Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century Parisians clamored for bread, did Marie Antoinette respond, “Let them eat cake”? No, but the line captures the aristocracy’s witlessness. Patrick Henry probably never said “Give me liberty, or give me death,” either.
The second game of the 1977 World Series, at Yankee Stadium, provided another such occasion. It was a time of crushing austerity for New York City; tens of thousands of municipal employees had been laid off, including firefighters. These woes were background to the game, but they flashed into the foreground when a fire in an abandoned elementary school lit up the skies just blocks away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer Howard Cosell famously but never actually said, “the Bronx is burning.”
Indeed, it was. “It seemed like just every second there was a fire,” Darney (K-Born) Rivers, a local rapper, later recalled. “I’m talking about every block you went on.” Families kept suitcases by the door; children were told to wear shoes to bed.
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To some, this was a tragic turn in the country’s racial drama. White people left cities for the suburbs, taking jobs and tax revenues with them. Black people, trapped in neighborhoods that felt increasingly like holding pens, revolted. The Watts uprising of 1965, in Los Angeles, incinerated hundreds of buildings. The fires continued. The historian Elizabeth Hinton, in “America on Fire” (2021), counts 1,949 urban insurgencies between May, 1968, and December, 1972.
Those uprisings subsided in the early seventies, yet the fires kept going. Bill Moyers, Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary, made an award-winning documentary, “The Fire Next Door” (1977), about Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the South Bronx. “Burning buildings are as common here as broken dreams,” he intoned. The arsonists he highlighted included addicts, welfare cheats, and kids setting fires just “for the hell of it.” This was, Moyers felt, “a society out of control.”
That was an unfair characterization. The South Bronx was also a fount of artistic fecundity, where poets, musicians, artists, and dancers created hip-hop. The art grew amid the fires, a boisterous eruption of life in deadly surroundings. “Throw your hands in the air, and wave ’em like you just don’t care,” Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three instructed. Yet fire singed even that carefree party anthem, which ended with an ominous chant: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.”
Conservatives saw all this as the devolution of post-Watts rioting into utter lawlessness. But was that diagnosis right? The South Bronx, the arson capital, hadn’t seen much upheaval. And although urban unrest had often burst forth from public-housing developments, the projects in the Bronx were virtually flameproof. As a report from the Bronx District Attorney’s office observed, the New York City Housing Authority provided residences for 169,663 families as of January, 1977, yet saw an “almost total absence of fires.”
The Bronx firestorm was selective not just in which buildings burned but in how they did so. The typical Bronx walkup was built of brick and concrete. A fire might not do much damage unless it burned the roof, in which case water would total the building. Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three proved to be keen students of pyrodynamics, because it was often the roof that caught fire. It was as if someone were trying to do as much damage as possible to privately owned—but not publicly owned—rental properties.
“In the community, we knew that landlords were burning their buildings,” the educator Vivian Vázquez Irizarry has said. This was an open secret, reported at the time and arising even in Moyers’s documentary. It made little dent on public consciousness, though. “When I first moved to New York,” the writer Ian Frazier remembers, “I assumed, as many people did, that the poverty and fires in the Bronx were just the way the Bronx was.”
In 2018, Vázquez and Gretchen Hildebran released a documentary, “Decade of Fire,” that exonerated the Bronx. Now a historian who worked on that documentary, Bench Ansfield, has published a formidable book, “Born in Flames” (Norton). The fires were set not by unruly tenants, Ansfield charges, but by landlords seeking insurance payouts. The late twentieth century gave rise to a horrifying dynamic, throughout the country but especially in the South Bronx, whereby owners had reason to burn their buildings and few people in power had reason to care.
The thought of cities burning in a racial reckoning has long haunted the American imagination. The era of slavery was also the age of wood, and nearly every major slave rebellion and conspiracy involved arson. In one of the most fearsome plots, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, rebels allegedly planned to burn down Charleston.
It was easy to understand why slaves might torch cities. But the fires emerging in the mid-sixties, just as the civil-rights movement was racking up victories, were harder to interpret. Were they protests? Meltdowns? Crimes? As arson and violence convulsed Black neighborhoods, white support for the movement plummeted.
