The South Bronx was originally called the Manor of Morrisania, and later
Morrisania. It was the private domain of the powerful and aristocratic Morris family, which includes
Lewis Morris, signer of the
Declaration of Independence, and
Gouverneur Morris, the penman of the
United States Constitution. The Morris memorial is at
St. Ann's Church of Morrisania. Morris' descendants own land in the South Bronx to this day. As the Morrises developed their landholdings, an influx of German and Irish immigrants populated the area. Later, the Bronx was considered the "
Jewish Borough," and at its peak in 1930 was 49% Jewish. Jews in the South Bronx numbered 364,000 or 57.1% of the total population in the area. The term was first coined in the 1940s by a group of
social workers who identified the Bronx's first pocket of
poverty, in the
Port Morris section, the southernmost section of the Bronx.
1950s: Demographic shift After
World War II, as
White flight accelerated and migration of ethnic and racial minorities continued, the South Bronx went from being two-thirds non-Hispanic white in 1950 to being two-thirds black or Puerto Rican in 1960. Originally denoting only
Mott Haven and
Melrose, the South Bronx extended up to the Cross Bronx Expressway by the 1960s, encompassing
Hunts Point,
Morrisania, and
Highbridge.
1960s: Start of decay , circa 1964 The South Bronx was populated largely by working-class families. Its image as a poverty-ridden area developed in the latter part of the 20th century. There were several factors contributing to the decay of the South Bronx:
White flight creating empty buildings,
landlord abandonment creating unsafe buildings, economic changes leading to a lack of tax dollars,
arson, demographic shifts, and the reallocation of tax dollars from the
South Bronx Fire Department to other places and the construction of the
Cross Bronx Expressway are common reasons given. The already poor and working-class neighborhoods were further disadvantaged by the decreasing property value, in combination with increasing vacancy rates. While some areas of the South Bronx were racially integrated as early as the 1930s, later larger scale influxes of African Americans immigrants from the American South, combined with the racially charged tension of the Civil Rights Movement, the rage following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the dramatic rise in crime rates, further contributed to white middle-class flight and the decline of many South Bronx neighborhoods. Following the implementation of desegregation busing policies, white parents who worried about their children attending the racially integrated schools began to relocate to the suburbs, which remained predominately white due to cost as well as legal barriers created by restrictive housing covenants, and selective lending. In turn, areas of the Bronx that became predominately African American or Hispanic were considered bad risks by lenders ("
redlining"), contributing to the decline in real estate values and lack of investment in the existing housing stock. As early as the late 1960s, some neighborhoods were considered undesirable by homeowners, precipitating a population decline. Postwar
rent control policies which were ostensibly to keep apartments cheap have also been proposed as a contributing factor, for the laws forced landlords to price the apartments so cheaply the landlords were unable to generate a profit and therefore there was no incentive for them to mend and repair their buildings, leading to the decay of the apartments of the South Bronx.
New York City Mayor John Lindsay (who served from 1966 to 1973) suggested that socioeconomic factors (including low educational attainment and high unemployment) limited housing options for the remaining low-income tenants, prompting the reduced upkeep by landlords. In either case, while desirable housing options were scarce, vacancies further increased. In the late 1960s, by the time the city decided to consolidate welfare households in the South Bronx, its vacancy rate was already the highest of any place in the city.
