Urban Legends
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Peter L'Official
About this book
A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths.
For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism.
Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life.
A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad.
Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.
Reviews
-- Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and The Other Paris
-- Dan Adler Vanity Fair
-- Emily Raboteau New York Review of Books
-- Sasha Frere-Jones Bookforum
-- Garnette Cadogan Literary Hub
-- Mark Favermann Arts Fuse
-- Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific
-- Lizabeth Cohen, author of Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
-- Carlo Rotella, author of The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood
-- Choice
Topics
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Frontmatter
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CONTENTS
vii -
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INTRODUCTION: WHEN LEGEND BECOMES FACT
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1. THE LONE TENEMENT
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2. PERCEPTION IS REALITY
34 -
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3. DEATH AND TAXES
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4. A GLOBAL BRONX
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5. SOUTH BRONX SURREAL
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6. THE PARANOID STYLE OF SOUTH BRONX FILM
198 -
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CONCLUSION: THE RIVER IS DEEP
237 -
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NOTES
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
285 -
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INDEX
291