To conservatives, this was vindication. In an influential essay, “Looting and Liberal Racism” (1977), Midge Decter argued that New York’s racial liberalism had done nothing for Black and brown people other than convince them that there were “virtually no crimes” for which they’d be held accountable. Riots fed law-and-order conservatism.
Of course, there were other views. “This ain’t no riot, brother, this is a rebellion,” the Black Power activist H. Rap Brown declared in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1967. Which is to say, the people in the streets weren’t riffraff running amok but activists with aims. The problem was white violence, Brown explained, and, if it didn’t stop, Black people should “burn this town down.” About an hour after Brown made that speech, as if to prove his point, police shot him. (He lived.)
Historians have come around to his view. Gerald Horne’s “The Fire This Time” (1995), Peter B. Levy’s “The Great Uprising” (2018), Hinton’s “America on Fire,” and, most recently, Ashley Howard’s “Midwest Unrest” treat the tumult as a purposeful, even admirable revolt against racism. Yet these histories focus on the uprisings that wound down by 1972, not on the harder-to-explain fires that followed. Hinton, in another book, briefly connects the Bronx fires to Black revolts—both stemmed from excessive policing and incarceration, she says—but leaves it there.
Ansfield offers a tidier solution. The fires of 1964-72 constituted an uprising, yes. But not the subsequent fires. Those were neither riot nor rebellion but something else: “racial capitalism.”
That term, “racial capitalism,” entered American discourse in 1983—via the political scientist Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism”—but came into vogue with the Black Lives Matter movement. The idea is that racial oppression is essential to capitalism. So, to take a stark but characteristic example from the historian Walter Johnson, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was “founded upon the capacity of enslaved women’s bodies” to maintain the supply of Black labor. Rape and forced family separation weren’t unfortunate by-products but “elementary aspects” of the system. This grim structure has varied with time, yet its fundamentals—economic predation, white supremacy—remain intact. “The temporality of racial capitalism,” the historians Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy write, “is one of ongoingness.”
Ansfield brings this expansive vision to the Bronx, following the trail from the arsonists who did the torching to the landlords who ordered it, the policymakers who enabled it, the financiers who encouraged it, and the insurers who paid for it. The Bronx’s fire-prone tenements were dirt cheap, yet wealthy investors in several countries held stakes in them.
That pattern is familiar, Ansfield notes. Once, ships had carried slaves across the Atlantic as part of a triangular trade in captives and commodities that connected the international élite to sadistic violence in Africa and the Americas. In the nineteen-seventies, insurance policies that encouraged arson were resold in Miami, London, and Rio de Janeiro. This was the “twentieth-century triangular trade in risk,” Ansfield writes, a deadly commerce that was “just as legal as the eighteenth-century trafficking in human cargo.”
When Ansfield filed their dissertation on this topic, in 2021, the response was rapturous. Prizes were heaped at their feet: best dissertation in American studies, in American history, at Yale (co-won), and so on. Reading their book, which is even sharper, you can see why. It’s a deft, at times brilliant history. To the conservative line about riot-torn cities, it responds firmly: property owners, not their tenants, were the lawless ones. The Bronx was burned by the “lethal alchemy of race and capitalism.”
The immolation of the Bronx was all the more staggering because, a generation before, it had been filled with upwardly mobile residents in sturdy homes. Colin Powell, who was raised in the South Bronx by Jamaican parents, remembered his neighborhood’s “intact and secure” families and its “rough-edged racial tolerance” among Jews, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks. Yet the postwar suburbs drained the borough. The South Bronx, in particular, lost more than sixty per cent of its population between 1950 and 1980.
Ansfield shows how the insurance industry hastened the Bronx’s decline. As the nationwide uprisings began, insurers pulled out of so-called riot-prone areas. Because uninsurable buildings were hard to sell, property values collapsed. Between 1969 and 1979, the Bronx lost forty per cent of its manufacturing jobs, partly because firms couldn’t secure insurance. Landlords floundered, too. The Times reported on the desperate owner of a tenement in nearby Inwood who offered to transfer its title to his tenants for a dollar; none took the deal. Many underwater landlords gave up. They extracted whatever rent they could as they cut services, stopped paying property taxes, and abandoned their buildings.
To stanch the bleeding, Congress, in 1968, created a form of last-ditch insurance: Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plans. Private insurers would be obliged to offer policies that couldn’t discriminate by neighborhood. In return, they would be reinsured by the federal government against riots. FAIR Plan policies were neither cheap nor comprehensive, but, when New York started offering them, demand was overwhelming.
