A piece exploring the meaning of community in urban spaces, grassroots mobilization and future possibilities of the use of space that seek to add to the voices and stories of the environmental history of New York.

1. Clara Soriano
Environmental History of NYC
14 December 2014
Lessons on Community-Building
From the (South) Bronx
In his book The Folklore of the Freeway, Eric Davila uses the concept of
infrapolitics “to identify the hidden forms of resistance to the presence of the freeway in
the city, beyond the visible end of the political spectrum.”1 He follows by suggesting a
real possibility that “infrastructure can make or break a community.”2 In her book
Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, Sonia Song-Ha Lee examines a black and
Hispanic binary to illustrate the collaboration of African Americans and Puerto Ricans in
the 1960s and 1970s toward localizing control of their poor community. Although
Davila’s focus is on the (in)visible Chicano movement in response to highway
constructions in Los Angeles, and Song-Ha Lee on the forging of minority identities
toward improving their poor children’s education in East Harlem, their views offer
possible venues to imagine community in the South Bronx. Undoubtedly, bodies fill the
void of public spaces, and so environmental history is also a history about people.
Through a close analysis of anecdotes from South Bronx bodies published in Robert
Jensen’s book, Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx,3 I will argue that a much-
needed discussion of community in the Bronx is offered by Bronxites creating a social
landscape in their immediate environments.4
1 Avila, E. (2014). The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. 4.
2 Ibid. 4.
3 Jensen, R., & Bronx Museumof the Arts. (1979). Devastation/resurrection:The South Bronx. New York:
Bronx Museumof the Arts.{Bronx County Historical Society Library: “The South Bronx” Folder; 5.9,
23}.
4 Two visits to the Bronx County Historical Society in Bainbridge Avenue proved that it was much more
difficult than I had imagined to pin point the concept of “community” in the South Bronx. Ideally, oral
stories of people who lived in the South Bronx would have furthered the goal of examining community, but
according to the librarian, Elizabeth Nico, there was a leak at the Bronx County Historical Society, where

2. In Devastation/Resurrection, Robert Jensen quips that “scores of answers to that
question [why areas of the South Bronx began to decline rapidly in the mid-1960s] have
been proposed over the last decade in accusatory speeches and cool, analytical prose”5
among them: the federal government destroyed the South Bronx, NYC abandoned the
South Bronx, the landlords sucked it dry and left, the people burned it, jobs disappeared,
and fear of robbers, muggers and street gangs.6 While all of these reasons need to be
accounted for, of particular interest to the discussion of community is the fact that “those
who know the South Bronx through past and present experience [who] are forced each
day to face its reality in their lives…they, in recollections and personal stories, reveal
their own pursuit of the truth.”7
Question: Can the “provisional city”8 be a contemplative city?
After serving 20 years in the Army, Victor George Mair, a former Harlem
resident, moved to the Bronx to live in what he equates to,
Paradise in comparison to where I was raised. Everything was so neat, so
clean, so tidy, so orderly…the serenity of the area once you walked into
it—trees everywhere…I mean they [the residents of the Bronx] were
living in luxury9
Despite the sad story of the Bronx, there are some traces of humor when for instance,
Mair describes the transformation of the Bronx in the 1970s as something that “happened
so slowly and…to such an extent that I wasn’t even aware of change until one day I
decided to walk around the block and found that we had no block. Then I decided to walk
audiotapes were stored,and had to be moved to the archives. If I should considergraduate school,then that
would be my future project.
5 Jensen. 53.
6 Ibid. 53.
7 Ibid. 53-54.
8 In an excerpt from “The Creative Destruction of Manhattan,1900-1940,” Max Page languages the trope
of the provisional city that cities like New York have come to be known for. As places “where the physical
remnants of early generations are repeatedly and apparently inevitably visited by the wrecking ball” (1).
9 Jensen. 55.

