Saving the Bronx River: An Excerpt From South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City

By Jill Jonnes

Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York City borough — ravaged in the 1970s and ’80s by disinvestment and fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by community activists — Jill Jonnes returns to chronicle the ongoing revival of the South Bronx. Though now globally renowned as the birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains America’s poorest urban congressional district. In this new edition, we meet the present generation of activists who are transforming their communities with the arts and greening, notably the restoration of the Bronx River. For better or worse, real estate investors have noticed, setting off new gentrification struggles. What follows is an excerpt from an excerpt from 3rd ed. South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of an American City (Fordham University Press, 2022).

South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City, 3rd ed.
by Jill Jonnes
Fordham University Press
October 2022, 608 pp.

Until the 21st century, few residents of New York City, much less the South Bronx, even knew there was a Bronx River, the City’s only river.  And why would anyone know? For more than a century, the banks and flowing waters of the lower Bronx River had long been largely fenced-off and out of sight behind an almost-solid wall of riverfront factories, gargantuan scrap metal yards, sprawling warehouses, and parking lots (including, starting in 1967, the massive Hunts Point wholesale food market). The lower five miles of the twenty-three mile river below the New York Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo served as an industrial dump and sewer, its few access points blocked by gigantic mounds of submerged cars, worn-out tires, less identifiable garbage, and rusting junk.

One of those hardy souls who managed to actually locate the river was David Shuffler, today the second Executive Director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. “I was fifteen,” he recalls, “going down to the Bronx River waterfront, sitting on a partially submerged car, planning how to clean up the river. There shouldn’t be cars in our river or tons of debris.”[1]

Twenty-five years earlier, another Bronx resident, older and more seasoned than Shuffler, had been moved by the same sense of outrage. Her name was Ruth Anderberg, and after leaving the Women’s Army Corps where she drove heavy trucks during WWII, she had moved in 1945 to the Fordham section of the north west Bronx. She carried with her two resolutions: a monthly outing to the opera, and a weekly trip to the nearby New York Botanical Garden. “That’s when I became aware there was a river,” she would later say. A beautiful river.

It would be yet another twenty years — while on a bus to the 1964 World’s Fair — before she caught a brief sight of the more southerly portion of river, almost completely buried in trash. “I thought, ‘What a shame! What a crime!’” A decade later, in 1974, as the South Bronx began to burn, Bronx Police Commander Anthony Bouza held a public meeting that Anderberg attended. He proposed organizing a river clean-up as one way to engage local youth, an alternative to  gangs. Bouza later articulated his thinking: “In Westchester, by my home, [the Bronx River] was a bucolic, sylvan, beautiful place. In the South Bronx, it was a yellow sewer. There were lots of tires, hundreds. Old refrigerators, auto bodies. One or two occasional human bodies. The river was a symptom of America’s attitudes towards the underclass, a powerful, physical metaphor.” Cleaning it up would presumably send a different message.

Anderberg would later recall that when Bouza mentioned the river at the public meeting, “I got up on my two feet and said, ‘Instead of just cleaning the river, why don’t we restore it?’ And they said: ‘Fine. You do it.’” Apparently she could find no “government agencies which admitted to having jurisdiction over the disastrous mess. So she quit her job as a secretary at Fordham University and went ahead without them,” first tackling the section between 177th and 180th Streets in the West Farms area, the first blocks below the zoo. “The scene Anderberg remembers was wild enough. There was 150 years worth of refuse, from a turn-of-the-century wine press from one of the little French restaurants that closed 90 years ago, to hopelessly broken machines from a riverside appliance repair store. Junk was piled 20 feet high along the banks. There were thousands of tires. Nearly every day people dumped dozens more.” [2]

In late May of 1974, Ruth Anderberg, wearing jeans and a sweater, directed 100 seventh-graders from I.S. 167 wielding rakes, shovels, and pitchforks as they bushwhacked their way towards the Bronx River. Working just off 177th Street, the boys and girls were creating a path of sorts as they hauled away rocks, tires, rusting debris, and chest-high clumps of weeds. One 13-year-old girl yelled to a passer-by, “We’re cleaning up New York City.” Anderberg had cajoled Bronx units of the National Guard, local tow-truck owners, and scrap dealers to lend their machines and prowess to her quixotic cause of making clean and visible this one part of the river just blocks from the gritty blight of the West Farms Square commercial hub. The haul in the first month: “six wrecked cars, two rusted horse trailers, 50 to 60 refrigerators, one discarded 25-foot lamppost, five rotted sofa beds, a mimeograph machine, two boiler tanks and the remains of an upright piano.” But now, Anderberg watched with delight as the kids excavated a final layer of debris, revealing in places actual grass and dirt. Equally exciting to witness: a city bucket crane in powerful action, scooping up what they finally deduced to be mounds of putrid fibers — tossed in the waters by a defunct upholstery company.[3]

