Who burned the Bronx? Ansfield shows that most experts in the 1970s arrived at roughly the same answer: those people did it to themselves. The true origin of the fires lay in Washington, Albany, and New York’s Financial District…. Born in Flames makes its most important contribution by linking the Bronx’s devastation to the world of finance — specifically “the racially stratified market of property insurance.”
Above: Onlookers watch a fire burning in an apartment building in the Bronx in 1983.