The Intrigue of Cities: Four Tales of the Bronx

Image by Urechi Oguguo, for Nina Cooke John’s Spring 2021 Columbia GSAPP course.

By Nina Cooke John

The Intrigue of Cities

Cities fascinate me. Multinational ones like New York and London, developing ones like Lagos and Mumbai, and smaller ones like Por-of-Spain, Trinidad and Newark, NJ. Whether your interests are in historic preservation, climate justice, racial justice or the empowerment of women, cities provide the raw material for deep investigation into each of those areas in addition to understanding how they overlap the larger study and construction of the built environment.

I came to America to start university at City College in New York in the late 1980s. I found myself navigating through a newfound life in the city while simultaneously navigating a newfound life in architecture. After two years, I transferred to Cornell University in rural Ithaca, New York. While at City College, I traversed the city, taking the subway for miles from the Bronx to Harlem to China Town and Brooklyn. My first year at Cornell, however, I never set foot off of the campus. Everything I needed was within the bounds of that vast property on the hill. I had been watching A Different World right after The Cosby Show every Thursday night and that depiction of the self-contained college campus and dorm life seemed to me to be the ‘real’ college experience. So, it was perfect.

I forged lasting friendships during those years, and continue to lean on a core group of colleagues, self-dubbed the ‘blackitects’, for creative support and guidance. Cornell took me on excursions to London, Paris, and Lugano to study the contexts of modernism; it did not, however, address the everyday realities of the disenfranchised. I wanted to understand how architecture could serve those at the margins, the people invisible to the academy. So, for my thesis I went back to the Bronx.

The Bronx: An Enigma Unwrapped

The Bronx. The Boogie Down Bronx. Of ill repute and The Bronx Is Burning. The only borough whose name is always preceded by the definite article, the Bronx seems to be the most mysterious of New York City’s five boroughs; not as hip as Brooklyn, and not as suburban as Queens. Unwrapping the enigma that is the Bronx, the final frontier of gentrification in New York City, certainly will not be fully done on these pages. But I say, back to the Bronx because it was the place of my first permanent residence in the United States.

While growing up in Jamaica, my summer visits were mainly rooted in Brooklyn and New Jersey. When I moved to New York, I lived with my uncle on the Grand Concourse. The Grand Concourse was once known as the ‘Park Avenue’ of the Bronx. Having a large apartment in one of the beautiful art deco buildings was a sign of social mobility. Designed by Louis Aloys Risse at the end of the 19th century, “Risse envisioned a wide boulevard stretching for miles that would rival the Champs-Élysées in Paris which was his inspiration...” [1].

When I was living there, the grand lobbies of many of the apartment buildings remained intact, in spite of the large-scale decay that many other buildings suffered in the Bronx. This was not quite the South Bronx, and our stop was 161st St./Yankee Stadium. We were also not in the heart of the West Indian community further north, bordering Westchester county. I did sometimes venture uptown to see my other uncle, but that trip involved a bus, to a bus to another bus common to intraborough transportation outside of Manhattan. It was sometimes easier for me to hop on the 4 train and head down to Brooklyn if I wanted to soak myself in some real Jamaican culture.

Collage by Angel Castillo, for Nina Cooke John’s Spring 2021 Columbia GSAPP course.

In-between and Inter-connected: The Multiplicity of the Black Experience

As with other ethnic enclaves throughout the city, the community often provides social and economic support to newly arrived immigrants and their extended families. When I arrived in the Bronx, I was fascinated by the in-betweenness of the West Indian community there and in Brooklyn; living with one foot in New York and the other ‘back home’. They seemed to reject assimilation, which for them meant joining the lowest ranks of the social hierarchy reserved for American Blacks. If they kept their heads down and did their jobs, whatever afflictions African Americans had would not make its way to them. They seemed to guard their otherness in the hopes of remaining just one rung above African Americans. But, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in her novel Americanah, “Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.” Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old migrant from Guinea, learned this when, in 1999, he was fatally shot as he was standing, unarmed, outside of his building in the Soundview section of the Bronx.

