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, 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.[7] Jews in the South Bronx numbered 364,000 or 57.1% of the total population in the area.[8] The term w as 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.
The 1960′s were known as a time of decay for the south Bronx.The already poor and working-class neighborhoods were at a disadvantage: the decreased property value brought on by their proximity to the Cross Bronx Expressway. The combination of increasing vacancy rates and decreased property values caused some neighborhoods to become considered undesirable by homeowners.In the late 1960s, the area’s population began decreasing, commonly thought to be a result of new policies demanding that, for racial balance in schools, children be bused into other districts. Parents who worried about their children attending the demographically adjusted schools often relocated to the suburbs, where this was not a concern. In addition, rent control policies are thought to have contributed to the decline of many middle class neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s; New York City’s policies regarding rent control gave building owners no motivation to keep up their properties.
In the 1970s significant poverty reached as far north as Fordham Road. Around this time, the Bronx experienced some of its worst times ever.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 multistory, multifamily apartment buildings (left vacant by white flight) sat abandoned and unsalable for long periods of time, which, coupled with a stagnant economy and an extremely high unemployment rate, produced a strong attraction for criminal elements such as street gangs, which were exploding in number and beginning to support themselves with large scale drug dealing in the area.Abandoned property also attracted large numbers of squatters such as the indigent, drug addicts and the mentally ill, who further lowered the borough’s quality of living.As the crisis deepened, the nearly bankrupt city government of Abraham Beame levied most of the blame on unreasonably high rents levied by white landlords, and began demanding they convert their rapidly-emptying buildings into Section 8 housing, which paid a per capita stipend for low-income or indigent tenants from Federal HUD funds rather than from the cash-strapped city coffers.
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, which then spread crime and fear of crime to nearby unaffected apartments in a domino effect. Police statistics show that as the crime wave moved north across the Bronx, the remaining white tenants in the South Bronx (mostly elderly Jews) were preferentially targeted for violent crime by the influx of young, minority criminals because they were seen as easy prey; this became so common that the street slang terms “crib job” (referring to how elderly residents were as helpless as infants) and “push in” (meaning what would now be called a home invasion robbery) were coined specifically to describe them.
Property owners who had waited too long to try to sell their buildings found that almost all of the property in the South Bronx had already been redlined by the banks and insurance companies. Unable to sell their property at any price and facing default on back property taxes and mortgages, landlords began to burn their buildings for their insurance value.Local South Bronx residents themselves also burned down vacant properties in their own neighborhoods. Much of this was reportedly done by those who had already worked stripping and burning buildings for pay: the ashes of burned down properties could be sifted for salable scrap metal. Other fires were caused by unsafe electrical wiring, fires set indoors for heating, and random vandalism associated with the general crime situation.
Flawed HUD and city policies also encouraged local South Bronx residents to burn down their own buildings.By the time of Cosell’s 1977 commentary, dozens of buildings were being burnt 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. In total, over 40% of the South Bronx was burned or abandoned between 1970 and 1980, with 44 census tracts losing more than 50% and seven more than 97% of their buildings to arson, abandonment, or both.
