South Bronx Rising

South Bronx Rising PDF Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531501222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York City borough—ravaged in the 1970s and ’80s by disinvestment and fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by community activists—Jill Jonnes returns to chronicle the ongoing revival of the South Bronx. Though now globally renowned as the birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains America’s poorest urban congressional district. In this new edition, we meet the present generation of activists who are transforming their communities with the arts and greening, notably the restoration of the Bronx River. For better or worse, real estate investors have noticed, setting off new gentrification struggles.

South Bronx Rising

South Bronx Rising PDF Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531501222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York City borough—ravaged in the 1970s and ’80s by disinvestment and fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by community activists—Jill Jonnes returns to chronicle the ongoing revival of the South Bronx. Though now globally renowned as the birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains America’s poorest urban congressional district. In this new edition, we meet the present generation of activists who are transforming their communities with the arts and greening, notably the restoration of the Bronx River. For better or worse, real estate investors have noticed, setting off new gentrification struggles.

We're Still Here

We're Still Here PDF Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780871130204
Category : Bronx (New York, N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description


The Dancing Gangsters of the South Bronx

The Dancing Gangsters of the South Bronx PDF Author: Willie Estrada
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692670019
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The Dancing Gangsters of the South Bronx is the untold, true story of the Warriors and the hidden pages of a history which have been suppressed for over 40 years... until now! This is the coming-of-age story of a young man and his friends during the worst days in the history of the South Bronx. A gang leader and his crew transform their neighborhood and create peace through the power and beauty of music and dance. Though many lives were lost on the road to peace, this art form helped to prove that the indomitable human spirit has the power to prevail in spite of the most destitute circumstances in life! Reviews: Based on true events, this is the powerful story of gang life and the creation and evolution of the Latin Hustle and the gang culture that spawned it. During the mid 1970's Latino Street gangs used this Art form to make peace, during the worst times in the history of the South Bronx... while it was burning! I absolutely loved it! Dr. Rosa PiJuan Leon Ph.D. "An urban dance legend gives a voice to a forgotten cast of real life characters from a past belonging to the South Bronx. A history that no one has ever managed to present from a first person perspective... until now. Willie "M.B." Estrada [The initials stand for 'Marine Boy'] takes the reader on an exclusive journey into a 'lost' era of South Bronx history. It is a period that has been largely ignored and grossly misrepresented by way of other analytical examinations of the South Bronx, during a time when the area was struggling for the right to exist. We have heard, read and seen much about the street gang culture, building structures on fire, abandoned living spaces, drug addicts and other harrowing phenomenons related to the South Bronx of the 1970s. These elements have been the backdrop to the stories of both the urban Latin American identity known as "Salsa," and is the environment that spawned the birth of a culture known as "Hip Hop." But within those narratives lie another truth. A reality that was somehow phased out and erased from the pages of history. It is within this retelling of a personal experience of one individual that the reader will be granted access to those missing pages. As such, the public will now be able to comprehend, in a much more complete fashion, how the present day reality of the urban Puerto Rican or Latino culture, manifested itself in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City. A manifestation in which the present day urban Latino cultural landscape is designed from. You will be introduced to a whole new angle of the South Bronx story in the latter half of the 20th century.. Provided by a contributing witness. Who pulls no punches, makes no apologies and tells it the way it was and is." Richie Blondet, South Bronx Historian Experience this eyewitness South Bronx story that takes you from the late 60's through the early 80's, as though you were there yourself. Willie Estrada is currently a consultant and actor on "The Get Down," an original series from visionary director Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet.) Debuting summer 2016 on Netflix, The Get Down is a mythic saga of how a battered city at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk, the Latin Hustle, and disco - told through the lives and music of the South Bronx kids who changed the city and the world, forever.

The Bronx

The Bronx PDF Author: Evelyn Gonzalez
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231121156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The Bronx is a fascinating history of a singular borough, mapping its evolution from a loose cluster of commuter villages to a densely populated home for New York's African American and Hispanic populations. In recounting the varied and extreme transformations this community has undergone, Evelyn Gonzalez argues that racial discrimination, rampant crime, postwar liberalism, and big government were not the only reasons for the urban crisis that assailed the Bronx during the late 1960s. Rather, a combination of population shifts, public housing initiatives, economic recession, and urban overdevelopment caused its decline. Yet she also proves that ongoing urbanization and neighborhood fluctuations are the very factors that have allowed the Bronx to undergo one of the most successful and inspiring community revivals in American history. The process of building and rebuilding carries on, and the revitalization of neighborhoods and a resurgence of economic growth continue to offer hope for the future.

Urban Legends

Urban Legends PDF Author: Peter L'Official
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674238079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Urban Forests

Urban Forests PDF Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110446
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
“Far-ranging and deeply researched, Urban Forests reveals the beauty and significance of the trees around us.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction “Jonnes extols the many contributions that trees make to city life and celebrates the men and women who stood up for America’s city trees over the past two centuries. . . . An authoritative account.” —Gerard Helferich, The Wall Street Journal “We all know that trees can make streets look prettier. But in her new book Urban Forests, Jill Jonnes explains how they make them safer as well.” —Sara Begley, Time Magazine A celebration of urban trees and the Americans—presidents, plant explorers, visionaries, citizen activists, scientists, nurserymen, and tree nerds—whose arboreal passions have shaped and ornamented the nation’s cities, from Jefferson’s day to the present As nature’s largest and longest-lived creations, trees play an extraordinarily important role in our cities; they are living landmarks that define space, cool the air, soothe our psyches, and connect us to nature and our past. Today, four-fifths of Americans live in or near urban areas, surrounded by millions of trees of hundreds of different species. Despite their ubiquity and familiarity, most of us take trees for granted and know little of their fascinating natural history or remarkable civic virtues. Jill Jonnes’s Urban Forests tells the captivating stories of the founding mothers and fathers of urban forestry, in addition to those arboreal advocates presently using the latest technologies to illuminate the value of trees to public health and to our urban infrastructure. The book examines such questions as the character of American urban forests and the effect that tree-rich landscaping might have on commerce, crime, and human well-being. For amateur botanists, urbanists, environmentalists, and policymakers, Urban Forests will be a revelation of one of the greatest, most productive, and most beautiful of our natural resources.

The Birth of the Bronx

The Birth of the Bronx PDF Author: Lloyd Ultan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780941980388
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description


The Stickup Kids

The Stickup Kids PDF Author: Randol Contreras
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520273370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insiderÕs look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as ÒStickup Kids,Ó these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robberyÕs violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.

Chronicling Stankonia

Chronicling Stankonia PDF Author: Regina Bradley
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469661977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post–civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators—including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole. Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern black identity.

Empires of Light

Empires of Light PDF Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375758844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.