THE BRONX: THE FIRES
Why did The Bronx burn? Intentional government policy. During the fiscal crisis of the 70s the city closed six fire companies in the South Bronx, and reduced the size of several more (while actually adding fire companies in the more affluent—and more white—North Bronx).
As was the fad in both the public and private sectors during the 60s and 70s, Mayor John Lindsay had hired the RAND corporation to perform a computer-based analysis of the FDNY for the purpose of streamlining the budget. The report RAND produced was famously bad, typifying the axiom “garbage in, garbage out”: the data set it used was small and biased, and the analytical models applied were—for all intents and purposes—nonsense, ignoring basic factors such as geography (for instance, it ignored the presence of the river in estimating the time it would take a company from Harlem to respond to a fire in the South Bronx). In the final report, RAND recommended closing 13 fire companies across The Bronx and a few more throughout the city. When the report was released, the New York Times declared “COMPUTER HELPS FIRE DEPARTMENT!”
While the RAND report was flawed, it was more than likely the result of incompetence, not malice. Data science was still a nascent field and couldn’t possibly live up to the claims of its boosters. Either way, the report was invoked selectively to justify closures of fire houses in The Bronx and Harlem, while it was ignored where it recommended closing them in wealthier neighborhoods. In several cases interested city officials directly intervened to save stations in affluent constituencies.
The closure of fire stations combined with landlords’ lack of maintenance on their buildings (see previous post for the racist government policies which encouraged this) had only one possible outcome: fire. Whether intentionally set due to landlord arson or accidentally sparked due to faulty wiring, eliminating fire companies ensured that even a minor fire had time to spread. In the 70s and 80s nearly 80% of housing was destroyed in the South Bronx and over 250,000 people were displaced.
Thankfully, most of these fire companies have since been restored.