By 1975, Anderberg had founded the non-profit Bronx River Restoration Project, and in the summer of 1979 hired 63 Youth Conservation Corps workers who spent eight weeks building a 600-foot retaining wall (largely of readily available old tires) where the riverbank — cleared of sunken cars, fridges, sofa beds, and of course tires but as yet lacking any vegetation — was starting to erode. Around this time, Nancy Wallace, a member of the White Plains City Council, showed up to help, and in 1983, she took over leadership from Anderberg. While what the volunteers had accomplished was heart-warming and impressive, to Wallace, “real money and real government commitment” were essential. Moreover, “Nobody in government was looking at the river as a whole.” [4] A variety of non-profit groups along the river were gradually drawn in, and a 1980 Master Plan guided their collective vision: “A clean, swimmable river enhanced with bike and walkways along its banks.” [5]

As the South Bronx was rebuilding its devastated cityscapes during the 1990s, volunteers with groups up and down the river slowly tackled the accumulated decades of industrial debris, even as illegal dumpers used the cover of night to unload more junked appliances and tires. The clean-up activists got to know one another, and in 1997 they coalesced into the Bronx River Working Group to advance the Master Plan mission. A dynamo named Jenny Hoffner from NYC’s Partnership for Parks was appointed coordinator. Recalls Lipson, “Congressman [Jose] Serrano had secured funding, and Jenny really opened our eyes. We were focused on the East River.” Hoffner sought out “local development corporations, environmental justice activists — to explore ways that these groups might connect their missions to the river.” One of those early community leaders was Majora Carter, then a 33-year-old life-long resident of Hunts Point in the South Bronx and employee of the POINT. Like many locals, Majora really had little idea she lived near a river. “Luckily,” reads a local history, “Majora had a new dog. Walking the dog one day, she was emboldened to explore a curious dead-end street. She found herself at water’s edge. The Bronx River flowed just three blocks from her childhood home. Stories like Majora’s fueled the engine of the Bronx River Project.” [6]

One of Carter’s roles as a community organizer at the POINT was serving as chair of the Bronx River Working Group. That group’s proselytizing (and small grants) galvanized everyone from Phipps Community Development to the Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice to join clean-ups, and to begin using and reclaiming the river. Down at the POINT, Executive Director Paul Lipson was pleased when Carter helped leveraged a $10,000 grant, spurring the City to create the neighborhood’s first legal public access point to the river in over 60 years. The three-acre Riverside Park at the end of Lafayette Avenue was fittingly where she had discovered the river on that dog walk. “We had lots and lots of waterfront and absolutely no access,” Lipson told the New York Times, “We started thinking, ‘There’s Chelsea Piers and the Hudson River Conservancy. Why shouldn’t we have some waterfront, too?” As for Carter, said Lipson, “She seized on this and she’s a great messaging person. She’s brilliant at it. God bless her!” [7]

The city’s powerful Parks Commissioner Henry Stern did not fail to notice all this energy and growing excitement. Despite decades of clean-ups, it was mind-boggling how much was still being dragged out of the river and off its banks: Just since 1997, almost sixty derelict cars, 340 tons of garbage, and 20,000 tires. On fully cleared river banks, volunteers had moved right in to plant almost 20,000 trees, shrubs, and grasses. Stern now embraced an updated version of Anderberg’s twenty-year-old Master Plan, and Wallace’s belief that only government had the money and power to restore the river. He declared 1999 to be The Year of the Bronx River. [8]

On April 24, 1999, the Working Group celebrated its new status with the first “Golden Ball Festival.” Starting in Bronxville in Westchester County, activists in a flotilla of canoes and kayaks launched a three-foot golden sphere, “a symbol of the sun, energy, and spirit of the Bronx River.” As they paddled alongside the Golden Ball, gleaming and glinting in the spring sunshine, a classical flutist played from one of the canoes, while on land dancers from the Arthur Aviles Typical Theater in Hunts Point emerged where possible to perform. “Along the route, there were community presentations, cleanups and tree plantings. The Golden Ball ended the day at Hunts Point Riverside Park.”

Explained Nancy Wallace: “It’s almost spiritual in nature. We’re starting to see the river as one universal link between all these communities — in a way unifying them.” [9] For the Working Group, the delightful day-long festival created a new sense of cohesion, terrific publicity for activists, politicians, and funders to parlay into more support, and a deadline for removing more debris and adding canoe put-ins for better public access. New partners joined in, and existing relationships became more solid. [10] Congressman Serrano was among those welcoming the Golden Ball as it bobbled onto the shore of Hunts Point Riverside Park. Nor was he among the public officials who then took off. “He didn’t want to leave,” recalls Torres.  “He had such a good time. He continued hanging out with everybody.” (An indelible memory from that day was the Congressman singlehandedly pushing the enormous sphere uphill along Garrison Avenue in its overland journey back to The POINT.) Over the years, Serrano secured almost $30 million in federal funds for the river’s revival, and served as a key ally for The Point. [11]

Twenty-five years after Ruth Anderberg attacked the twenty-foot wall of debris up near West Farms, and seven months after the first Golden Ball Festival, Parks Commissioner Henry Stern arrived with an official entourage on November 19, 1999, to stand with river activists on the “inhospitable, scrub-and-weed-covered” bank near the Sheridan Expressway and E. 174th Street. There they watched a giant crane pull yet another “rusty carcass of a vehicle from the water — a symbol, they hope, of the work to come…Sometime about 2010, Mr. Stern said, New Yorkers will be able to bicycle and hike through leafy, landscaped greenways from the edge of the Westchester border all the way down to Soundview, the gritty neighborhood on the tip of the South Bronx, where the river empties into the East River.” Stern pledged $60 million in public and private funds. [12]

In the spring of 2000, the first annual Bronx River Amazing Boat Flotilla, some fifty canoes set out to escort the Golden Ball all the way down the ever-cleaner, greener river. That fall, on October 14, Governor George F. Pataki (in a suit and tie no less!) came to canoe in the river’s waters near Hunt’s Point, and when he debarked, he announced an $11 million grant for riverside parks and bikeways. More than a year later, the Working Group transitioned to become the more powerful Bronx River Alliance, a permanent 501c3 heavily supported by the Parks Department, but able to raise private and public funds.

[PHOTO 5: The Bronx River Amazing Boat Flotilla became a much-enjoyed annual event. (NYC Parks Dept. Malcolm Pinckney)]

In 2001, the Bronx River Alliance formed and spearheaded the biggest cleaning up yet of the river — removing 89 automobiles, yet another 21,000 tires, and 85 tons of debris and litter. In the ensuing years, the Alliance focused on creating the promised riverside parks and greenway. In 2005, Maggie Scott Greenfield, an urban planner and transportation expert fleeing the boredom of a desk job, joined the Bronx River Alliance as its greenway coordinator. “A big part of my work was to keep things on track,” she says. In 2006 the two-acre Hunt’s Point Riverside Park opened, followed in 2009 by the 7-acre Concrete Plant Park, both offering waterside park space with fishing piers and boat launches. From Concrete Park an eleven-acre one-mile northbound greenway hugs the river and joins up to thirteen-acre Starlight Park.

“We hit a wall due to 2008 and the financial collapse,” says Greenfield, who recently stepped down as the Alliance’s Executive Director and Bronx River Administrator. [13] Still, good things continued to happen. On April 8, 2009, the first alewife herring in centuries were spotted returning from the ocean, miraculously heading up the river to their ancient spawning grounds where baby alewife had been re-introduced three years earlier. A beaver was seen! And immediately named “Jose” in honor of the Congressman, the river’s principal patron. The 19-acre Bronx River Forest, just above the Botanical Garden, was also being slowly retrieved from its longtime status as dumping ground. Instead, school children on field trips, families and urbanites in need of a nature break began to meander the trails criss-crossing these verdant woods and floodplain. The Bronx Forest was home to an astonishing 250 species of native flora (many planted in recent years) and fauna. There were also finally major upgrades along the Greenway. In early spring of 2020, the Alliance capped off years of hard-fought success when they finally moved into Bronx River House, its new ultra-green Parks Department staff offices, community center, and boathouse, perched on the water in Starlight Park. By 2020, a bicyclist starting at Soundview Park and peddling north to the Kensico Reservoir in Westchester County could complete almost the whole of that waterside journey on the 25-mile Bronx River Greenway.

