Southern Boulevard: A History

The history of Southern Boulevard closely parallels the history of the South Bronx as a whole, and is in many ways emblematic of the many demographic, spatial, and cultural shifts that took place in the area over time. Before 1900, like much of the Bronx, the area was home of wealthy landowners outside of New York City who owned large estates. In 1899, the El train was extended north along Southern Boulevard, bringing increasing development and a new wave of commuters to the area. The area had been previously slotted for more dense development when Crotona Park was created from the Bathgate estate in 1895.

The residents who moved in were mostly Jewish immigrants coming out of the Lower East Side, those who has gained enough economic capital to move out of “slum conditions.” On Jennings Street between Charlotte Street and Louis Nine Boulevard (at the time Wilkins Street) was the Jennings Street Market, the main hub of commercial activity in the neighborhood and home to many food stalls and small businesses. Crotona Park East was tight-knit and seen a paradigm of the American Dream at the time, where immigrants could move out of the slums and attain stable housing in a rising working class community. Most of the men were union members and commuted downtown to work manufacturing jobs in the garment district. Children attended the local PS 61 and Herman Ridder Junior High School, and went on to a number of notable local or city high schools, including Stuyvesant.

In the 1930s, like much of New York City, the neighborhood was hit hard and many workers lost their jobs, but having previously lived through immigrating to the US and living in overcrowded Lower East Side housing, community members scrimped and saved to make it through. In 1940, President Roosevelt drove through Boston Road on a motorcade to Fordham, which was celebrated in the neighborhood of Roosevelt democrats. Many of the young men went to fight in WWII, and when they returned went to college on the GI Bill and moved out of the neighborhood to the West Bronx, Queens, or suburbs with a VA mortgage.

Simultaneously, mass immigration from Puerto Rico and migration from the Second Great Migration began to push African American and Puerto Ricans north into Crotona Park East. With much less economic capital than the Jewish residents already living there, the newcomers often lived in overcrowded housing. During this time period New York City was also rapidly deindustrializing, and the manufacturing jobs that catapulted Jewish and Italian immigrants into the middle class were vanishing for a new wave in search of jobs, leading to a far less stable economic foothold for Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Jewish residents rapidly began to leave.

By 1960, Crotona Park East was majority Puerto Rican, and had doubled in population. The housing stock was also aging and beginning to show signs of wear, exacerbated by holding more people and families with more children. In 1961, drugs first appear in the neighborhood, and in the years following, created a significant population of addicts who would do anything for a high, leading to increased violent crime, specifically in robbery and mugging. This was only exacerbated by soldiers who came back from the Vietnam War with addictions. The Jennings Street Market continued, but in a different iteration – it became open-air and had many stalls of Puerto Rican foods and goods that catered to the local population. During the same time, many landlords stopped making repairs to their buildings, which later escalated into not paying taxes, cutting off services and utilities to residents, causing degradation of the housing. Eventually, some tenants or owners purposely burned their buildings to collect insurance or put themselves on the list for more lucrative and newer public housing. The fires began in the South Bronx in the mid-60s, but were not widely recognized until the “Burning of the Bronx” in the early 1970s.

In 1975, New York City went bankrupt, a marker of widespread decline across the city. By this time the South Bronx was hit especially hard. In the 1977 blackout, businesses that had remained open through the fires were looted. Later that year, when Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street, the neighborhood was broadcasted to the nation as a sign of urban decimation. Also during the mid-70s, tenants and residents who had managed to to keep their homes embarked on sweat equity project, endorsed by the city, to clean up and renovate their buildings. Out of this, a notable neighborhood organization, Banana Kelly, was born, among many others. The 1970s was also the birth of hip hop in South Bronx, that grew into an international phenomenon.

During the 1980s, the population of the South Bronx steadily rose. The infamous Charlotte Street was turned into Charlotte Gardens, a multi-block suburban-style development of single-story ranch houses, symbolizing renewal. Mayor Ed Koch began an affordable housing initiative the increase the housing stock across the city and began to rebuild the vacant lots of the South Bronx. In 1993, Community District 3 of the Bronx, which contains Crotona Park East, established a 197-a plan for the revitalization of the district that emphasized the creation of affordable housing and economic development.

Today, Southern Boulevard is populated with a mix of buildings, a few from before the fires and many from afterwards. There are several new affordable housing developments along the surrounding streets, including WHEDco’s Intervale Green, which sits on one of the sites Jimmy Carter visited in his 1977 visit to the South Bronx. Little of the “old” Crotona Park East remain, but the neighborhood is home to a large Puerto Rican population, as well as black, West African, and more recently Middle Eastern immigrants. The congressional district is still the poorest in the nation and 30.7% live under the poverty line (county-wide, as of 2015).