This stretch of Charlotte Street was once the national symbol of urban blight and decay until the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes community organization transformed into the tree-lined, suburban-style neighborhood it is today.
Over the vinyl-sided ranch houses, a few five story apartment buildings line parallel streets. From the time those multifamily tenements went up in the first decades of the 20thcentury through the early 1970’s, Charlotte Street’s residential stock resembled that of its Bronx neighbors. Its big, walk-up apartment buildings housed Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants pursuing the American Dream; by the 1970’s, they housed Puerto Rican and African American families, doing the same. Yet this housing was a casualty of the severe fiscal crisis of the 1970’s, when New York City came close to declaring bankruptcy. Hundreds of multifamily buildings were torched by landlords seeking insurance payments more profitable than continuing to rent to and service their cash-starved tenants. Hundreds of others decayed and burned from general neglect and the city’s “planned shrinkage” policy.
Charlotte Street was the backdrop to visits from United States Presidents during its crisis years and beyond. When President Jimmy Carter visited in October of 1977, part of Charlotte Street had been quite literally erased, removed from the city map in 1974. With Carter’s visit, it came to stand as the national symbol of urban blight and decay. When President Ronald Reagan came in 1980, it was to score political points against Carter’s “failed” urban strategies. Yet by the time President Clinton visited in 1995, Charlotte Street had become the picture of neighborhood renewal – and not because of federal largesse or support.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Bronx clergy and residents had formed countless organizations to improve life in the Bronx. One Bronx woman, Genevieve Brooks, went door-to-door in her neighborhood, organizing a block association to clean up the streets and establishing the Seabury Day Care Center under community control to help local families with child care. She then organized and established the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes (MBD), a coalition of neighborhood groups that fought for investment and services in the Bronx and eventually built or rehabilitated thousands of units of affordable housing in the South Bronx.
The MBD transformed this stretch of Charlotte Street that America came to associate with urban catastrophe into a new neighborhood of pre-fabricated modest single-family homes by leveraging public and private funding. In the mid-1980s more than 500 people applied to purchase the 89 subsidized homes for sale between $50,000 and $60,000. And by the turn of the century, MBD managed 38 buildings throughout the South Bronx in its own right. Brooks would later become the first woman to be Deputy Bronx Borough President in 1990.
Further Reading:
Gonzalez, Evelyn. 2004. The Bronx. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jonnes, Jill. 2002. South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. New York: Fordham University Press.