That should have sounded alarms. The FAIR Plans inadvertently replaced the too-little-insurance problem with a too-much-insurance one. Once insurers lost the ability to say no, landlords had little incentive to maintain their properties. If property values dropped, they could drive their buildings into the ground and cash out by arson. The more they did so, the further property values plunged, and the more enticing the practice became.
Owners often outsourced the arson to cash-strapped locals. Ansfield gives the example of a fifteen-year-old, Hector Rivera (not his real name), who set forty to fifty fires. “I don’t do it for fun,” Rivera explained to a reporter. “I do it when they hire me.” He made between three and fifteen dollars a fire. Occasionally, landlords did their own dirty work. In 1975, Imre Oberlander was arrested while en route to a building he owned, with firebombs and wearing blackface. (He pleaded guilty to weapons possession and served five years’ probation.)
Oberlander had taken in a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars from twenty-one fires in just five years. Another property owner, the convicted felon Joe Bald, was caught leading a ring of landlords who had reportedly collected around five million dollars on some two hundred and fifty burned buildings. A recent study by Ingrid Gould Ellen, Daniel Hartley, Jeffrey Lin, and Wei You estimates that in 1978 alone the state of New York had thirteen thousand more fires than it would’ve had without the FAIR Plan. Most other states had FAIR Plans, too, and arsonists torched poor neighborhoods nationwide.
Insurers seemed oddly tolerant of this. Litigating claims was costly, the FAIR Plans spread out the pain among firms, and historically high interest rates allowed them to offset risks by investing premiums. Interest rates rose so high that out-of-state insurers started voluntarily underwriting Bronx tenements in the midst of the fires—no FAIR Plan needed.
Still, no matter how you slice it, selling fire insurance to arsonists is a terrible business model. It persisted, Ansfield explains, only because the market was opaque. As with more recent subprime mortgages, brokers sold, bundled, and resold crummy contracts so many times that the people left holding the bag had no clue what was in it. The losses on the policies held by Joe Bald’s group wound through a labyrinthine chain of intermediaries before arriving at the storied insurer Lloyd’s of London. Investors there were stupefied, and it was years before they grasped the extent of their exposure.
Politicians were no quicker to respond. The indefatigable activist Genevieve Brooks (later Brown) pressed the issue yet found that “no one, but no one, was interested.” It took years to win over even a few officials to the cause. One, the Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola, was initially dismissive but became an “anti-arson crusader” in 1975, Ansfield writes. As he bluntly told the Senate, a “substantial portion” of his borough’s arson was “committed for profit.” Ansfield also praises the Arson Strike Force (initially the Arson Task Force) as a “bona fide white-collar crime squad.” Its deputy director, Michael Jacobson, would co-author an article, “Burning the Bronx for Profit,” that laid bare the evidence.
Yet evidence mattered only so much. Just as financial opacity concealed the fires from insurers, racial opacity concealed them from politicians. Gerald Ford, who was President during the peak of the arson wave, publicly mentioned the Bronx just once, to go by the American Presidency Project, and that was to commend Merola’s office for locking up recidivists.
Meanwhile, fire-setting landlords enjoyed extraordinary immunity from prosecution—immunity from blame, even. Most people found it easier to chalk up the conflagration to ghetto anarchy. Vivian Vázquez Irizarry laments, “That’s the only story that ever gets told”—to the point that inhabitants of the Bronx now believe it themselves. Ansfield agrees: “The vague impression that Bronxites burned down their own borough endures, while the vast fortunes made were forgotten.”
Ansfield’s great achievement is following the money, the thread linking the fortunes to the fires. This is the panoramic, it’s-all-connected view that racial-capitalism theory promises. One thinks of Walter Johnson’s insistence that the mills in Manchester depended on the rape of women in Mississippi.