Decades of work, hundreds of millions in public and private dollars, and countless volunteer hours have produced this wondrous restoration of New York City’s only freshwater river. Today, adults and children are kayaking and canoeing in the river. They gather in the new parks to barbecue, fish, and just chill out, while others pass through, strolling and biking the greenway. “Sometimes in the trenches,” says Greenfield, “you just feel like you are beating your head against a brick wall. Why does it take so long to do so many things?” But today the revived river that Anderberg dreamed of and worked hard for is an almost-hidden natural treasure cherished by the community.

Like the rest of New York, the River Alliance was hamstrung by the pandemic: employees needed to work from homes on the wrong side of the digital divide, while month after month cancelled group programs — for school kids, volunteers, or just paddling days — sapped the organization of revenue and momentum. The annual July flotilla had to be virtual! In late August, the non-profit wrote in its blog: “It would be a considerable understatement to say that 2020 has been a rough year…But it was against the backdrop of this crisis that 32 eager high school students” were chosen as paid summer interns to complete on-line sessions about water quality, flora and fauna, river history, a sustainable urban future, and how local adults navigated their own “green” career pathways. Each week offered a precious chance to re-connect with others, as eight students and two instructors (masked, socially-distanced) came together somewhere along the river to mulch, weed, monitor the water, or harvest food,. No surprise, after a year of remote learning, one student called this the “highlight of my summer,” saying it “gave me the motivation to become the change I want to see in the Bronx.”  [14] Today, the Alliance is settled in its new green offices and going strong — with programming for birders, mushroom hunters, boaters, and all manner of river education and fun.

For environmental justice activists wanting to enjoy the fruits of decades of work, there is nothing better than a mid-summer paddle down the Bronx River. Here one can luxuriate in a major on-going environmental win — the amazing resurrection of this fresh-water oasis flowing past forested banks, city scenes, new riverside parks and greenways, and on into the East River. And this January 2023, two dolphins showed up, swimming in the river off Starlight Park, thrilling every one who had the good fortune to see them. Twenty years ago, who could have imagined it? Ed Garcia Conde, blogger of the news site Welcome2The Bronx, says simply, “Being on the river is my favorite thing in the Bronx. It is so peaceful.”

[PHOTO 6: Concrete Park has become a uniquely urban riverfront oasis. (Bronx River Alliance)]

Jill Jonnes is author of multiple books including Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and its Tunnels, and Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape. Fordham University Press recently published an updated third edition of her landmark South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City, from which this post is excerpted.

[1] “I was fifteen…” McLaughlin, p. 191.

[2]“The scene Anderberg remembers….” By Barbara Stewart, “A River Rises,” NYT, December 3, 2000.

[3] “We’re cleaning up…” Allen M. Siegel “Bronx Project Is Lifting Face of River’s Banks,” NYT, May 25, 1974, p. 33.

[4] “Nobody in government…” By Barbara Stewart, “A River Rises” NYT (Dec. 3, 2000).

[5] “A clean, swimmable river…” By Maarten de Kadt, The Bronx River: An Environmental & Social History, (Charleston: The History Press, 2011), p. 71.

[6] “Luckily, Majora had a new dog…” Partnership for the Parks, “Discovery and restoration of the Bronx River,” p. 3.

[7] “We had lots and lots of waterfront…” Interview with author, November 13, 2019.

[8] Commissioner Henry Stern. De Kadt, p. 83.

[9] “It’s almost spiritual….”  By Stephen Paul deVillo, The Bronx River in History and Folklore (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2015), p. 208.

[10] “river….” Partnerships for Parks, “Discovery and Restoration of the Bronx River,” p. 6.

[11] “Bronx River …” By Hibah Ansari, “The Lasting Legacy of U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano,” The Bronx Ink Oct. 14, 2019.

[12] “inhospitable….” By Barbara Stewart, “In Bronx, a Plan for Reeling in Fish, Not Cars,” NYT Nov. 20, 1999.

[13] “We hit a wall….”  Interview of Greenfield by author, June 23, 2019.

[14] “It would be a considerable understatement….” “EELS in the Bronx River: A Virtual Internship Shaping Students For A Green Future,” Bronx River Alliance blog Aug. 31, 2020.