Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier's serious writings are about the places and people around him more than you might expect from a New Yorker writer and reporter. But I also mean "around" somewhat expansively - that Frazier looks around, from wherever he is at the moment, and writes about the distinctive things and people there.

I can most obviously connect Family into that scheme, and Gone to New York, which is largely the story of his life, also fits. Great Plains is somewhat less so, though I could make an argument it arose from Family, and from growing up in the Midwest and looking both East (where he went first, to Harvard and then New York) and West (to those plains and living in Missoula, Montana for what I think were two stretches of his life). And then On the Rez clearly followed Plains and was largely about one friend of Frazier's, an Oglala Sioux man he met on the streets of NYC and followed back to those plains to see where he came from and what his people were like.

I'm not sure quite what the deal with Travels in Siberia is, but I'm sure I can make it fit into this framework with a bit more effort, if the panel sees fit to extend funding.

Anyway, Frazier's newest book - which is also one of his longest - is somewhat in the same vein. Paradise Bronx is explicitly a love-letter to New York City's largest, most spread-out, most diverse borough, and the only one that's actually "on the continent," as Frazier puts it. Frazier never lived in the Bronx, but he lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and has spent the last twenty-some years (I think) in a New Jersey suburb, from which he's traveled into the city, and in particular the Bronx, what seems to be quite a lot.

Like Frazier's other long, serious books, this is a combination of the sit-and-research book and the walk-around-and-talk-to-people book. I suspect Frazier has had a number of New Yorker stories about the Bronx during the past decade or so, and that either the actual articles or new versions based on his notes have made their way into this book - I'd call that a large part of the walking-around aspect of the book. Frazier also notes he's a big walker in general; he's walked across the Bronx multiple times in multiple directions, including getting down under major interstate intersections and trying to figure out where various colonial-era events happened.

Paradise Bronx is divided into three sections. "Nobody, or a Nation" is the deep history - mostly that colonial era, where what was then just called "Westchester" saw a lot of activity, particularly during the Revolutionary War. It also follows the life and career of Gouverneur Morris, a mostly-forgotten (and hard-to-spell) Founding Father who wrote a lot of the Constitution, was an important envoy to France during their Revolution, and did a bunch of other interesting things along the way.

The middle section, "Paradise," is somewhat transitional, covering basically everything about the Bronx from the early 1800s through roughly 1970 and presenting roughly the end of that era (particularly the 1930s and 1940s, slightly less the post-war period) as something of a golden age: good housing, strong social cohesion, mostly friendly neighborhoods, relatively even-handed governance. Frazier did not himself grow up in the Bronx, but he did grow up at the end of that era, so some readers may detect in this a new mutant strain of Boomer Special Pleading, My Childhood Was The Bestsest In The Whole Wide World Division.

And then the last section is "Fall and Rise," covering the "Bronx is Burning" years of the '70s, the hip-hop revolution soon afterward, and what the modern-day Bronx is like. Robert Moses, the source of nearly everything modern New Yorkers hate about their city - as well as several things they love - comes in for commentary, though not in any depth; Frazier assumes we already know the story and arguments. Here's where the other voices show up most strongly: Frazier wandered around the Bronx for years and talked to a lot of people; he brings out many of their stories here.

Frazier is an optimist, and he sees reason to be optimistic about the Bronx. He was writing this book, from internal evidence, mostly about 2019-2022, through the peak Covid years, and still was optimistic. This is a positive, surprisingly sunny book about a place most people think of as a punch-line. (My own biggest memory of the Bronx is accidentally walking across more of the South Bronx than expected or wise after getting off a subway on my way to an interview in 1990. I accidentally turned the wrong direction and went completely the opposite direction from the office I was looking for. But I called them when I got back to a payphone, and I rescheduled the interview, and they actually eventually offered me that job. That was one of the vanishly few times I've been on the ground in the Bronx; I ended up taking a different job in Manhattan instead, even though it paid substantially less.)

Non-fiction books are for telling you things you don't know, and often things you didn't know you might have wanted to know. Paradise Bronx is a great example of that: nearly everything in this book is something you don't know that you don't know, and most of it is worth knowing. Even better, Frazier's attitude and viewpoint makes it all fascinating and uplifting.