The Bronx

The Bronx gave the world hip-hop and the term "the South Bronx" as shorthand for urban decay—and both came from the same cause. When Robert Moses built the Cross Bronx Expressway (1948-1972), he carved a trench through functioning neighborhoods, displacing thousands of families and severing the street networks that sustained local businesses. Property values collapsed. Landlords torched buildings for insurance money. By the late 1970s, seven census tracts in the South Bronx had lost over 97% of their buildings.

DJ Kool Herc's party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on August 11, 1973 launched hip-hop from this rubble. The art form—born from block parties in burned-out neighborhoods—has since generated a global industry worth over $15 billion annually. The Bronx received almost none of that money.

The Bronx is the only New York City borough on the US mainland (the other four are on islands). Named for Swedish settler Jonas Bronck, who bought land here in 1639, it became part of New York City in 1898 and industrialized along the Harlem River corridor. The Grand Concourse—modeled on the Champs-Élysées—was the borough's architectural pride before the expressway destroyed its economic logic.

Recovery has been slow and uneven. The Bronx remains New York City's poorest borough—roughly 30% of residents live below the poverty line, and median household income is less than half Manhattan's. Yet the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo (the largest urban zoo in the US), and Yankee Stadium generate visitor economies that neighboring blocks barely touch.

The South Bronx's resurgence—artist studios, food halls, affordable housing developments—follows a pattern familiar from every gentrifying borough: capital returns to neighborhoods once it destroyed, and the residents who survived the worst years are often priced out by the recovery.

The Bronx invented an art form worth billions and remains too poor to benefit from it.