1970s: "The Bronx is burning" By the 1970s, significant poverty reached as far north as
Fordham Road. Around this time, the Bronx experienced some of its worst instances of
urban decay, with the loss of 300,000 residents and the destruction of entire city blocks' worth of buildings. The media attention brought the South Bronx into common parlance nationwide. The early 1970s saw South Bronx property values continue to plummet to record lows. A progressively
vicious cycle began where large numbers of tenements and multi-story, multi-family apartment buildings, left vacant by White flight, sat abandoned and unsaleable for long periods of time, which, coupled with a stagnant economy and an extremely high unemployment rate made
street gangs attractive to many, which were exploding in number and beginning to support themselves with large-scale
drug dealing in the area. The abandoned property also attracted large numbers of
squatters, who further lowered the borough's quality of living. The massive citywide spending cuts also left the few remaining building inspectors and fire marshals unable to enforce living standards or punish code violations. This encouraged slumlords and absentee landlords to neglect and ignore their property and allowed for gangs to set up protected enclaves and lay claim to entire buildings. This then spread crime and fear of crime to nearby unaffected apartments in a
domino effect. As the crisis deepened, the nearly bankrupt city government of
Abraham Beame placed most of the blame on unreasonably high rents levied by landlords. Beame began demanding that they convert their rapidly emptying buildings into
Section 8 housing. Section 8 paid a per capita stipend for low-income or
indigent tenants from Federal
HUD funds rather than from the cash-strapped city bank. However, the HUD rate was not based on the property's actual value and was set so low by the city that it left little opportunity or incentive for landlords to maintain or improve their buildings while still making a profit. Fraudulent "no questions asked" fire insurance policies would then be taken out on the overvalued buildings and the property stripped and burned for the payoff. Flawed HUD and city policies encouraged local South Bronx residents to burn down their own buildings. Under the regulations, Section 8 tenants who were burned out of their current housing were granted immediate priority status for another apartment, potentially in a better part of the city. After the establishment of the (then) state-of-the-art
Co-op City, there was a spike in fires as tenants began burning down their Section 8 housing in an attempt to jump to the front of the 2–3 year long waiting list for the new units.Often, the properties were still occupied by subsidized tenants or squatters at the time, who were given short or no warning before the building was burned down, and were forced to move to another slum building, where the process would usually repeat itself. By the time of
Cosell's 1977 commentary, dozens of buildings were being burned in the South Bronx every day, sometimes whole blocks at a time and usually far more than the fire department could keep up with, leaving the area perpetually blanketed in a pall of smoke. Firefighters from the period reported responding to as many as 7 fully involved structure fires in a single shift, too many to even bother returning to the station house between calls (
Report from Engine Company 82). The local police precincts—already struggling and failing to contain the massive wave of drug and gang crime invading the Bronx—had long since stopped bothering to investigate the fires, as there were simply too many to track. Progress did not come quickly. Three years later, in 1980, presidential candidate
Ronald Reagan paid a visit to Charlotte Street, declaring that he had not "seen anything that looked like this since
London after
the Blitz".
Revitalization and current concerns Primarily beginning in the 1980s, parts of the South Bronx started to experience
urban renewal with rehabilitated and new residential structures, including subsidized multifamily townhomes and apartment buildings. Between 1986 and 1994, over $1 billion were spent on rebuilding the area, with 19,000 apartments refurbished and more than 4,500 new houses built for the working class. More than fifty abandoned apartment buildings on the
Major Deegan Expressway and the
Cross Bronx Expressway were renovated for residential use. Over 26,500 people moved into the area. and the area changed so significantly that a Bronx borough historian (
Lloyd Ultan) could not locate where Carter had stopped to survey the scene. As of 2004, houses on the street were worth up to a million dollars. Construction of the new
Yankee Stadium has stirred controversy over plans which, along with the new billion-dollar field, include new athletic fields, tennis courts, bicycle and walking paths, stores, restaurants, and a new
Metro-North Railroad station at
East 153rd Street. During baseball season, the station helps ease overcrowding on the subway. There is hope that these developments also will help to generate residential construction. However, the new park came at a price: a total of in Macombs Dam and John Mullaly Parks were used to build it. In April 2012, Heritage Field, a $50.8 million ballpark, was built atop the grounds of the original Yankee Stadium. The population of the South Bronx is currently increasing. Despite significant investment compared to the post war period, many exacerbated social problems remain, including high rates of violent crime, substance abuse, and overcrowded and substandard housing conditions. Its precincts have recorded high violent crime rates and are all considered to be
New York City Police Department "impact zones." The Bronx contains the highest rate of poverty in New York City, and the greater South Bronx is the poorest
Congressional district in the United States. The poorly maintained, substandard housing has caused disproportionately high asthma rates among children in the South Bronx, where residents are predominately minorities—mainly
Black and
Hispanic. == Arts and culture ==