From 1968 through the early 1980s, thousands of fires raged through the Bronx. The precise number is unknown and it’s uncertain who was responsible for setting them. But at the time, most fingers pointed to the working-class Black and Puerto Rican tenants who lived in the borough. The newspapers said as much, as did the Blaxploitation movies of the late 1970s. Politicians, too: in the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down.” The Bronxites who lived that history, however, have long identified a different culprit, and over the past decade, historians have arrived at a new explanation for the arsons. Bench Ansfield’s new book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, is unequivocal: “The hand that torched the Bronx and scores of other cities was that of a landlord impelled by the market and guided by the state.” The story that unfolds is one of fire and a new FIRE economy, insurance and disinvestment, profit and privatization.
Go beyond the episode:
- Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
- Watch Decade of Fire, Vivian Vázquez Irizarry’s 2018 documentary, and Born in Flames (1993) from which Ansfield’s book takes its title
- For a film on the pathologization of public housing, there’s no better place to start than Candyman (1992)
- Across the Hudson, Hoboken was burning, too
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