Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity. By Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York, New York University Press, 2019) 308 pp. $30.00

Abstract

The best way to study cities is through their neighborhoods, which offer the local consequences of national and city-wide policies. Gurock, a historian of New York’s districts and a former resident of Parkchester, provides an excellent analysis of this neighborhood, a unique Bronx area that seemed largely to avoid the conflict and collapse of the rest of the borough in the period from 1940 to 2017. This “apartment village” or “city within a city” of fifty-one buildings had its problems over the years, though not on the level of other Bronx communities. The physical structure declined over time; management under Helmsley neglected the buildings; suburbia beckoned, and a shift to condominiums all altered Parkchester. The East Bronx development, however, never reached the disaster that befell the South Bronx.Gurock uses a variety of research tools to develop his history. Most importantly, his willingness to go back into the neighborhood for oral-history accounts and to seek previous tenants for their recollections provides a sense of being there. His interviews indicate the importance of oral history in understanding neighborhoods. This type of research cannot be done in archives or through statistical analysis. It requires a hands-on approach and an understanding of the community, which Gurock’s approach represents superbly. Furthermore, by delving into the fields of architecture, intergroup relations, urban planning, and economics, Gurock ably fleshes out the history of this unusual housing project.Parkchester was the result of a project undertaken by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build lower-middle and working-class apartments in New York City as an investment and a foray into city planning. During a time of housing shortages due to the Depression and World War II, the city was eager to see private companies enter the housing field. A few years later, Metropolitan also built the better-known Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. Careful selection of tenants became the hallmark feature in both projects, resulting in a segregationist racial policy regarding who would live in this designed community. The company’s efforts to people the apartments initially with white ethnics excluded many African Americans who would have met the class and employment guidelines. Later, only after court decisions, legislation, and tenant activism forced the landlord to open fully to blacks and Hispanics in 1968 did Parkchester integrate.The enmity between the Irish and Jews, most evident in 1930s and early 1940s New York City, especially in the Bronx, did not appear in Parkchester. Moreover, as non-white minorities made their way into this housing, animosity between blacks and whites was minimal. Although whites eventually left the development, they did not flee en masse. Nor did the gang warfare and large-scale open hostility found even in neighborhoods near Parkchester erupt. In the 1990s, when Parkchester housed mainly African Americans, Africans, Latinos, Afro Caribbeans, and Asians, as well as Muslims and Hindus, the intergroup relations remained peaceful.Why antagonism did not occur is the book’s key question. Part of the answer lies in the willingness of religious leaders to work together. But apparently something special, as Gurock relates, existed in Parkchester. A sense of community, initially nurtured by Metropolitan and continued by others, sustained a neighborliness lacking elsewhere. Tenant associations, organized activities for children, an unarmed security force, and strict rules of behavior added to a peaceful village atmosphere that persisted through extensive population changes. Parkchester remained a highly desirable area with a continuation of the same class and occupational elements that the project had at its beginning. Gurock has provided an outstanding history of an extraordinary Bronx neighborhood. The Bronx tale is clearly about more than conflict and decay.