1970s:
"The Bronx is burning"

The phrase "The Bronx is burning," attributed to Howard Cosell during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series featuring the New York Yankeesand Los Angeles Dodgers, refers to the arson epidemic caused by the total economic collapse of the South Bronx during the 1970s.

On October 5, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter paid an unscheduled visit to Charlotte Street while in NYC for a conference at the headquarters of the United Nations.

Charlotte Street at the time was a three-block devastated area of vacant lots and burned-out and abandoned buildings. The street had been so ravaged that part of it had been taken off official city maps in 1974.

Carter instructed Patricia Roberts Harris, head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to take steps to salvage the area.

Progress did not come until three years later, in 1980, when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan paid a visit to Charlotte Street, declaring that he had not "seen anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz".

by the American writer Tom Wolfe, presented the South Bronx as a nightmare world, not to be entered by middle or upper-class whites, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Primarily beginning in the 1980s, parts of the South Bronx started to experience urban renewal with rehabilitated and new residential structures, including subsidized multifamily townhomes and apartment buildings.

Between 1986 and 1994 over $1 billion were spent on rebuilding the area, more than fifty abandoned apartment buildings on the Major Deegan Expressway and the
Cross Bronx Expressway were renovated for residential use.