I met Ian Frazier at a six-way intersection in the South Bronx, where Prospect Avenue, Westchester Avenue, Longwood Avenue, and 160th Street chaotically meet. It was forecast to reach 96 degrees on this August day, and the street already felt like the inside of a rice cooker. Above us, a 5 train pulled into the elevated station with a roar; I could also hear cars honking their horns, trucks rattling and squeaking on their shocks, a bus heaving a sigh as it settled into a stop, an airplane flying low on approach to LaGuardia, a police siren, several jackhammers, and a guy shouting “Morning, fellas!” as he walked past.
Amid it all, Frazier had the contented, pleased air of someone introducing me to a secret waterfall. “This is a place I really like,” he told me. “This has been a really hopping center of the Bronx for a long time.” He pointed across the intersection to a bodega and a Dunkin’ Donuts. “That was where a famous jazz club used to be. I think it was called Club 845. Those steps right in front of it lead to the Manhattan-bound train, so I like to think of Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday coming out of there just at dawn, walking up those steps, and going back to Manhattan.”
“What has existed in a place, and what has happened there, are hard to cover up,” Frazier writes in his new book, Paradise Bronx, an ode to “New York’s greatest borough.” “The past bleeds through layers of accumulation like graffiti through whitewash.” Paradise Bronx brings that philosophy, which could serve as a credo for Frazier’s half-century career, to life.
To write the book, Frazier walked a thousand miles through the borough, talking to seemingly everyone he met, while simultaneously researching the Bronx’s centuries of history. In Paradise Bronx, the past and present always comingle, as Frazier the walker/reporter visits, observes, and contextualizes the physical places where history (both grand and quotidian) occurred. And so a stop at the Cedar Playground in Morris Heights leads to the story of Grandmaster Flash first being inspired by Kool Herc’s thundering speakers, which leads to Frazier wondering how the sound compared to the cannons of the British when they opened fire on Fort Washington from the same spot, a sound which made George Washington weep with despair.
As we walked along 161st Street, Frazier mentioned a woman from his book, Vivian Vázquez, who made a documentary called Decade of Fire about the 1970s in the Bronx. “Her father worked in a furniture store that was gutted in the ’77 riots,” Frazier said. “It was called Paradise Furniture. The number of ‘Paradise’ things that I found from that time—so many things were named ‘Paradise’!” The Paradise Lanes bowling alley sat across the Grand Concourse from Loew’s Paradise Theatre, a movie palace so glorious its ceiling featured moving clouds drifting across illuminated stars.
The most splendid chapters of Paradise Bronx hearken back to the paradise era, the first half of the 20th century, when the borough was a bustling metropolis of about a million and a half people. Kids played in the streets; adults traveled on the new subways into Manhattan for work; a population that, in 1930, was 50 percent Jewish learned to cohabitate with new arrivals from the Caribbean and the American South. “One must say this straight out,” Frazier writes. “Paradise Bronx did not end when Blacks and Puerto Ricans started moving in—more the opposite. With their arrival it became even better.” Frazier writes about a borough well supported by its city, full of amenities and services made for the comfort and happiness of its people. If you were a Bronx resident in that era, you could “swim in the Bronx River or the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, spend afternoons in a branch of the New York Public Library, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages coming from nearby apartments, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.”
For many Americans, their idea of the Bronx remains trapped in the 1970s, when fires and riots scoured much of the borough. Even for those who live in and love the borough now, much of its history—not just the paradise years but the centuries before—remains misunderstood and uncommemorated. Frazier loves the idea of uncovering what people might not clearly see—might not even be looking for—and connecting it to the present day.
This impulse, to find the stories in a place where many aren’t necessarily looking, has driven Frazier much of his career, since he came to New York City in 1974. He was a small-town kid from Ohio who’d then spent four years at Harvard and three months in Chicago writing copy at the porn magazine Oui. He wanted a job at the New Yorker, and he wrote a sample Talk of the Town, the franchise that leads every issue, about a guy who scooped ice cream for advertisements. “He could just scoop it exactly right,” Frazier recalled. “You’ve got mere seconds under the lights before it melts. I thought it was a good piece, but they didn’t run it.” But he did meet William Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor, who gave him a job.
