Given the global influence of the rap, breakdancing, graffiti, and DJ culture that flowered in the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, one might guess that a work of scholarship about that place and time would focus on hip-hop. Bronx-born Peter L’Official, a literature professor at Bard, acknowledges that “hip-hop was, and is, the Bronx’s social novel for the ages”—and that Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, Jeff Chang, and others have already covered that ground. In his recent book, Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, he deliberately and skillfully reads the borough instead through novels, movies, art, journalism, and municipal records, looking to both unpack and undo its mythology. The result is a vibrant cultural history that gestures beyond the tropes of the boogie down and the burning metropolis, those pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect that have dogged the area for half a century.
As its name makes plain, the South Bronx lies in the southern part of the Bronx, the northernmost of New York City’s five boroughs. On the subway map, the South Bronx extends from the head and neck of northern Manhattan like an elephant ear, separated by the Harlem River. Its borders have been debated over the years, but its many neighborhoods include Concourse, Mott Haven, Melrose, and Port Morris. The 6 train gets you there from Midtown, as Jonathan Kozol points out in his urban classic Amazing Grace (1995), making “nine stops in the 18-minute ride between East 59th Street and Brook Avenue. When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest.” That district would be the Fifteenth—the country’s poorest, still.
It wasn’t always so. The area was once Lenape territory, and then beginning in the seventeenth century it was taken over by colonial farmland, owned by the aristocratic Morris family, which included Founding Fathers Lewis Morris (who signed the Declaration of Independence) and Gouverneur Morris (who signed the Constitution). Annexed by New York City by 1895 and connected by subway to Manhattan in 1904, the Bronx grew into a polyglot boomtown and manufacturing hub that became known for making pianos, and offered a step up for families escaping the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side, or Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany.