Episodes

During the 1970s – for the whole decade – the Bronx suffered an epidemic of fires and abandonment. This destroyed over 80 percent of the South Bronx housing stock making it look like a bombed out city during World War II. What exactly caused this? Some blamed its residents, others blamed the landlords. In 1975, Gelvin Stevenson, a Bronx economist and journalist tried to sound the alarm by telling the story of one building on one boulevard that once promised the American Dream — but then succumbed to abandonment; Roosevelt Gardens on the Grand Concourse.

In this episode, we investigate the toxic mix of invisible factors that turned the Bronx into a tinderbox

In 1978, Robert Davis was the youngest child to ever be sent to New York’s Rikers’ Island Jail. He was Black, from the Bronx, and only thirteen.

In this episode we look into Robert Davis’s life. We explore his old neighborhood in the South Bronx, his old middle school, and the media frenzy that surrounded his case. We explore how Robert was sucked into a riptide of tough-on-crime political theater that had consumed the country and New York City. And we try to find out where he ended up four decades later, long after his story had faded from the limelight and the city had forgotten his name.

In the 1970s, New York City was broke. Today, we know the city eventually bounced back, but at what cost? When a city is broke, who pays?

In 1970, Bella Abzug took on an incumbent Democratic Congressman––and won. A tough Jewish lawyer raised in the Bronx, Bella would become one of the icons of second-wave feminism, passing laws that changed the lives of men and women. 50 years after she first ran for Congress, Bella has had a resurgence. In the past few years there have been plays, movies, and TV shows about her life. Why does she still spark such fascination today? How did she rise to power so quickly? And why didn’t she stay in office longer? All we’ll say for now is that everyone we interviewed for this podcast couldn’t stop talking as soon as we said the words “Bella Abzug.”

On March 6, 1970, a townhouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village blew up. After unearthing large quantities of dynamite in the wreckage, local officials determined that the townhouse’s basement had been used as a makeshift bomb factory.

Three people died in the explosion and the two women who survived would be on the run for the rest of the decade. They were a group of white, upper class, twenty-somethings, who only a few years before demonstrated in peaceful protest against the Vietnam War.

What drove them to start building bombs in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse? The answer begins on college campuses in the late sixties.