3. around the neighborhood and found that we had no neighborhood”10. The humor in such
a story lends itself to hope11, and Mair explains,
I felt that if one devastated area could be rebuilt it might give people heart
to re-establish themselves and rebuild it in general and bring the Bronx, if
not back to what it was at one time, back to at least a decent place to live
and a place where all people could find themselves12
In Mair’s story we are confronted with whether or not the provisional city can be a
contemplative city “where all people could find themselves.” According to Mair, not only
can the city be contemplative, but, in fact, the Bronx can serve the purpose of city people
to contemplate. Thus, while the provisional city is ever changing, the contemplative
borough of the Bronx endures nature and allows its citizens to create something that is
not always provided.
Question: Did local control in poor communities work? Yes. How might that look?
In her book The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote “to
overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and
acting upon their own self-interests, which they certainly are.”13 This understanding is
elucidated in the narrative of Leona Palacious, an administrator of a tenant-controlled
apartment house in the South Bronx, who moved to the Bronx in 1966. Palacious
describes how she and eight other tenants took care of their building, and each other:
It didn’t worry me because I’d been there so long. I guess you get familiar
with your surroundings…if someone strange came in, we’d stop him at the
door and ask him, ‘Where are you going? Who do you want to see?’ And
if they said such and such, well, they don’t live here, you’re in the wrong
place. And if you don’t leave, we’re calling the police. It’s as simple as
10 Jensen, 56.
11 While writing this paper, I was influenced by the interpretation of Ernst Bloch’s “principle of hope” in an
excerpt from deceased NYU professorof performance, Jose Muñoz’s book, Cruising Utopias,using hope
as a human drive, and a real theory of interpretation needed to combat political pessimism.
12 Ibid. 56.
13 Jacobs. 271.

4. that.14
In addition to interrogating strangers entering the building, Palacious recounts how she
and another neighbor, Audrey, would take turns maintaining their building often at the
expense of a day’s work:
Before we got a super, it was really a thing because, like I said, the boiler
was in very bad shape, and we had a sump-pump that was not working
right, and we’d go down, and the pit would be full of water and almost
covering the relay, which has all of the electrical workings under the
bottom. And there’s nobody down in the basement except Audrey and
myself. And this is 10, 11, 12:00 at night. And there we are bailing water,
she and I. And we’d be down there for an hour or two hours…[Once we]
get all the water out, get the boiler running, go back upstairs, you go back
down the next morning to check before I went to work, so this is like 7:00
in the morning, and I’d go down there and the pit is full of water again. So
then I had to bail water out before I went to work. And then when I got
back upstairs, I’d call my boss and tell him I’d be a little late…
Palacious, a full-time bookkeeper, had to make do with her situation of living in a
decaying South Bronx, but her efforts and those of her neighbors extended their living
headquarters, as well as their lives for yet another day. Despite the uncertainty, Leona
Palacious and her neighbors demonstrate a tenacity to create change and extend the
longevity of their immediate environment.
Question: How did poor communities mobilize themselves in public spaces in 1979?
Moreover, Jacobs, analyzing the process of ‘unslumming’ slums, is concerned
with “the inability of a perpetual slum to hold enough of its population” to do so (unslum)
and suggests, “it is a characteristic that starts before the slum itself starts…the first sign
of an incipient slum, long before visible blight can be seen, is stagnation and dullness.”15
For Jacobs, an area designated as slum is an area that is not aesthetically pleasing and
tends to drive away its more affluent citizenry. Here, I want to suggest, that Bronxites
14 Jensen. 57.
15 Jacobs. 273.

5. who did stay in the South Bronx when it was at its worst, who probably did not have the
means to get away, were determined to work with and around their “limit situations.”16
This is evident in the personal story of Theodore Panos, who moved to the Bronx in
1967. Panos joined his neighborhood organization, and was assigned to inspect a building
in the neighborhood. For Panos, the inspection was a wake-up call, “I was horrified at
what I saw. I wasn’t even aware of these things…the roof was leaking. The door was off
the hinges…fire hazards, just total neglect.” On seeing the deteriorating conditions of the
building, Panos "went down and demonstrated at his [(the landlord's)] house. It was on
79th Street and Manhattan as I remember."17 When the landlord was unwilling to help,
Panos and others picketed at a savings bank in upstate New York, and demanded to speak
with a person in charge. According to Panos, the bank "started enforcing the good repair
clause to a certain extent."18 Importantly also is Panos’ reasoning as to why the
neighborhood organization was able to get some relief from the banks, "I think the reason
they responded was [because] we went into Scarsdale…That sort of broke them. We were
walking to a place where their image meant so much."19 This example is not the first of
its kind that makes note of affluent New Yorkers’ concerns about image; New York City
itself continuously sought to impress foreigners, and compete with European cities by
appealing to bourgeois tastes of the time.20
16 In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire coined the term “limit situation” asserting
that “humans…because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world—because they are conscious
beings—exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As
they separate themselves from the world, which they objectify, as they separate themselves from their own
activity, as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and
others,people overcome the situations which limit them: the ‘limit situations’” (99).
17 Jensen. 58.
18 Ibid. 59.
19 Ibid. 60.
20 In Taming Manhattan (2014) Catherine McNeur writes, “New Yorkers believed filth was a major
blemish on their city’s reputation…trying desperately to keep up with New York’s burgeoning population,
the Common Council passed ordinance after ordinance in an attempt to legislate its way out of the muck”
(96).

