Nano Arnold

Mott Haven is not a neighborhood known for its fine dining, or nightlife, or high culture, or funkiness. But despite that – or just as likely, because of that – it is a fascinating neighborhood and has a fascinating history. A single burned-out-then-reconstrcuted plot of land in Mott Haven has seen enough drama for scores of blocks in other parts of the city.

 

Where is Mott Haven?

Mott Haven is the southern tip of the South Bronx – basically everything between 149th Street and the Harlem river east of the Bruckner Expressway. A little of Mott Haven’s distinctiveness is sometimes drowned in the larger “South Bronx” label, which incorporates Mott Haven as well as Melrose and a collection of other neighborhoods that varies depending on who you ask. It is very true that Mott Haven’s history is very closely tied to that of its South Bronx neighbors, but of course it still deserves recognition as a distinct entity.

 

History

Early development

Mott Haven got it’s start when the Morris family, then the owner of a huge swath of what is now the Bronx, allowed the construction of a railroad across part of their property and proceeded to sell land around the railroad for development. One of the people to purchase land from the Morrises was an inventor and industrialist named Jordan Mott, the inventor of the coal-fired stove. In 1828, Mott founded an ironworks on his new land by the Harlem River, and proceeded to divide the land he had purchased in order to develop houses for those he employed. The resulting development became known as Mott Haven, and a neighborhood was born.

Really, though, Mott Haven was much more a village than a neighborhood, as neither it, nor the rest of the Bronx, was yet part of New York City, which at that point consisted exclusively of Manhattan. The annexation of Mott Haven and its neighbors took place in two stages: the first in 1874 involved the annexation of three municipalities east of the Bronx River, the second in 1895 brought the town of Westchester as well as parts of Eastchester and Pelham (which section Mott Haven was included in is not clear from the documentation but it would seem to have been included in the first phase). This occurred three years prior to the more famous annexation of Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) in 1898.

Much of Mott Haven’s early significant development was industrial. Jordan Mott’s ironworks was the first major industry to take hold, but later, lumber companies and coal companies moved in, taking advantage of the canal Mott had built (where Canal Place now runs) as well as the railroad. Factories along East 138th Street turned the thoroughfare into the manufacturing center of the Bronx by the beginning of the 20th century (illustratively, half of all pianos made in America were built in this area). There was significant residential development, too. One of the most visible residential developments is a series of beautiful row houses, built in 1863. These row houses later became part of the Mott Haven Historical District. Around the turn of the century, an area known as “the Hub” developed around the intersection of Third Avenue and 149th Street. The Hub contained many boutiques and department stores that made it the center of the Bronx retail scene until it was eclipsed by Fordham Road years later. In 1909, the new Grand Concourse opened to traffic. Inspired by Paris’s Champs-Elysées, the Grand Concourse was (and is) a wide boulevard stretching for four miles through the Bronx, starting in Mott Haven. By the middle of the 1930s – yes, right in the middle of the great depression – over three hundred modern and art-deco apartment buildings had been constructed along the length of the Concourse (not all of them in Mott Haven by any means).

The people populating Mott Haven from the mid 1800s until around 1920 were largely German and German-American as well as Irish and Irish-American. A concentrated German-Jewish population grew up along East 149th Street, and a group of Irish residents clustered west of Lincoln Avenue. By the 1930s, the Irish were the dominant ethnicity in the neighborhood, and they left their mark in the taverns, dance halls, and restaurants they built along 138th Street and Willis Avenue.

Changes were coming, though, that would permanently transform the character of Mott Haven and its South Bronx neighbors.

 

The whole South Bronx meltdown

The South Bronx that everyone knows (or, perhaps, thinks they know) – the poor, depressed, derelict South Bronx of the 1970s – began in Mott Haven. The first sign of things to come came in the 1940s, when a group of social workers noticed a “pocket” of poverty along East 134th Street which they called “the South Bronx”  – prior to this, the Bronx had largely been spoken of as divided into an east Bronx and west Bronx, instead of north Bronx and a south Bronx. This isolated depressed corner of the otherwise well-off borough grew, until by 1970, the Bronx had gone from being an economically successful borough where people came to pursue the “American dream” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), to being a borough that was one of the poorest places in the United States. How such a drastic economic decline happened in the span of a few decades is still a matter of debate and cannot be attributed to a single cause.

