Ian Frazier’s Tour of “Paradise Bronx”

About this episode

<p>“I like to look at places that people aren’t seeing,” says <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/ian-frazier">Ian Frazier</a>, the author of “Great Plains” and “Travels in Siberia,” and the new “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Bronx-Times-Greatest-Borough/dp/0374280568/?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50">Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough</a>.” “Not only do people not know about” the Bronx, “but what they know about it is wrong.”  The book, which was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/paradise-bronx">excerpted recently</a> in <i>The New Yorker</i>, came out of fifteen years’ worth of long walks through the city streets, and on a hot morning recently, he invited a colleague, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/zach-helfand">Zach Helfand</a>, to join him on foot. They admired the majestic Romanesque-style stonework of the High Bridge, where Edgar Allan Poe would walk while mourning his wife, in the eighteen-forties; the impressively tangled connections of the interstate highway system that engineers once called “chicken guts”; and walked east to the Cedar Playground, which has a strong claim to being the birthplace of hip-hop.  </p><p><i>Note: The segment misstates the year Edgar Allan Poe moved to the Bronx. Poe moved to New York City in 1844, and to the Bronx in 1846. </i></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>