Frazier knew nothing about New York. That was part of the appeal of the job. “The people who started the magazine were hicks,” Frazier said. “Harold Ross was from Aspen, before it was fabulous. Thurber was from Columbus. Joseph Mitchell, who was the most revered guy, was from a small town in North Carolina.” We walked past a man doing chin-ups on a bar of scaffolding, grunting quietly with each one. Frazier mused on Mitchell: “He was another explorer of the city. He walked all over, took buses all over. So I figured it was something that would probably work.”
It has worked for 50 years, with one interlude of unemployment during the Tina Brown era. Frazier is both the epitome of a New Yorker writer and so sui generis that he barely seems to exist at the same magazine as everyone else. He’s a tireless reporter and a careful observer, but even half a century in, there’s no hint of genteel omniscience to his writing; he’s as ingenuous and curious as the day he arrived in the city. “I’m opposed to expertise,” he has said, and in his writing he is forever learning, forever making discoveries he can’t wait to share with the reader. To have read Frazier over the years is to understand that the world is full of unusual and interesting people, and that New York is a place where profound stories might be found anywhere, from the Stella D’oro factory to New Palace Paint Supply, on East 180th Street, which sells paint to the city of New York in what Frazier believes to be the city’s unofficial official color, Statue of Liberty green. Frazier can write about anything, “no matter how silly, no matter how seemingly small,” Casey Cep, the author of Furious Hours, told me. “He looks at the world and all the wonderfully strange people in it with love.”
Frazier also publishes books—collections of his humor pieces for the magazine, many of which rank among the funniest ever written, but also long travelogues about the kinds of places that are sort of the New Palace Paint Supplys of the world. The long books come out every 10 years or so, and his longtime publisher, FSG, sometimes buys them based not on a detailed proposal but simply on Frazier talking about a new place he’s been thinking a lot about. Great Plains, a bestseller from 1989, is about finding community in the loneliest part of the continental United States. On the Rez (2000) is a tender exploration of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Travels in Siberia (2010) contains a description of the summer tundra I will never forget as long as I live: “On calm and sultry evenings as we busied ourselves around the camp, mosquitoes came at us as if shot from a fire hose.”
Though it’s as fundamentally foolish as declaring a Great American Novelist, if forced to pick a Great American Nonfiction Writer, I might choose Ian Frazier, because his work has always resolutely quested to explore, experience, and explain his nation. “He’s one of the reasons I became an American,” the writer Jamaica Kincaid, a longtime friend, told me. “I was always very hesitant about it. He makes you believe America is a great place, but he’s not blindly patriotic. His love of America is very illiberal. He loves John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Crazy Horse.”
“I consider myself an American patriot,” Frazier told me, “even though there are people who say they’re patriots who I think are criminals who should be locked up.” His view of America is of a place filled with regular people—those criminals aside—whose lives are interesting and whose stories are worth telling. Frazier’s eagerness to talk to anyone and his essential good humor also give him authority to condemn, in plain language, the evils plaguing the places he chronicles. In Paradise Bronx, his explanation of the top-down political disdain and the on-the-ground chaos that caused the crisis of the 1970s is clear-eyed. He’s blunt about the effects of the enormous interstate project that cut the Cross Bronx Expressway through the borough’s heart. “The subways built the modern Bronx,” he writes, “and the highways almost destroyed it.” There’s a running gag in the book about his anger at Robert Moses, culminating in his visit to Moses’ grave in Woodlawn Cemetery, where he gets “a special feeling” imagining Moses listening to the honking of horns and the grinding of truck gears on nearby Jerome Avenue. “A long time ago, in Morocco, I saw the tomb of a king over whose coffin a hafiz chants the Qur’an all day and all night,” Frazier writes with satisfaction. “The sounds of traffic at that intersection are Moses’s 24/7 Qur’an.”
