When Fausto Rodriguez, his wife and three children fled East Harlem two years ago in search of a house in a quieter, safer neighborhood, they headed across the river.
Not the Hudson -- the Harlem. Not to the suburban retreats of New Jersey -- to the South Bronx.
Mr. Rodriguez, a city police officer assigned to narcotics investigations, knew the rap on the South Bronx as well as anyone, maybe better: lawless, bombed out, drug-infested. But it was the other side of that story -- the less-known tale -- that led him to buy a new house smack in the middle of the enduring symbol of America's urban catastrophe.
In a city full of surprises, few are as striking as the contrast between the 20-year-old image of the burned-out South Bronx and the reality after what officials call the nation's largest urban rebuilding effort. With more than $1 billion in public dollars trained on the South Bronx since 1986, 19,000 apartments have been refurbished, more than 2,500 new houses have been built for working-class home buyers and 2,000 more are under construction.
More than 50 abandoned buildings that once stood like rotten teeth along major arteries like the Cross Bronx and Major Deegan expressways have been reclaimed as mid-rise apartment houses.
Even in the impoverished interior of the South Bronx, where rampant crime inspired the movie "Fort Apache, the Bronx," rows of one- and two-family homes with a suburban feel of vinyl siding, driveways and backyards have reappeared on blocks once burned, abandoned and left for dead.
The outside world has seen only glimpses of the changes: a new development here, a ground-breaking or a ribbon-cutting there. And while many patches of the South Bronx are still decayed and dangerous, the efforts taken together represent a fundamental shift for a section of the city that less than 20 years ago many considered a lost cause.
Mr. Rodriguez said that his fellow police officers "think I'm a little crazy because I moved to the Bronx," but he said the price of the house was good -- $165,000 -- the commute is easy and he feels safe there.
"I'm living pretty well," he said. A shiny maroon Voyager sits on the car pad out front, and inside, the furniture is new, compact discs fill a black rack and there is a small balcony overlooking the basketball court in the backyard.
Three years ago, his neighborhood was one of those urban prairies that telegraphed the desolation of the South Bronx. Now there are about 500 houses that sold at prices from $90,000 to $165,000 to working families who qualified for city and state subsidies. Many have first-floor rental apartments, keeping mortgage payments as low as $500 a month.
Even as the wave of development has swept the South Bronx, large stretches, particularly the Mott Haven section, have been left behind, and there the ravages of crime and drugs and decay have continued unabated. Even in the rebuilt neighborhoods, challenges remain. New stores for the new residents are few. Though crime tends to shy away from new developments, police and residents say, it doesn't migrate far. And amenities from parks to libraries remain scant.
A New South Bronx, Hard Against Decay
Many neighborhoods now look like works in progress, with distinct lines between the new and old South Bronx. On a recent day, Christine Daniels, an unemployed elderly woman wrapped in a large yellow sweater, sat on the porch of her tumble-down home, which had been marked for demolition after a recent fire, and wondered where she would live. Staying seemed out of the question.
All around her were new two-family houses. In the driveway of the house next door was a grey Nissan Sentra and a white Mercedes. Two ornamental lions adorned the wrought iron gate that guarded the house.
"There has been no more dramatic revival of a community in the country," said Paul S. Grogan, the president of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which aids housing groups nationwide. "It's particularly dramatic because the South Bronx went so far down, down to rubble. If it were more widely known what happened in the South Bronx, it could be a symbol of the possibility of revival."
He attributed the success of the effort to local housing groups that in many cases were involved in financing and marketing the developments and in assisting residents after they move in with everything from maintenance to social services.
Affordability And Community
Kathryn Wylde, the president of the New York City Housing Partnership, which has helped to develop thousands of houses in the South Bronx, said a variety of forces were attracting home buyers. Some are coming because good, affordable homes are scarce in much of the region. Others, particularly Hispanic immigrants, are drawn by a sense of community, not unlike the European immigrants who settled in the Bronx generations ago.
Although the town houses where Mr. Rodriguez and others live are the most visible signs of the new South Bronx, more than 17,000 vacant apartments have been rebuilt in scores of mid-sized buildings whose landlords abandoned them as white residents fled to the northern Bronx and the suburbs in the 1960's and 70's.
In the 1970's, many of those building became fuel for the arson fires that made the South Bronx infamous. But after Mayor Edward I. Koch initiated a $5 billion housing renovation plan in 1986, the city and nonprofit groups began renovating thousands of apartments each year.
"It was the fortuitous coming together of the need to spend the money and the inventory of vacancies," said Samuel Kramer, the director of Bronx planning in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Some See a Chance To Live a Dream
Officials say the new housing is largely serving people with enough money to move out of public housing or people who used to live in the South Bronx and are moving back.
"I lived in Spanish Harlem all my life," said David Garcia, a hotel maintenance worker, standing outside his two-family home on a street in Morrisania shared by new homes and old, tattered buildings. "This is a dream. Wouldn't you want to own your own home rather than live in the projects with 10,000 other people?"
Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx Borough President, said: "We're reversing flight. We're keeping middle- and working-class people in the Bronx."
