Word: bronx
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three years ago the South Bronx became much more than a decaying inner-city neighborhood. On October 5, 1977, a motorcade of black limousines normally used to shuffle New York's elite around midtown Manhattan brought Jimmy Carter to Charlotte Street. And as Carter gazed at crippled tenements and mounds of garbage, the South Bronx became a symbol of the devastation of America's inner cities...
Charlotte Street shocked President Carter. "Here was this farmer from Georgia," commented Edgar Cordona, a South Bronx Community leader, "who came from a world of beautiful scenery, fishing ponds, to see that he is president of something unbelievable in the most powerful nation on earth...
...Patricia Harris, then the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and instructed her to "see which areas can still be salvaged. Get a map of the whole area and show me what could be done." These words became a hope to the residents of the South Bronx. Yet today Charlotte Street is still desolate--President Carter has yet to put his words into action...
Today, more than 600,000 live in the South Bronx, a population equalling that of Boston. But unlike Boston, one out of three of its residents are supported by public assistance: welfare, food stamps, social security, unemployment insurance or some other government program. Two years ago, Community Board 5, one of the six community boards of the South Bronx, had the highest welfare dependency rate in the United States. The 1970 census revealed a median annual income of $5,500, with $7,183 considered the baseline for a "low" standard of living in the New York area. At that time...
...every four live births in the South Bronx were born by mothers under 19 years old. Almost a third of the pregnant women in the area receive late or no prenatal care. The infant mortality rate is almost 50 per cent higher in the South Bronx than it is in New York City as a whole. And drug addiction and drug related deaths are twice as high...