Continued...

Despite WHEDCo’s progress in the built environment and our holistic blend of programs, we still encounter many of the same problems that have plagued this community for years. WHEDCo staff works with parents and children they describe as being in constant stress and depression. Some of the symptoms are endemic to poverty, some to the urban trifecta of crowding, noise, and danger. Beneath this surface lies something even more disturbing: there seems to be an absence of good memories about the place they call home.

Environmental Psychologist Susan Saegert of Vanderbilt University has explored the disorientation and trauma of events that uproot families, and extinguish social structures, neighborhood traditions and cultures. When familiar places disappear, people who remain can literally lose their way. More than a year after Hurricane Katrina, Saegert examined the trauma wrought by the storm and the disruptions that occurred in significant relationships. She characterizes the post-traumatic symptoms she observed as “relational trauma”: something that causes a severe disruption in survivors’ relationships to social networks, home, neighborhood, city and physical environments.

While the destruction of the Bronx spanned more than a decade and was not a single cataclysmic event such as Katrina, it was nonetheless equally traumatic and profound. It shredded the social fabric of tens of thousands of lives, and resulted in a terrible loss of memory and an enduring and wholly unwarranted sense of shame and responsibility among today’s residents about what happened in and to the Bronx.

Fordham’s Professor Naison has been working for over a decade to create an oral history of the Bronx, from current residents, as well as those who left. He is unearthing a rich legacy that portrays the Bronx as a vortex of musical traditions where jazz, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop fused with Afro-Caribbean traditions. Depending on the decade, a child could walk down the streets of Hunts Point or Morrisania hearing live jazz, bebop, or mambo. Thelonius Monk, Herbie Hancock, Maxine Sullivan, Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, The Chantals, Dion, and later on Grandmaster Flash, all grew up in the South Bronx.

New types of music grew from the cultural migrations of the 1930’s and 1940s, when African Americans, Afro Caribbeans and Puerto Ricans converged in the South Bronx joining Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. Music flowed from generation to generation. Nowhere else in America, Naison says, has there been such cross-cultural musical creativity with firm institutional roots. In addition to music programs in schools and youth centers, the Bronx was home to theaters and clubs where live music was performed most nights and every weekend, where people went to listen and dance.

Hip-hop’s rise reflected a very different era. As the demolition raged, the Bronx lost more than 19,000 theater seats in dozens of venues. For performers, these clubs were pipelines to the recording industry. The 1970s fiscal crisis stripped schools of music and sports, closed scores of after school centers, and left children to their own devices. Angry lyrics reflected the despair, as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five illustrate in 1982’s “The Message”: “Broken glass everywhere, people pissin’ on the stairs, you know they just don’t care…Rats on the front porch, roaches in the back, junkies in the alley with a baseball bat.”

The Bronx produced some important music in this era. Two of the buildings where hip-hop pioneers lived during this era of displacement and devastation—General Sedgwick Houses and public housing’s Bronx River Houses—have just received a remarkable (and deserved) designation, as the birthplaces of hip-hop. An annual “Place Matters” ceremony, a joint project of City Lore and New York’s Municipal Art Society, is honoring these buildings as the places where DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) first played his “breakbeats” that inspired breakdancers, and where Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a collective of breakdancers and graffiti artists who used rhyming and music to channel youth energy away from violence.

The Bronx needs these—and more—opportunities for residents, especially young people, to learn about the extraordinary cultural history of their communities. WHEDCo’s next development, recently approved by the City of New York and now in the planning stage, is to create a place that directly confronts negative perceptions by celebrating and teaching the Bronx’s exceptional musical heritage. We are planning, in collaboration with neighborhood artists, and Naison’s Bronx History Project at Fordham, a space where elderly musicians can live, play, and compose as well as enjoy the companionship of other artists, and where younger would-be musicians can gain both mentorship and music lessons by building a school, theater and places to safely play outside.

Building social infrastructure into this affordable housing development project will present challenges as it remains difficult to stretch affordable housing dollars to build more than tenant meeting rooms, along with apartments, let alone a school, recreational center and performance venue. But the neighborhood is determined to see these components through.