That story works best, though, if the fires were all set for insurance. Were they? Other histories—Jill Jonnes’s “South Bronx Rising,” Evelyn Gonzalez’s “The Bronx,” Jonathan Mahler’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning,” Joe Flood’s “The Fires,” and Ian Frazier’s “Paradise Bronx”—identify multiple culprits. Landlords torched properties, everyone agrees. But renters did, too; New York City paid up to two thousand dollars to arson victims who had lost their furniture and clothing, and put them at the head of the line for hard-to-get public housing. Firemen spoke of seeing tenants sitting outside flaming buildings with their belongings neatly arranged beside them. Furthermore, scavengers used fires to destroy walls and steal fixtures and fittings. Perhaps a few tenants, furious at paying rent they couldn’t afford for services they weren’t getting, lit fires to strike back. (“We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.”)
Ansfield discusses these phenomena with admirable sensitivity yet warns against overstating their significance. Burning to get public housing was “minimal”; welfare arsonists and building strippers were “scapegoats.” Elizabeth Hinton has claimed that the inhabitants of the Bronx lit more fires than their landlords did. Ansfield, having none of it, scolds Hinton for her “unsound verdict.”
We don’t actually know who lit more fires. But Ansfield’s contention that the fires were “primarily” landlord-set diverges from most judgments at the time, including those of insurance fraud’s fiercest critics. Merola, the Bronx District Attorney, campaigned energetically against landlords. Yet, when asked what proportion of arson they committed, he guessed “about 20 percent.” Michael Jacobson, of the Arson Strike Force, was unyielding in exposing insurance arson. He now teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, and I asked him how much arson in the Bronx had been for profit. Thirty to forty per cent, he estimated. But, he specified, this included cases where landlords ordered fires and those where they merely abandoned their buildings, leaving tenants, thieves, or others to light the match.
“The landlords collected,” Genevieve Brooks insisted in an oral history. Ansfield quotes that line, but not what she said next, which is that the building strippers did, too—“everybody profited,” Brooks observed. Similarly, Ansfield twice quotes Hector Rivera, the fifteen-year-old arsonist, explaining that he set fires because “they hire me.” Ansfield implies that Rivera worked for landlords, ignoring his specification that “they” were thieves stealing plumbing fixtures and hardware. “As with everything in the city, there were small-time plays and big-scale scams,” the New York novelist Colson Whitehead writes, in reference to the arson epidemic, in “Crook Manifesto” (2023). “People setting fires every night,” a character observes, “and not just guys in it for the insurance.”
These multicausal explanations soften the accusatory focus on landlords but pull the lives of tenants into sharper detail. As the South Bronx’s private-housing market collapsed, many owners compensated for lost rents by retracting services. Shivering, tenants used ovens and electric heaters for warmth, which, especially in buildings with old wiring, caused fires. As the deteriorating tenements emptied, the arson began. Landlords burned to get insurance, scavengers to access valuable metal, and tenants to escape the doomed buildings for safer, better-maintained, and subsidized public housing. Fire was contagious. Tenants expecting their homes to burn had reason to light the fires themselves, to control when they happened and thus protect their lives and property.
Michael Jacobson interviewed convicted New York arsonists for his dissertation. Some burned for pay, some not. What united them was their “highly stressful lives.” Most had quarrelled with someone right before the act. Unfortunately, fires, by ripping households and neighborhoods apart, only compounded the stress. And surely the more fires that raged, the easier it was to imagine using arson to rob apartments, hurt competitors, or get revenge. (The deadliest fire, at the Puerto Rican Social Club, was orchestrated by a man motivated by jealousy.) In the holocaust of the South Bronx, lighting a match could seem like just hastening the inevitable.
Emphasizing arson’s complex motives is no defense of the system. Even fires set by vandals were “shaped by a larger political economy which included banks, landlords, and insurance companies,” Jacobson writes. Still, the relation between finance and fire was often indirect. Poverty has the power to make perpetrators of its victims, and Bronxites feared their neighbors as well as their landlords.
The thread tangles at the other end, too. Ansfield describes “vast fortunes” made from insurance arson. Yet claims rarely exceeded thirty thousand dollars, and the Bronx’s swiftly depreciating tenements were generally owned by petty and mid-tier operators, not Tom Wolfe-style masters of the universe. Joe Bald, the leader of the arson ring, had been an interior decorator, a furniture dealer, and a rabbi.
There were fires that benefitted Wall Street. The historian Dylan Gottlieb has explained how Hoboken property owners torched hundreds of inhabited tenements and rooming houses to clear space for yuppies’ luxury apartments. The Bronx fires, however, were a drain on the financial élite. Insurance arson wasn’t the richest squeezing the poorest. It was hustlers—slumlords, corrupt brokers, tough guys, owners in dire straits—defrauding large corporations. The poor were collateral damage.