6. In an area founded by a nation that allegedly values democracy, the Bronx had its
fair share of unhappy people in 1979. For example, Katherine ("Kay") Peele, who moved
to the Bronx in 1965, thought of the South Bronx not as a specific geographic area, but as
a term that invokes a particular image, and symbol for unwanted populations and, to use
Jacobs' critique, dull environments, "well, really I'm not quite sure of that myself, what
the term 'South Bronx' means. I imagine it means that it's an area where there is a lot of
deterioration; minorities, that's my opinion."21 At the same time, Peele contends, "I am
optimistic about the Bronx because I'm involved and a lot of different things are
happening in the Bronx, so therefore I must see the Bronx in more than just one way...a
lot of things are going to happen, but it's going to take time."22 Despite the ruin and
rubble, for Bronxites like Peele, every area of the Bronx, especially the South Bronx, is
the Bronx. It is likely, then, that Bronxites in opting to be inclusive of their neighbors in
the South Bronx were greatly reprimanded by its neighboring boroughs for it.
Question: Was there “future” in the Bronx in 1979? Is there future in the Bronx
today?
Jensen's exhibition of the South Bronx ends with a statement of hope from
Clorinda Torres, who came to New York City from Puerto Rico in 1944, and in 1979 still
lived in the Bronx. Torres raised her family in the Bronx, where she remembers, "it was a
beautiful, nice neighborhood; very friendly people...then things started getting really
bad...a lot of drugs in the street..." but "I would really like to see it rebuilt—I would really
like to see it the way it was years ago…some people say, 'I just care about my apartment,'
no, you have to care about your surroundings too. For me, there'll always be a
21 Jensen. 65.
22 Ibid. 67.

7. future...yes, in the Bronx." 23 Torres’ words are contrary to Ted Steinberg’s opinion that
“density tends to alienate people from the land while obscuring the connections to distant
places and resources that they depend on for survival,”24 because while “city living does
affect people…they [city people] in turn ‘cope, manipulate and change environments,’
adapting to crowding and minimizing its stress.”25 The anecdotal of these five individuals
from 1979, when the Bronx was said to be burning, serve as memories of the past where
people in poor communities lived with the hope for a better Bronx, and one in which,
they saw themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, as not simply adapting, but realizing.
Ironically, there is so much talk of the South Bronx, and a burning Bronx, and few
Bronxites barely remember what areas of the Bronx form part of the infamous South
Bronx. In an article that appeared in a 2001 issue of the Bronx Beat magazine, Diana
Reinhart states, "everybody agrees that there is a place called the South Bronx. But unlike
most well-known spots, its exact location is unknown." Reinhart interviews several
Bronxites and each one offers a different answer. She explains that "several decades of
shifting borders live behind this confusion, over the South Bronx," to which Lloyd Ultan,
the borough's historian asserts, "it has no definite boundaries, obviously because it has
moved back-and-forth." Interestingly, Reinhart chooses to end the article in a way that
does not offer a definitive conclusion as to which areas are the South Bronx. This is not
to say that the area of the South Bronx does not exist, but rather, that similarly to
accounts of Bronxites in 1979, to present-day Bronxites, such an area exists in the
imagination of outsiders to the Bronx. The Bronx, in this respect, has no boundaries, not
because it has been moved as historian Ultan states, but because every area in the Bronx
23 Jensen. 68.
24 Steinberg, T. Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Great New York. 337.
25 Gonzalez, E. D. The Bronx. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Print. (91). {From The Bronx County
Historical Society Library}.

8. (both poor and affluent) is the Bronx.
According to Evelyn Gonzalez, author of The Bronx, in the late 1890s, "Bronx
boosters"26 were proud of the Bronx, and regarded it "a ‘natural accretion' of New York."
Gonzalez writes, "local control intensified local pride…became a primary ingredient in
the effort to create the county of the Bronx, which originated residents of the new
borough objected to being lumped into Manhattan assembly districts."27 In many ways,
the Bronx, since its conception, has thrived on local control. Arguably, this local pride
has transcended and will continue to transcend future Bronxites. At the same time, the
city as provisional provides an opportunity to explore the transience of all things.
Admirably, the narrative of the South Bronx demonstrates the potentiality of
communities of struggle as environments in need of a self-imagined futurity. Future
studies on community and community-building in areas like the Bronx could research the
sustainability of the 5 boroughs of NYC.
26 Gonzalez. 80.
27 Gonzalez. 81.