We walked a few aimless blocks, chatting, before Frazier realized he no longer knew where we were. “I guess I’m gonna cheat,” he said resignedly, and consulted the map on his phone, poking at the screen with his index finger. On the next block, we both started at a flash of lipstick-red on the sidewalk—a spotted lanternfly. We took turns sneaking up and stomping, but each time the lanternfly fluttered away just before impact. “What’s that?” a woman said, alarmed at our behavior. “It’s an invasive species,” Frazier reassured her. To me he said, “They’re fast, but they do tire.” In the end, he was the one who finally squashed the bastard.
In 1977, in the wake of news reporting about turmoil in the South Bronx, President Jimmy Carter traveled through the neighborhood on an impromptu tour that made headlines and highlighted the government’s inability to do anything to help the people who lived there. The drive serves as a leitmotif in Paradise Bronx, and Frazier has walked the route Carter’s limo took many times. At the corner of Charlotte Street and Boston Road, Carter stepped out of his limo and stood, wearing a suit and tie, observing the destruction that stretched around him for blocks. His expression, Frazier writes, was blank and dazed: “For a president to allow himself to be seen when he appears so overwhelmed required self-sacrifice and moral fortitude.”
We approached that very intersection, which decades later is now a vibrant mix of apartment blocks and single-family homes. Frazier pointed out the house of his pal Willie, whom he likes to talk with when he’s in the neighborhood. “This was built by the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes,” a community housing group founded in 1974, he explained. “They knew they couldn’t fail at this. It was too big a risk. This was the Jimmy Carter corner!” While it condemns the individuals, institutions, and structural racism that wrecked Paradise Bronx, the book also identifies and valorizes the many activists and organizations who have driven the borough’s revival.
In nearby Crotona Park, Frazier wiped the last of the morning’s dew off a bench so we could sit down in the shade. He reapplied sunscreen to his ruddy, open face, the face of a Midwestern pastor—which his great-grandfather was. As in most photos, he was wearing a legendless baseball cap; though at 73 he looks a little smaller and older than he once did, he’d effortlessly accomplished a several-mile walk wearing jeans and a button-down while I’d sweated through my shorts. His good cheer and sly sense of humor have made him a varied collection of friends over the years, all of whom call him “Sandy.” He fishes with Jack Handey, the creator of “Deep Thoughts” on Saturday Night Live, and for many years he, Kincaid, and the ultra-highbrow essayist George W.S. Trow were inseparable. “I had just come from the West Indies, where everyone’s Black,” Kincaid told me. “I didn’t understand American racism at all. I often thought people were being rude and had no manners when they were in fact being racist.” Frazier and Trow, she told me, “helped me get through my life in New York when I was young. I was protected by these people who simply had no interest in racism.”
When I asked Kincaid what she thought about Frazier writing a book about a mostly Black and brown borough, she said, “I wish people could model themselves after Sandy. He’s very aware of the problem with being a white person.” His whiteness, she said, is something he knows he must surmount to write about the America he’s always found most fascinating, the one in which white people are supporting players—almost intruders. “In a way, he has more interest in African American and Native American life and culture than he does in white people,” she said. “Not as a voyeur. For him, that’s real America. African Americans and Native Americans. You start there. And then you ask them, ‘Can I join you?’ ”
As a group of teenagers, all Black, trooped past us wearing matching T-shirts and carrying brooms and rakes, I asked Frazier if he felt a special responsibility as a white person writing about a mostly nonwhite place. When he wrote On the Rez, he said, some readers did not like the portrait he painted of reservation life; the affectionate irreverence of the television show Reservation Dogs makes him think, he says now, that he got it mostly right. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that there are perils to writing about other people’s lives without the expertise of lived experience. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I took criticism for this book,” he said. But he has a career reporter’s appreciation for the power of curiosity and observation. “You try and say what you see, and try and get it as straight as you can,” he said.
