Visiting the Longwood-Hunts Point neighborhood in the South Bronx today, it's hard to remember that only 30 years ago it looked like Dresden after the bombing, with abandonment the dominant characteristic. Today, a mix of new and old three- to eight-story apartment houses lines Kelly, Fox, Beck and Dawson Streets and Prospect Avenue. A once-empty school houses the thriving Banana Kelly High School, a lush green park is filled with trees showing solid age, and well-used playing fields occupy a vast space where rubble once dominated. The number of local businesses is increasing. Developer-built infill housing is scattered around. A beautifully restored elevated subway station anchors the district. And an ethnically and economically diverse population proudly calls the area home, a far cry from the day when departure was a universal goal.
My first visit to Kelly Street was in 1977. I was taken there by Ron Shiffman, a founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development. The purpose was to witness a mostly burned-out neighborhood for research I was doing on urban regeneration – because it turned out that beneath the dust, seeds of revitalization were just beginning to sprout. Experts had declared the area hopeless, beyond repair, an obvious candidate for demolition and "planned shrinkage" – a form of official redlining to force evacuation of targeted neighborhoods by withdrawing city services. Property owners, government and financial institutions had long since abandoned this once vibrant, densely populated middle-class community; the bleak landscape was an international poster child for extreme urban decay.
Under siege is an understatement for what I saw. Scattered abandoned buildings stood amid blocks upon blocks of mostly rubble-strewn lots. Vacant stores, an empty school and mounds of garbage filled the view – the typical condition of so much of the South Bronx in the post-urban renewal and highway clearance decades following World War II.
Hope was hard to find. Yet it sparked among a small group of highly motivated local residents determined to turn the place around. They didn’t know better than to believe it could be done. And they were led by a determined 23-year-old social worker named Harry De Rienzo.
Banana Kelly, they called themselves, in honor of the curve of Kelly Street where they started a long-term reclamation effort one building and one block at a time. “Don’t Move, Improve” became their motto, later adopted by community-based groups around the country inspired by the eventual success of Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, Inc., and signaling a new brand of community development.
Now, 30 years later, De Rienzo has written a terrific book, "The Concept of Community: Lessons From the Bronx," a book that tells the incredible story of how Banana Kelly was one of the critical successes lighting the way for the community-led resurgence of the Bronx – a resurgence initiated by local people whom everyone officially had given up on. This self-organized, citizen-motivated movement made it possible for developers and investors to follow (and then attempt to take full credit for the rejuvenation visible today).
In 1977, one just had to believe in the impossible: The city was bankrupt. Landlords were fleeing. No banks had any stake in the area. And the court system offered no help. There was no one to protest against.
