South Bronx
The South Bronx is an area of the New York City borough of the Bronx. The area comprises neighborhoods in the southern part of the Bronx, such as Concourse, Mott Haven, Melrose, and Port Morris.
In the early 1900s, the South Bronx was originally known as the Manor of Morrisania, as it was the manor of Lewis Morris. As the Morris family continued to expand on the land, an influx of German and Irish immigrants started to populate the area. By the 1930s, the Bronx was considered the "Jewish Borough", as nearly half the population was Jewish. This soon changed as World War II caused rent to increase in many apartments, pushing people out. By the end of the 1950s, the South Bronx was two-thirds African American or Hispanic.
The South Bronx is known for its hip-hop culture and graffiti. Graffiti became popular in the Bronx in the early 1970s, spreading through the New York City Subway system. The South Bronx also became notable as the 1973 birthplace of hip-hop music and culture.
As of the 2010 American Community Survey, the South Bronx had the poorest congressional district in the United States. This statement was reiterated in the media in 2024 and 2025.
Boundaries
The geographic definitions of the South Bronx have evolved and are disputed, but certainly include the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, and Port Morris. Originally referring to the industrial area below East 138th Street, the name "South Bronx" symbolically has had its northern boundary shift northward to East 149th Street, East 161st Street, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and Fordham Road over the years. The neighborhoods of Crotona Park East, Highbridge, Hunts Point, Longwood, Concourse, and Morrisania are sometimes considered part of the South Bronx. Generally, most consider any neighborhood west of the Bronx River and south of the Cross Bronx Expressway the South Bronx. The Cross Bronx Expressway is usually considered the dividing border between North and South Bronx. There has been debate that Fordham Road is the northern border of the South Bronx.The South Bronx is part of New York's 14th and 15th Congressional districts. The South Bronx is served by the NYPD's 40th, 41st, 42nd, 44th, and 48th precincts.
History
The South Bronx was originally called the Manor of Morrisania, and later Morrisania. It was the private domain of the powerful and aristocratic Morris family, which includes Lewis Morris, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Gouverneur Morris, the penman of the United States Constitution. The Morris memorial is at St. Ann's Church of Morrisania. Morris' descendants own land in the South Bronx to this day.As the Morrises developed their landholdings, an influx of German and Irish immigrants populated the area. Later, the Bronx was considered the "Jewish Borough," and at its peak in 1930 was 49% Jewish. Jews in the South Bronx numbered 364,000 or 57.1% of the total population in the area. The term was first coined in the 1940s by a group of social workers who identified the Bronx's first pocket of poverty, in the Port Morris section, the southernmost section of the Bronx.
1950s: Demographic shift
After World War II, as White flight accelerated and migration of ethnic and racial minorities continued, the South Bronx went from being two-thirds non-Hispanic white in 1950 to being two-thirds black or Puerto Rican in 1960. Originally denoting only Mott Haven and Melrose, the South Bronx extended up to the Cross Bronx Expressway by the 1960s, encompassing Hunts Point, Morrisania, and Highbridge.1960s: Start of decay
The South Bronx was populated largely by working-class families. Its image as a poverty-ridden area developed in the latter part of the 20th century. There were several factors contributing to the decay of the South Bronx: White flight creating empty buildings, landlord abandonment creating unsafe buildings, economic changes leading to a lack of tax dollars, arson, demographic shifts, and the reallocation of tax dollars from the South Bronx Fire Department to other places and the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway are common reasons given.The already poor and working-class neighborhoods were further disadvantaged by the decreasing property value, in combination with increasing vacancy rates. While some areas of the South Bronx were racially integrated as early as the 1930s, later larger scale influxes of African Americans immigrants from the American South, combined with the racially charged tension of the Civil Rights Movement, the rage following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the dramatic rise in crime rates, further contributed to white middle-class flight and the decline of many South Bronx neighborhoods. Following the implementation of desegregation busing policies, white parents who worried about their children attending the racially integrated schools began to relocate to the suburbs, which remained predominately white due to cost as well as legal barriers created by restrictive housing covenants, and selective lending. In turn, areas of the Bronx that became predominately African American or Hispanic were considered bad risks by lenders, contributing to the decline in real estate values and lack of investment in the existing housing stock.
As early as the late 1960s, some neighborhoods were considered undesirable by homeowners, precipitating a population decline. Postwar rent control policies which were ostensibly to keep apartments cheap have also been proposed as a contributing factor, for the laws forced landlords to price the apartments so cheaply the landlords were unable to generate a profit and therefore there was no incentive for them to mend and repair their buildings, leading to the decay of the apartments of the South Bronx.
New York City Mayor John Lindsay suggested that socioeconomic factors limited housing options for the remaining low-income tenants, prompting the reduced upkeep by landlords. In either case, while desirable housing options were scarce, vacancies further increased. In the late 1960s, by the time the city decided to consolidate welfare households in the South Bronx, its vacancy rate was already the highest of any place in the city.
