Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough

“the Bronx surely is a cornucopia of stories, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who could tell those stories with more clarity, optimism, and love.”

The Bronx, for years one of the most demonized and mythologized parts of the United States, now has its Edward Gibbon. He goes by the name Ian Frazier, whose previous excursions into historical narratives have taken him to the Great Plains and Siberia. Frazier is funny (proof can be found in his New Yorker pieces or in his 25 comic essays in Dating Your Mom), and he has an encyclopedic intelligence (proof of this can be found abundantly in Paradise Bronx).

For a guy who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, who went on to graduate from Harvard University, and now lives in New Jersey, Frazier knows a lot about the only borough of New York City that is physically connected to North America. The four other boroughs— Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn—are, of course, islands. As Frazier points out, “The Bronx is the continent, and once you’re on it you can go for thousands of miles without seeing the ocean again. The other boroughs, for their part, cling to the Bronx for dear life.”

The Bronx is the only borough that carries the before its name, as if to designate its special character. At one time or another, it has been home to the pre-teen John F. Kennedy, the adult Edgar Allan Poe, and the 12-year old Lee Harvey Oswald. Home, it seems, to presidents and assassinators. Also, home for a time to Mark Twain, W. E. B. DuBois, E. L. Doctorow, Dion and the Belmonts, and Ralph Lauren (when he was known as Ralph Lifshitz). Even the author of Moby Dick found a way to get himself buried there. The curious reader might want to know that the writer Michael Patrick Pearson grew up there, too.

For years, Ian Frazier has been a Bronx flaneur. He has clocked decades and hundreds of miles walking the streets, parks, and bridges of the borough. Clearly, he loves the place, and one of the few quibbles a reader might have with the writer is that he never explicitly reveals what led to the decades’-long love affair.

But Frazier’s love and knowledge are on display in every page of Paradise Bronx. Tales of Jonas Bronck, the namesake of the borough, and Anne Hutchinson, one of its early martyrs, intersect with stories of Gouvernor Morris, a Bronx native and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and Leon Trotsky, briefly a resident who became famous for involving himself in politics elsewhere.

At times, Frazier’s descriptions of the Bronx reads like the catalogue of a Walt Whitman poem. Describing  a typical Bronx street goes like this: “Q-tips. A pigeon foot. Those Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from rearview mirrors. Syringes with pale orange plastic stoppers on their needles. Sunglass lenses. The butts of menthol cigarettes. A bathroom sink. A single pink, almond-shaped artificial fingernail. . . . Pennies. Scratched-off scratch-off tickets. Green puddles of antifreeze. . . . Covid masks. Black plastic takeout bags that skitter, ankle-high, on the wind. Pavement graffiti: ‘Lost Virginity at this spot 11-1-16.’”

But like most street wanderers, Frazier drifts amiably from history to travel narrative, from description to analysis, from a discussion of the early Dutch influence in the area to the ramifications of the Revolutionary War on its landscape. From a breakdown of the effects of Robert Moses’ building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway to the rise and fall of Co-Op City.

And then, as if turning a street corner, the reader’s view shifts to anecdotes of the Bronx in the mid-20th century: stickball and Spaldeens, egg creams and corner candy stores, roller skates and Johnny on the Pony. Another short hop and Frazier takes the reader on a tour of doo-wop and hip-hop, music that was born there. A few corners later, the reader encounters the drug-riddled 1960s and ’70s, the iconic landscape of the Bronx is burning, where at its height in 1974, 33,000 blazes burned in the borough.

Frazier’s pilgrimage through the Bronx brings him in contact with local historians like Lloyd Ultan or current success stories and residents like Edwin Velasquez, people who were born and raised in the Bronx and stayed, people who strongly believe that a renaissance is at hand.

Whether it is a modern Eden, a place to return to, or a postapocalyptic underworld, a place to escape from, remains an open question, but the Bronx surely is a cornucopia of stories, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who could tell those stories with more clarity, optimism, and love.