott Haven, lower Morrisania, Claremont, and Hunts Point-Crotona Park East. The rest of the borough was still overwhelmingly white in 1960, still mostly of Jewish, Italian, Irish, and German ancestry.” p. 110.

7. Jonnes 102, 111.

8. Gozalez, 118.

9. Gonz., 126.

10. Rosenthal, South Bronx, 109. In 1960, there were 998 reported assaults in the borough; in 1969, there were 4256. In 1960 there were 1765 reported burglaries; by 1969, there were 29,976. Most of the crime occurred in the South Bronx. See Gonzalez, 120.

11. Martin Tolchin, “Future Looks Bleak for the South Bronx,” New York Times, 18 January, 1973.

12. Rosenthal, 18; Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
323.

13. John J. O'Connor, “TV: 'Fire Next Door' Studies South Bronx Arson,” New York Times, 22 February, 1977.

14. “With a density of well over 500 units per acre, it was a vibrant neighborhood, consisting primarily of New Law tenements built after 1901.” Pluntz, 335-36.

15. Rosenthal, 18.

16. See Marshall Berman, “New York Calling,” Dissent, Fall 2007, 71-77; 72. The Senator is quoted from Judith Cummings, “Moynihan, at Badillo's Bid, Will Tour South Bronx,” New York Times, 21 December, 1978, p. B9.

17. Gonz., 120.

Melle Mel

Read somewhere that the Furious Five's "The Message" was crafted at the urging of a record exec for some socially conscious material, that Flash and the guys initially resisted for fear that their core audience wouldn't dig it. Whether that's true or not, when Melle Mel drops knowledge, the air crackles.
I had always liked "The Message" ever since hearing it twelve or so years ago, the soundtrack to my getting lost in the Bronx as a teenager in my '82 Accord at 2 in the morning. Even if he had done nothing else--and he's had plenty of sublime lyrical moments--I would rank Melle Mel as one of the most gifted rappers on the strength of that song.
More recently, though, I saw his performance in the penultimate scene of the much-maligned movie Beat Street, which for the record, you can promptly stop and eject right after Mel's exit, or else endure a Broadway-style modern dance/break dance-fusion fiasco. The verse he contributes is thematically similar to "The Message," but even more urgent in tone. And thanks to the big-studio film quality, Mel's peculiar body language is impossible not to read; hand by the side then thrust forward open and facing down, as if to quiet a jumping dog at his feet or bless a city from atop a mountain, face scrunched up like a man in anguish.

Note that on the youtube link, Grandmaster Melle Mel comes on after the other guy. Also notice the street footage in the first minute or so.

"The rise and fall, the last great empire,
the sound of the whole world caught on fire,
the ruthless struggle, the desperate gamble,
the game that left the whole world in shambles,
the cheats, the lies, the alibis,
and the foolish attempt to conquer the skies..."

Breaks and Loops

My interest in the old South Bronx is inseparable from my interest in hip hop music. And what I love about later hip hop, especially the mid-nineties New York variety, is its abundant use of white noise to create musical texture. In the hands of RZA, 4th Disciple, El P and others, the subliminal sounds of city life are patterned into apparent meaning--rain on pavement, the hiss from an old radiator, arguing neighbors, an express train passing. Listen to that stuff for a while, and you'll begin to feel like the old man in Paul Auster's City of Glass, 'reading' the streets as if they formed a great big secret book.

Of course, finding patterns in the aural landscape and re-presenting them is basic to all musical grammars, and artists have done so in urban America since ragtime days if not earlier. What is unique about sample-based hip hop is the degree to which it works with "registers of the real" rather than representations; i.e., the difference between an actual train whistle and a harmonica that evokes one. The difference is not merely technical, it is also ontological.

But old-school hip hop, and by that I mean the bare-bones seventies stuff, built from breaks, isn't the sound of 'the streets.' It's the sound of society getting on in spite of 'the streets,' celebrating survival on a Saturday night at the T-Connection or the high-school gym to the beat of a wind-up funky drummer. It creates a temporary social space above and against the desolation of uptown nights; that same wonderland of glowing floor tiles and disco balls that helped Tony Manero to forget his shitty hardware store job for a few fleeting hours every weekend.

Only later would artists try to make music out of ambient noise, when the sampler became an essential tool of the trade. Not coincidentally, the tone of the music and of the culture in general changed with the advent of that machine from upbeat to uptight. Heads now kept time instead of hips, and "looking the negative in the face" became a defining feature of hip hop aesthetics. What I am suggesting is that the sampler abetted hip hop's obsession with 'street life' by making it possible to capture, edit and pattern the sonic traces of daily life to an unprecedented degree.

***

"The breaks" are an ur-form of sampling--hand-cranked loops that are always about to slide back into the same old shit. Limited to two turntables and a mic, djs/emcees had to speak the present in the borrowed musical grammar of the past. Though old school hip hop recontextualized disco, funk, and soul, it could not break those forms open, the way cops and shrinks break the expressions of filmed subjects down into hundreds of discrete, unwitting gestures.

Thurston Saw

In poor neighborhoods, history is a bit more legible, more transparent. Houses are less often painted, signs less often replaced, while abandoned buildings experience a long afterlife of slow decay. Within their walls, the artifacts of the distant-recent past sometimes remain for decades, suspended in time even as time accelerates for the world around.

I remember visiting an empty Providence mill building in the mid-2000s with a friend. It was built in the 19th century and housed Thurston Manufacturing Co., maker of precision cutting saws, until its closure some time in the early 1990s. In the top floor office was a dried-up potted palm tree next to an orange armchair, the floor strewn with business letters and squatters' clothes. In a room nearby was a desk cluttered with blueprints and boiler reports going back to the 1930s. Amazing, that such ephemera could survive for more than a decade after abandonment. To be in a place like that, one feels the arrest of time, and it is a shock to the senses. Adjacent to Thurston Saw was Interstate 95, from which the angry drone of cars tearing by offered a perfect counterpoint to the stillness inside.

Thurston Saw has not made the switch to digital record keeping.
Thurston Saw does not accept web-based orders.
Thurston Saw does not enforce a no-smoking policy.

So what does this have to do with the South Bronx? Both the mills of Providence, RI and the neighborhoods of the South Bronx were casualties of the regional transition from an industrial to a 'knowledge-based' economy, along with the flight of jobs and capital to the suburbs. In both places, the built environment ceased to function as a dynamic symbol of progress, in effect ceasing to mark the passage of time-as-progress. The clock stopped for thirty years or so, and even now a few blocks remain unchanged from 'the bad old days.' To walk them is to slip through a crack in the edifice of our 'homogenous, empty time.' To do so without having to takes spirit, like opening a letter from a collections agency.

photo by Richard Townley.

The Global Village

Rap engages time in a unique and radical way, both through lyrical content (which invokes the past) and sampling (which appropriates its material artifacts). The influence of African diasporic cultures (especially Jamaican) and the creative possibilities opened by recording technologies are defining features of the music, and these are well known.

Less appreciated, I think, are the external adversarial forces that worked upon African-American culture in the early days of hip hop, forces that were deflected or 'flipped' into aesthetic practices. I am thinking of the postindustrial landscape of the South Bronx, where the physical decay and planned destruction of neighborhoods exposed strata of history and memory in brief flashes preceding total loss. It was a “permanent state of emergency,” and for young people, the formulation of a cultural-artistic response was a matter of life and death.

When I see pictures of the South Bronx in its saddest days, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history':

There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet. Th angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

The desire to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”—this is the source of hip hop's continued vitality, and as the storm spreads to the new slums of the 'global village,' it is no wonder that the human casualties of progress adopt its basic forms.