Racial-capitalism theorists, emphasizing systematicity, tend to see historical traumas as features, not bugs. They envisage a vast, extractive structure in which, as Walter Johnson writes, “white supremacy justified the terms of imperial dispossession and capitalist exploitation.” But the Bronx had high unemployment, low property values, and large welfare rolls. How much was there to extract? Bronxites were less exploited by capitalists than mauled by an unexpected combination of policies and incentives that few outsiders bothered to notice. Ansfield, surveying the borough’s devastation, deems it “the core of twentieth-century racial capitalism.” One might alternatively see it as capitalism’s no man’s land. Rather than being central to the system, the Bronx hardly mattered to it at all. Sometimes that’s worse.
In July, 1977, near the arson wave’s peak, the power to New York cut out. The city had endured a blackout before, in 1965—a largely benign event memorialized in the flirty Doris Day comedy “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” This time, however, New York exploded. More than a thousand fires burned, and more than a thousand shops were ransacked. Crowds emptied the South Bronx furniture store where Vivian Vázquez Irizarry’s father worked; it shut down and he lost his job of seventeen years.
“Poor people have been waiting years for those lights to go out,” one woman explained. Musicians, treating the power outage as an impromptu arts grant, stole mixers and turntables. (“That sprung a whole new set of DJs,” the hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz recalled.) Others took baby food and diapers. The blackout exposed both the depth of people’s needs and the depth of their rage. It was a “collective reckoning,” Ansfield writes. The South Bronx burned, and “landlords were, for once, probably not the main culprits.”
Three months later, President Jimmy Carter arrived to survey the debris. The blackout, Carter’s visit, and the 1977 World Series turned the South Bronx into the country’s most famous slum. Paul Newman starred in the blockbuster movie “Fort Apache, the Bronx.” Ted Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa made pilgrimages. The South Bronx was as crucial to understanding U.S. cities, the Times declared, as Auschwitz was to understanding Nazism.
The negative attention pushed the authorities to act. Perverse incentives in insurance and welfare policies were removed. Insurers, alerted to the problem and granted permission to respond, grew more discriminating in their underwriting and more probing in their investigations. Fire marshals and police investigators became conspicuous presences in arson zones. The Arson Strike Force tried outreach to deter kids from setting fires (straying from its anti-landlord mission into “a racialized paradigm of juvenile delinquency,” Ansfield grumbles). It also identified arson-prone buildings and put their owners on notice (better, Ansfield feels, though still “far from mounting a confrontation with the property regime”).
Whatever their shortfalls, such measures appeared to work. The number of intentionally set fires in New York City buildings dropped by nearly two thirds from 1976 to 1984. This was a triumph, but also an indictment. Arson was fixable. How had it gone unfixed so long?
As the city recovered its budget, it poured vast sums into urban rehabilitation, especially in the Bronx. Suddenly, tenants’ groups got resources. By 1984, with help from Genevieve Brooks’s organization, families were moving into ranch houses on the former rubble field where Carter had once stood—wildflowers blooming in the burn scar.
The devastation Carter had witnessed arose from abandonment. The population rebounded soon afterward, though, and now parts of the South Bronx face the opposite phenomenon: gentrification. Ansfield describes a lavish party thrown, in 2015, to promote a residential and retail complex on the Harlem River which cost hundreds of millions to build. Celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Adrien Brody, and Naomi Campbell, along with leading New York politicians, drank Dom Pérignon amid loose bricks, fires burning in trash cans, and a sculpture made from bullet-riddled cars. “Ruin porn” is the name for this fetishizing of urban decay. Guests posted photos tagged #thebronxisburning.
Too soon. The memories of smoke-filled hallways, of desperate searches for family members, remain vivid. For more than a decade, economic forces, large and small, lit harrowing fires. These burned in the most populous city in the U.S., matched by others throughout the country, yet barely registered as news. Was all this, as Ansfield suggests, what capitalism required? In a way, that’s a consoling thought. The more dispiriting alternative is that it needn’t have happened at all, and that the Bronx’s burned-out homes were monuments not just to greed but to indifference. ♦