1970s: "The Bronx is burning"
By the 1970s, significant poverty reached as far north as Fordham Road. Around this time, the Bronx experienced some of its worst instances of urban decay, with the loss of 300,000 residents and the destruction of entire city blocks' worth of buildings. The media attention brought the South Bronx into common parlance nationwide.The early 1970s saw South Bronx property values continue to plummet to record lows. A progressively vicious cycle began where large numbers of tenements and multi-story, multi-family apartment buildings, left vacant by White flight, sat abandoned and unsaleable for long periods of time, which, coupled with a stagnant economy and an extremely high unemployment rate made street gangs attractive to many, which were exploding in number and beginning to support themselves with large-scale drug dealing in the area. The abandoned property also attracted large numbers of squatters, who further lowered the borough's quality of living. The massive citywide spending cuts also left the few remaining building inspectors and fire marshals unable to enforce living standards or punish code violations. This encouraged slumlords and absentee landlords to neglect and ignore their property and allowed for gangs to set up protected enclaves and lay claim to entire buildings. This then spread crime and fear of crime to nearby unaffected apartments in a domino effect.
As the crisis deepened, the nearly bankrupt city government of Abraham Beame placed most of the blame on unreasonably high rents levied by landlords. Beame began demanding that they convert their rapidly emptying buildings into Section 8 housing. Section 8 paid a per capita stipend for low-income or indigent tenants from Federal HUD funds rather than from the cash-strapped city bank. However, the HUD rate was not based on the property's actual value and was set so low by the city that it left little opportunity or incentive for landlords to maintain or improve their buildings while still making a profit. The result was a disastrous acceleration of both the speed and northward spread of the cycle of decay in the South Bronx as formerly desirable and well-maintained middle-to-upper class apartments in midtown, most notably along the Grand Concourse, were progressively vacated and either abandoned altogether or converted into federally funded single room occupancy "welfare hotels" run by absentee slumlords.
Police statistics show that as the crime wave moved north across the Bronx, the remaining White tenants in the South Bronx were preferentially targeted for violent crime by the influx of young, minority criminals because they were seen as easy prey. This became so common that the street slang terms "crib job" and "push in" were coined specifically in reference to them.
At this time, landlords began to burn their buildings for their insurance value, relying on "fixers" to buy property below cost, then selling and reselling, artificially driving up the value incrementally each time. Fraudulent "no questions asked" fire insurance policies would then be taken out on the overvalued buildings and the property stripped and burned for the payoff. Flawed HUD and city policies encouraged local South Bronx residents to burn down their own buildings. Under the regulations, Section 8 tenants who were burned out of their current housing were granted immediate priority status for another apartment, potentially in a better part of the city. After the establishment of the state-of-the-art Co-op City, there was a spike in fires as tenants began burning down their Section 8 housing in an attempt to jump to the front of the 2–3 year long waiting list for the new units.Often, the properties were still occupied by subsidized tenants or squatters at the time, who were given short or no warning before the building was burned down, and were forced to move to another slum building, where the process would usually repeat itself. HUD regulations also authorized lump-sum aid payments of up to $1000 to those who could prove they had lost property due to a fire in their Section 8 housing; although these payments were supposed to be investigated for fraud by a HUD employee before being signed off on, very little investigation was done and some HUD employees and social services workers were accused of turning a blind eye to suspicious fires or even advising tenants on the best way to take advantage of the HUD policies. On multiple occasions, firefighters were reported to have shown up to tenement fires only to find all the residents at an address waiting calmly with their possessions already on the curb.
Firefighters in the South Bronx were also extremely strapped for resources, facing budget cuts galore amid the city's fiscal crisis, and struggled to maintain adequate staffing, equipment, and response times. Fire companies in the South Bronx, such as Engine 82 and Ladder 31, became legendary for their relentless service, often responding to dozens of alarms per day in neighborhoods plagued by poverty, unemployment, and crime.
During this period, the NYPD's 41st Precinct station house at 1086 Simpson Street became famously known as "Fort Apache, The Bronx" as it struggled to deal with the overwhelming surge of violent crime, which for the entirety of the 1970s and 1980s made South Bronx the murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault and arson capital of America. By 1980, the 41st Precinct was renamed the "Little House on the Prairie", as fully of the 94,000 residents originally served by the precinct had fled, leaving the fortified building as one of the few structures in the neighborhood that had not been abandoned or burnt out.
By the time of Cosell's 1977 commentary, dozens of buildings were being burned in the South Bronx every day, sometimes whole blocks at a time and usually far more than the fire department could keep up with, leaving the area perpetually blanketed in a pall of smoke. Firefighters from the period reported responding to as many as 7 fully involved structure fires in a single shift, too many to even bother returning to the station house between calls. The local police precincts—already struggling and failing to contain the massive wave of drug and gang crime invading the Bronx—had long since stopped bothering to investigate the fires, as there were simply too many to track.
In total, over 80% of the South Bronx was burned or abandoned between 1970 and 1980, with 44 census tracts losing more than 50% and seven more than 97% of their buildings to arson, abandonment, or both. The appearance was frequently compared to that of a bombed-out and evacuated European city following World War II.
On October 5, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter paid an unscheduled visit to Charlotte Street while in New York City for a conference at the headquarters of the United Nations. Charlotte Street at the time was a three-block devastated area of vacant lots and burned-out and abandoned buildings. The street had been so ravaged that part of it had been taken off official city maps in 1974. Carter instructed Patricia Roberts Harris, head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to take steps to salvage the area.
Progress did not come quickly. Three years later, in 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan paid a visit to Charlotte Street, declaring that he had not "seen anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz". The 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, by the American writer Tom Wolfe, presented the South Bronx as a nightmare world, not to be entered by middle or upper-class whites.
The PBS documentary show Independent Lens released an episode titled "Decade of Fire" on May 3, 2019. The episode was previewed at the Full Frame Film Festival the previous month.