The Bronx Is Burning

Did the South Bronx burn down in the 1970s due to "racial capitalism" or to "Jewish lighting?"

A couple of generations ago, American big cities suffered two arson waves in succession: first, the black riots of 1965-1968 which took a bad toll on stores in black neighborhoods (but much less so on housing), and then the 1970s burning, mostly of housing, most notoriously in the South Bronx borough of New York City.

The two arson waves were obviously different. The victims of the 1960s riots arson tended to be white shopkeepers in the ghetto, primarily Jewish. (I visited Watts on July 4, 1977, a dozen years after the Watts riot. I was surprised by how pleasant was the housing, but depressed by how bleak was the retail.) The perpetrators were obviously the black mobs recorded by television news cameras.

In contrast, the victims of 1970s arson tended to be black and Puerto Rican tenants of decaying tenements. In contrast to the short-lived paroxysms of 1960s riot arson, 1970s fires just went on and on for years, with the shadowy arsonists taking pains to not get caught on camera.

A celebrated new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by the historian Bench Ansfield (a Person of Plurality who insists on being referred to, confusingly, with plural pronouns) insists that The Media back in the 1970s blamed the tenants while never suspecting that landlords were torching their properties for the insurance money.

For example, the New York Times review of Ansfield’s book contends:

Who was to blame for this destruction? From the mid-1970s onward, a whole cultural machinery — from Hollywood studios and social scientists to the nation’s leading newspapers — fixed on the same explanation: The fires were the fault of their victims.

Before the “welfare queen,” there was the largely apocryphal “welfare arsonist.” The Los Angeles Times described the Bronx as a “landscape of urban cancer.” The New York Times warned that the borough’s “social cancer is spreading.” A vice president of the New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association claimed that arsons were committed for “sexual gratification.” As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it: “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down.”

That strikes me as highly dubious. Back in the late 1970s, one of the guys in my suite in the Rice U. dorm was an Italian-American from New York. His dad had an increasingly depressing accounting job in the rapidly decaying South Bronx, which was experiencing so much arson that Howard Cosell famously pointed out a fire during the 1977 World Series at Yankee Stadium.

My friend said his father told him that the bosses were having their own property burned down for the insurance.

Did anybody else really doubt that landlord arson was playing a big role?

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