Being Jamaican is an important part of who I am. The way I see the layered, interconnectedness of the world, and by extension operate my practice, is a direct result of growing up on an island that looked outwards towards the UK and the US for economic and cultural influences, soaking it all up, then taking it back into our own processes of cultural production where reggae music is as much influenced by the melodies of Motown as by African percussion. My experience is similar to, but different from, many of the African American friends I met in school. However, in America, the multiplicity of the Black experience is erased. Tommy E writes that “Adichie’s Americanah challenges typical representations of race in America, and, resultantly, highlights many blind spots or simplified ideas about race that I (and anyone attempting to view others complexly) must actively reexamine and transcend.” It is this blind-spot — the space of the “in-between” — that the West Indian immigrant occupies. And it is out of this acculturation that hip-hop emerged in the Bronx in the early 1970s.

Claiming Space: The emergence of Hip hop

The Bronx has long housed immigrants moving into the borough looking for more space. Up until the 1950s, the Bronx was known as the “Jewish Borough.” The building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the 1940s, the first of Robert Moses’ motor vehicle-centered interventions, displaced Jewish families. With the continued white flight of the 1960s, the Bronx lost one in five residents. New migrants – African Americans fleeing overcrowding in Harlem, followed by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, then Jamaicans and Haitians and most recently, Nigerians and Ghanaians – moved in. Many of the Bronx’s African immigrants have arrived in the past 15 years and now represent about 10% of immigrants in the Bronx. The census reports that there are at least 16 different African languages spoken in the Bronx [2]. Hip hop emerged in the Bronx in the early ‘70s as first-generation and recent immigrant youth navigated their new environment.

The rec room parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in Morris Heights provided a safe space where these youth could try out the “dubbing” techniques they witnessed in Jamaica in the street dance scene of Kingston, merging spoken word and hard funk. They made their mark on the city as they claimed the space they desperately needed. Hip hop emerged amongst the despair and decay.

Hip hop encouraged the multiplicity of the black experience with rap music styles picking up local intonations as it migrated from the Bronx to cities across the country and the world. The resultant variegated styles include those of the young North African rap artists who emerged from the incubators of those same modern housing projects in the banlieues of Paris and Marseille that I visited with my architecture studio in the summer of 1993. The banlieues, the Bronxes of France, are the ground zero of contested space in France. As I set out to select sites for my thesis, The Urban Porch, I looked specifically for leftover spaces. My aim was to steal space, ruffneck style, creating public spaces that members of the community could use for cultural enactment – mimicking strategies of appropriation practiced by marginalized people all over the world.

Panorama by Angel Castillo, for Nina Cooke John’s Spring 2021 Columbia GSAPP course.

Perspective by Angel Castillo, for Nina Cooke John’s Spring 2021 Columbia GSAPP course.

The City: Space, Protest, Repression and Liberation

Our eyes were opened, last summer, to the importance of public space as we emerged from months of lockdown and tentatively connected with each other again in the safety of the outdoors. That same summer reinforced our understanding, as architects, of the spatial practice of protest as it unfolded in our urban environments. New Yorkers exercised their constitutional right to take over the streets in Black Lives Matter protests throughout the city. In Mott Haven in the Bronx, however, we witnessed a particular spatial counterstrategy of the police as they corralled protesters by surrounding them and blocking their movement using bicycles and other equipment. Whereas teargas encourages dispersion, kettling, as it is called, sweeps up and contains bystanders and protesters alike through an intense limiting of space and movement, releasing them only when the police allow it, often by arrests. The protest marches that followed in the Bronx, including along the Grand Concourse, were peaceful. The grand boulevard that continues to hold immigrant dreams and aspirations, was the scene of an influential act of citizenship which can only be played out in public space.

Looking Forward: Fundamentals of Living

For me, the fascination lies with all of it; the layered, intertwining and weaving of all these issues that make cities, and that makes the Bronx, the dynamic laboratories for ideas about the fundamentals of living. In particular, the migrant condition, the condition of transcontinental existence, the economic striving and the challenge of intergenerational cultural continuity in a foreign land, have been of interest to me. New York, with immigrant waves spanning more than a hundred years, continues to see arrivals of new immigrants from around the world, and will for a long time. The Bronx demonstrates for us all the possibilities of living that can come from this.

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1. From Conde, Ed. "The Grand Concourse: A Look At The Bronx's Most Famous Street - Welcome2thebronx™". Welcome2thebronx™, 2021, https://www.welcome2thebronx.com/2020/05/22/the-grand-concourse-a-look-at-the-bronxs-most-famous-street/.

2. Nytimes.com. 2014. “Influx Of African Immigrants Shifting National And New York Demographics” (Published 2014). [online]