bronx little italy

You are not alone in missing out on all Bronx Little Italy has to offer.  The country and for that matter most New Yorkers outside of the Bronx know very little of the Bronx on a positive note except for the iconic Yankee Stadium, the Bronx Zoo, and the New York Botanical Gardens.  This is principally because of the negativity promoted by the media such as the 70s infamous quote “the Bronx is burning” credited to the legendary sports broadcaster Howard Cosell.  According to the New York Post article dated May 16, 2010, “Why the Bronx burned”, written by Joe Flood, Mr. Howard Cosell never said it.  Mr. Flood writes that Mr. Gordon Greisman, who co-wrote and produced the ESPN mini-series of the same name, “the Bronx is burning”, said that Mr. Cosell never said it, but it did pick up steam in spreading the negativity because of Mr. Cosell’s fame.  What most people do not know about that time was that it was not just the South Bronx that was burning during the 70s but also Brooklyn’s Brownsville, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods, and Manhattan’s Harlem and Lower East Side.  More importantly, it was not the hoodlums that were responsible for the Bronx burning but it was the bureaucrats, organize crime, landlords, and the insurance industry.  Specifically, Mayor John Lindsay is the bureaucrat to blame.  In 1971 Mayor Lindsay asked Chief John O’Hagan, of the Fire Department of New York, to close some 13 fire houses in order to save a few million dollars to help balance the budget.  What’s suspicious about that request is that many of the closings were in fire prone areas of the South Bronx which greatly contributed to the increase in fire incidents.

According to the Village Voice article “Arson for Hire”, dated June 2, 1980, by Joe Conason & Jack Newfield, another known contributor to the “the Bronx is burning” image was an arson ring of landlords, lawyers, brokers, and insurance adjusters.  A pattern of arson was eventually uncovered that led to a network of landlords whose buildings were insured for large amounts, more than what the buildings were worth, creating a moral hazard enticing landlords to burn their buildings for the insurance proceeds.  How could landlords purchase policies worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the actual purchase price or assessed value of their buildings?  Because at the time the insurance industry simply passed on the cost by increasing premiums and did nothing to amend the policies to discourage the practice until some years later.  This aspect of the era did not receive as much attention from the media.

Fire fatalities in New York City doubled in the 1970s, as President Jimmy Carter, Mayor John Lindsay and Fire Chief John O’Hagan faced a disaster of the government’s own making, a new book claims

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