One reason may have been the ramifications of the National Housing Act passed in 1949. This act made available federal funds for the clearance of “slums” and the construction of replacement housing. What this often led to was the replacement of huge areas that were majority-poor by chance with huge areas that were majority-poor on purpose. The construction of massive social housing projects in the 1950s and 60s permanently concentrated poverty wherever they were built, and in Mott Haven and the South Bronx, the government built a lot of social housing (in an effort at least partly led by Robert Moses).

Another reason for the decline of the South Bronx may have been city tax policy that incentivized much of the borough’s job base to leave the city. Dwindling jobs bred rising poverty.

In any case, by the time the 70s rolled around, Mott Haven was reeling from drug use, drug trafficking, violent crime, widespread poverty, building abandonment, and arson. If there is one phenomenon everyone could associate with Mott Haven and the South Bronx from that time period, it would be arson. The phrase “the Bronx is burning” came from this era; and a phrase has scarcely ever been less appropriate.

The South Bronx arson epidemic may have started accidentally (i.e. may not have been arson at first). Shortage of funds for maintenance of buildings (some say driven by post-war rent controls) could have meant decaying electrical systems; some fires were inevitable. But eventually, landlords and tenants discovered how to exploit insurance policies and city rehousing policy, respectively. Landlords found they could make more money burning their building and collecting insurance payouts than by selling the building, and tenants took advantage of the fact that the city of New York gave lump sum payments to many of those whose previous home had been destroyed by fire. Eventually, insurance payouts were capped and rehousing policy was changed, but until that happened, the Bronx averaged over 12,000 housing fires a year. This represented a loss of over forty percent of its housing stock.

 

Recovery

The climb back from the brink for Mott Haven and the South Bronx came slowly, starting in the 1980s. Community organizations, government, and citizens all share credit for eventually restoring Mott Haven to working order. Community development corporations (CDCs) negotiated to buy buildings at low cost (which would describe most buildings in the area at the time) and set about renovating them, often with volunteer labor. The loans they used to renovate buildings were often made possible by the Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977, that mandated evaluating banks for how they met the needs of low-income communities when deciding whether to grant approval for branch openings, mergers, and acquisitions. This act greatly reduced the practice known as “redlining,” where banks would refuse to loan money for a property anywhere within a demarcated area they saw as being too risky, regardless of the trustworthiness of the potential borrower. With newly available mortgages, CDCs were empowered to help renovate deteriorating buildings into affordable housing, helping to stabilize neighborhoods. Government funding, as well, helped enormously, with the City providing substantial portions of the funding for housing development as well.

The change in Mott Haven over the last two or three decades has been huge. Crime dropped precipitously in the following years, picking up steam during the term of Mayor Giuliani. From 1993 to 2010, total crime plummeted by a whopping 72 percent – to just over a quarter of what it once was. Murder is down 80 percent and burglaries are down 85 percent. Residents feel far more secure than they could in years previously and no longer feel the need – as one former resident recalled – to sleep with their shoes on in case their homes burned. Mott Haven may still be poor, but it is at least a functional community no longer in a state of crisis. Things are looking up.

 

Mott Haven today

People

Mott Haven, as noted, was predominantly Irish, German, and Jewish until the middle of the twentieth century. Then, many black and Puerto Rican immigrants and migrants began moving in, and today the population is almost entirely black and Hispanic – 73 percent the latter and 24 percent the former; with white, Asian, and other-race people making up the remaining three percent of the population (about one percent each). One thing that is notable about Mott Haven’s population is that it is relatively young compared to the rest of New York: 35 percent of the population is 17 years old or younger, while 24 percent of New Yorkers as a whole are the same age. Households and families are on average a touch larger as well. There are actually more single-mother households with children in Mott Haven than there are married-couple households with children. People from Mott Haven are less likely than others from the Bronx to speak English well, yet more likely to have been born in the United States.

Demographic changes could be on the horizon as an as-of-yet very tiny amount of “yuppie” type people (I certainly don’t mean that as an insult) have moved to Mott Haven in the constant search for affordable housing that is convenient to Manhattan. Much more likely to be white and middle-class than the current residents of Mott Haven, they could be the start of a “Williamsburgization” of Mott Haven (not that New York desperately needs another Williamsburg exactly) if their numbers continue to grow. Stay tuned.

