The Bronx Is Burning

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler, 339 pages

In 1975, New York City, in many ways the capital of the modern world, teetered on the brink of collapse.  The bankrupt city government was refused a federal government bailout, sanitation workers held a ten day strike during which garbage piled up on the sidewalks, and laid off policemen rioted, shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge during rush hour.  The city bounced back in '76, serving as the focal point for the nation's bicentennial celebrations, hosting a successful Democratic National Convention, and cheering the Yankees into the World Series.  The subsequent sweep of the Yankees by the unstoppable Big Red Machine might have served as an omen for '77.  

As author Mahler chronicles, the momentous events of 1977 represented the convergence of a series of trends.  Rupert Murdoch's New York Post continued to change New York's media landscape.  Disco broke big, while punk grew in the East Village and hip hop conquered the Bronx.  Pudgy postman David Berkowitz terrorized the city as the ".44 Caliber Killer" and then as the "Son of Sam", killing 6 and wounding 7 in a series of random shootings that lasted twelve months.  A cascading series of failures in the city's power grid led to a blackout in mid-July that plunged the entire city into darkness, triggering widespread looting and arson.  Most obviously, the future of the city was weighed in the Democratic primary for mayor, which pitted incumbent technocrat Abe Beame against irrepressible radical Bella Abzug, opinionated loudmouth Ed Koch, and political Hamlet Mario Cuomo.  Yet for Mahler, the great story of '77 is the Yankees' championship season, throughout which manager Billy Martin fought his own personal demons as well as team owner George Steinbrenner and brash slugger Reggie Jackson. 

Mahler's account is written in a readable, straightforward documentary style, but the material is loaded with a symbolic importance far greater than the bare facts.  It is to the author's credit that he does not force interpretations onto these facts.  The Martin-Jackson feud can be seen as representative of an insecure, unhinged white establishment trying desperately to deny the legitimate achievements of rising blacks, or as locally-rooted working class ballplayers being eclipsed by mercenary free agent superstars, or neither, or both.  The Son of Sam murders certainly evoked the horror of urban anonymity (even as the discotheques promised the pleasures of that same anonymity), but also involved the hype of sensationalistic journalism.  The result is genuinely poetic, both a revelatory history and a love song to the city and its legendarily outsized personalities.