Some community organizers contend the development has slighted poorer residents. "The approach has been to provide incentives for the moderate- and middle-income people to stay or move in and incentives for the poor people to leave or continue to double up," said Harold DeRienzo, a housing advocate in the South Bronx since the early 1970's.
Helen Schaub, who heads a school advocacy group, said she was repeatedly turned down as a tenant in renovated apartment buildings in the heart of the South Bronx because her $22,000 annual salary was too small.
Mr. Ferrer rejected the criticism, saying poorer people were not being displaced by more affluent residents. The new developments, he said, give working people the opportunity to get a better home without leaving their neighborhoods. "We change the demographics by adding something, not subtracting," he said.
While major highways carry motorists passing through the South Bronx, the renovation has gone largely unnoticed because the area remains isolated, physically and culturally. Few people commute to the South Bronx for work. Population shifts have made Spanish as common as English. And crime statistics, news reports and the ongoing debate over whether baseball fans are wary of going to Yankee Stadium have reinforced the outsiders' view of the South Bronx as fearsome and foreign.
Visitors are invariably surprised by the development. Norbert Figmik, a businessman from Bratislava in the Slovak Republic came to the South Bronx this month envisioning a place too dangerous even for the police and left saying, "I expected very, very bad, much worse than it is."
His expectations were understandable. The South Bronx's reputation was both well-earned and well-broadcast. President Jimmy Carter drew attention to the devastation while visiting a charred and abandoned Charlotte Street in 1977. Ronald Reagan returned in 1980 and said he had not "seen anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz."
Howard Cosell, announcing the 1977 World Series from Yankee Stadium declared "the Bronx is burning" as the camera panned a sky alive with fires. And in the 1981 film "Fort Apache, the Bronx," crime and depravity wear down Officer Murphy, played by Paul Newman, who says: "I'm as burned out as the damn building on Charlotte Street."
But Charlotte Street is now a development of 90 single-family homes on grassy lots that look like they were transported by tornado from Southern California. Metal grating on ground floor windows is the only reminder of their true address.
Fruit Trees Sprout, But It's No Eden
In his backyard there, Joe Santiago, a heating and air-conditioning engineer, grows pears and peaches and apples. "It's like a piece of the country inside the city," he said. "It's not like the 60's or the 70's."
Nor is it a Garden of Eden. Urban ills -- from drug abuse and violence to teen-age pregnancy and illiteracy -- are still epidemic in many South Bronx neighborhoods. The area has among the worst-rated public schools in the city, and police precincts there have some of the city's highest crime rates, after eastern Brooklyn and upper Manhattan.
The Rev. Paul LeBlanc, whose St. Pius V Roman Catholic parish in Mott Haven is overburdened by drugs, AIDS, homelessness and poverty, said the prevailing attitude about the South Bronx used to be "just let it die and, once it has gone, just bulldoze it. That's what I thought would happen." But, he added, "We haven't turned the corner yet. I think maybe we are on one knee."
Just the same, the progress is extraordinary considering the free-fall of the 1970's. Between 1970 and 1980 the population of the South Bronx -- an area that came to be defined as everything below Fordham Road -- plunged by more than 40 percent as over 300,000 people left. In the next decade, the slide ended as the area gained about 26,500 people.
Harvey Katowitz has lived the journey of the South Bronx at every stage. His family moved from Hunts Point in the 1960's when the area was in decline, but he returned as a narcotics officer in the 41st Precinct for less than a year in 1972 when it was known as Fort Apache.
He remembers a Wild West atmosphere of running down drug addicts in rotting tenements and then fighting his way past angry residents after making an arrest.
"This was probably the worst precinct to work in probably in the country," he said.
Assigned to another tour there in 1982 as a sergeant, he found the area relatively deserted. Fires had leveled whole blocks.
A decade later, he returned as commanding officer of the precinct. While it has the 10th highest number of homicides of the city's 75 precincts, the area is far calmer and congenial, he said. The precinct house is near a row of new, brick two-family homes in the Longwood Historic District. A new ball field across the street from the homes was the site of a drug-ridden apartment building 20 years ago, Captain Katowitz said.
"When I was here in 1972 we were chasing junkies through the tenements there," he said. "When I drove by this July 3rd, people were setting up for a barbecue and they invited me back the next day. I said, 'Wow, this is different.' "
Since much of the work has been completed since the 1990 census, it is not yet clear how the new housing has affected the social and economic profile of the South Bronx.
But Kevin Nunn, the president of the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, said recent interest by retail chains such as Bradlees and Pathmark in developing South Bronx locations is encouraging.
And new residents see improvements in their neighborhoods.
Frances Ortiz, a bank manager in Manhattan who bought a three-story town house in Mott Haven nearly four years ago, said that within weeks of her arrival "there was a big shootout with rifles and people shooting from the roof. The Sanitation Department forgot about us, and there were a lot of rats. Poor people from the neighborhood thought we were rich people moving in and knocked on our doors and asked for money."
But the situation has improved. The new homeowners were able to get the attention of the city government and the police, and relations between old and new residents have evened out, she said.
And people are beginning to notice. "When cabs take me home at night," she said, "they say: 'This looks so nice. This is the South Bronx? ' "
