July 22, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ian Frazier’s lyrical “Paradise Bronx.” It’s an exploration of the mainland borough of New York City called the Bronx. As Frazier explains, the name comes from the Bronx River, “which begins at a reservoir north of the city and runs south through the middle of the borough until it empties into the East River.” Frazier tells about the history of the borough (“In December, 1639, several local Munsee headmen sold five hundred acres of land adjoining the river to Jonas Bronck, a Swede who had arrived on his own ship, the Fire of Troy”). He describes its physical features (“Thirteen bridges connect Manhattan to the Bronx, and two more cross the East River from Queens. Other links exist underground in tunnels and pipes, which carry subway lines, drinking water, gas mains, power cables, and wastewater. Every which way, the Bronx is sewn and bound and grappled and clamped to the rest of the city”). And, most enjoyably (for me, at least), he walks it, logging his impressions as he goes. For example:

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, I was stunned by the loudness of the trucks. (No other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world.) I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. Even during the emptiest days of the covid shutdown, the Bronx’s pulse of transport kept pounding.

And: 

One September morning at ten-forty-five, I set out from Manhattan for a walk of about ten miles. When I was halfway across the Third Avenue Bridge, heading into the Bronx, a horn of unknown origin blasted twice. Then double barricades with blinking red lights went down at either end of the bridge. I hurried to get to the Bronx side. A guy in a hard hat and a bright-green vest with bright-orange stripes showed me how I could scoot around the edges of the barricades. He said that workers were testing the bridge. Then the bridge’s whole middle span began to move, rotating slowly and smoothly on its central pivot, until it was perpendicular to the roadway. Watching it do that was like seeing the Empire State Building telescope down to the size of a Pizza Hut—a technical surprise, but just another event of the day. Most of the bridges over the Harlem River open by rotating. They’re what are called swing bridges, as opposed to lift bridges, which go up and down. For ten or fifteen minutes, traffic sat waiting. Then the bridge pivoted back, the barricades lifted, and the traffic moved.

And:

All kinds of things are on the ground in the Bronx: Q-tips. A pigeon foot. Those Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from rearview mirrors. Syringes with pale-orange plastic stoppers on their needles. Sunglass lenses. The butts of menthol cigarettes. A bathroom sink. A single pink, almond-shaped artificial fingernail. The white plastic tips of cigarillos. Little bags that once held fortune cookies, with pagodas faintly printed on them in red. Inside-out surgical gloves. Pennies. Scratched-off scratch-off tickets. Green puddles of antifreeze. Hair picks with handles shaped like fists. Pieces of broken mirrors. Flattened pieces of sugarcane. Corona beer-bottle caps. Coconut husks. Crumpled paper handouts offering cash for diabetes test strips, with a number to call. Crushed traffic cones. Dashboard dice. Skeins of hair for extensions. Spiced-whiskey bottles with devil silhouettes on the labels. covid masks. Black plastic takeout bags that skitter, ankle-high, on the wind. Pavement graffiti: “Lost Virginity at this Spot 11-1-16.”

That “Black plastic takeout bags that skitter, ankle-high, on the wind” made me smile. As we know from Frazier’s great “Bags in Trees” series, he’s obsessed with plastic bags. 

“Paradise Bronx” brims with inspired Bronx details. I enjoyed it immensely.