(note: “White” and “Black” here refer to “white alone” and “black alone,” respectively. “Hispanic” refers to Hispanic of any race.)

 

Socioeconomic Conditions

As noted before, conditions in Mott Haven have drastically improved, and the area no longer resembles a war zone. That said, the area is still rather less economically successful and rather more crime-riddled than would be ideal.

Mott Haven is overwhelmingly working-class. The average income of households in Mott Haven is around 20k a year; this compares to slightly less than 33k for the average Bronxite and almost 57k annually for the average New Yorker. New York’s 16th congressional district, which includes Mott Haven, was in fact for many years the poorest district in the entire United States, with over 45 percent of its residents living below the poverty line (whether it remains the number one poorest district is unclear). Mott Haven also has a higher-than-average number of people on public assistance; 60 percent of residents received income support.

 

 

Housing

Like most New Yorkers, most residents of Mott Haven live in renter-occupied housing. The housing stock has improved tremendously since the the 1970s, with many new buildings built and old ones renovated in the intervening years. The Grand Concourse contains many notable examples of Art Deco apartment buildings, and many beautiful row houses line various streets. But probably the most  notable feature of housing in Mott Haven is its housing projects. The Bronx has more New York City Housing Authority projects than any other borough besides manhattan, and many of them are concentrated in Mott Haven. There are seventeen NCYHA projects in Mott Haven in all, most of them of the “tower in park” variety favored by urban planners at the time the projects were built. Though this has proved to be a disadvantageous format for apartment buildings in many instances, unlike some projects, Mott Haven’s tend not to be isolated from the surrounding street grid quite as severely, helping integrate project dwellers into the surrounding neighborhood more thoroughly than they otherwise would be.

 

Health

(note: the city of New York combines health statistics of Mott Haven with those of Hunts Point)

Health issues are a major problem in Mott Haven. I mean, health issues are always a problem no matter where they are, but Mott Haven just has more of them than would be expected. More than 43 percent of people in Mott Haven rate themselves as having fair or poor health, compared to 28 percent in the Bronx generally and 21 percent in New York City generally. Mott Haven and its South Bronx neighbors have very high levels of asthma, due in part to the many distribution centers, bus depots, and heavily-used expressways that populate the area. People in Mott Haven tend to be slightly less likely to be insured, as well as slightly more likely to smoke, than average New Yorkers. Critically, obesity in Mott Haven is high, with more than one if four adults obese (the rest of New York is not actually that far behind in this regard, however, with 20 percent obese). Those in Mott Haven are twice as likely to have diabetes and, tragically,  three times as likely to die from HIV/AIDS as New Yorkers in general. Resident of Mott Haven are also 50 percent more likely to suffer from what the city calls “serious psychological distress,” and have far more hospitalizations for mental illness than the citywide average. Alcohol related hospitalizations are twice the New York average and drug related hospitalizations are over four times the New York average. Encouragingly, Mott Haven actually has above average rates of cancer screenings and immunizations. Less encouragingly, its rate of teen pregnancy is twice that of New York City overall. Clearly, Mott Haven is facing substantial health challenges.

 

Education

Education is another area where Mott Haven is struggling. PS 154, an elementary school on East 154th Street, had a mere 23 percent of its students meet proficiency standards in English and 44 percent in math in 2010. Elementary school PS 43 on Brown Place fares slightly better; 40 percent of its students meet English standards and 54 percent met math standards. Among middle schools, the picture is even more bleak; No. 203 on Morris Avenue had scarcely eleven percent of its students score adequately on english tests and merely 14 percent on math tests. The high school scene is not particularly more encouraging. In response to these dismal conditions, several charter schools have opened up: the Bronx Success Academy, the Bronx Charter School for Children, and the Mott Haven Academy specifically for children in foster care and on child welfare. The Mott Haven Educational Complex opened in 2010 and provided very badly-needed classroom space for five different schools at once.

 

• • •

 

Mott Haven is quite the place. It’s seen better days – as a quiet leafy suburb of Manhattan in the 1800s – and worse days, in the turbulent 70s when it sometimes seemed as though the end was near. Mott Haven didn’t end then, though, and hopefully, will continue to address its current issues as innovatively and proactively as it did its past ones.

 

Extra photos