To Cep, Frazier’s commitment to “saying what you see” has, itself, a moral valence. “His eye for detail and incredibly descriptive writing style,” she said, are a product of him giving his subjects “loving attention. Which I think is a writerly discipline, but also an ethical commitment.” Kincaid, for her part, told me she has faith in Frazier’s powers of observation, no matter where he’s reporting. “He’s very aware of the tiniest injustice,” she said.
At a nearby picnic table, guys played rap from big Bluetooth speakers. The teenagers spread themselves over our sector of the park and began picking up trash. Frazier said, “They’re cleaning up for Old Timers Day,” a yearly event he chronicles in the book’s most perfect chapter. He marvels that the event comes together every year despite lacking any website, any flyers, any schedule—no visible bureaucracy at all. “Just a lot of people,” he writes, “and those tents that don’t seem to have a name other than ‘tents,’ but they’re not really tents, because they’re just a tent roof supported by poles at the four corners. Shelters? Pavilions? Canopies? I don’t know what they’re called. When I asked people what they called them, they said, ‘I don’t know—tents?’ ” He continues,
Red and light blue and pink and yellow tents like these create a sort of enchanted-village effect among the trees, as barbecue smoke rises through the greenery. Every year, families are at the same places in the gathering, which makes it easier for their friends to find them.
Throughout the book, Frazier repeats a wish that the city invested in more commemorative plaques for places he thinks deserve them: the house on Kelly Street where Sonia Sotomayor grew up, or the steps where the “minister of peace” for the Ghetto Brothers gang was shot in 1971—an act that, Frazier argues, indirectly allowed hip-hop to be born in the Bronx.
“Maybe I talk about plaques more than I should,” Frazier told me. “But I ask about them all the time, and I get no response. Nobody is interested in it.” He shook his head. “I feel that if you say, ‘This is an important place where people did important things,’ then it will not be just used. It will not be discarded.” In its insistence upon closely observing the past and present, Paradise Bronx is in and of itself an attempt to create a kind of plaque commemorating the Bronx entire. “A plaque,” he said, “at least slows you down, before you trash something.”
Frazier’s wife is also a writer; his daughter has published a number of humor pieces in the New Yorker herself. “But the amount of precarity involved—you must know this—it’s horrible,” he said. “I mean, people don’t pay you.” One of his great Shouts and Murmurs stories, “Coyote v. Acme,” was adapted into a big-budget movie starring an animated Wile E. Coyote and a live-action Will Forte as his attorney in a product-liability lawsuit against the Acme Corporation. Frazier only found out they were actually making the movie when a friend he’d worked with at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea, who’d moved to Albuquerque, emailed to tell him the movie was filming on her street. “They hadn’t told anyone,” he said, despite his option contract stipulating he’d get paid the day they commenced photography.
Warner Bros. Discovery recently shelved the finished movie, despite reportedly positive test screenings, to take a $30 million tax write-off. “David Zaslav,” Frazier said. “That fucking guy.”
So why write? Before that great-grandfather of Frazier’s, Johannes Bachman, became a Dutch Reform preacher, he was a surveyor in Switzerland. When he received the call, his boss warned him that he was giving up a comfortable surveyor’s life by enrolling in the St. Chrischona Mission Institute in Basel. Frazier recalled what, per family legend, his great-grandfather said in response: “I have the greatest privilege on Earth, to point immortal souls to God.” He leaned back on the park bench and looked around at the green city oasis, the rows of folding tables ready for Old Timers Day, the men smoking blunts and good-naturedly arguing with one another. “That’s how he saw it,” Frazier said. “In a secular way, that’s how I see literature.”
We walked to the El station and Frazier went up the stairs to head home to New Jersey. As the train rattled overhead, I thought about a declaration Frazier makes in Paradise Bronx. “Everybody who lives out in the country in America should move to a city and live there, at least for a while,” he writes. “Just to see what it’s like. The experience will knock the rust off you and rearrange your mind.” When I’d asked Frazier, the small-town boy who’d come to the big city and had the rust knocked off, he volunteered that the ideal location for those rural people to live would be the precise Prospect Avenue intersection where we’d met. Demonstrating what would happen to them if they did, he vibrated his whole face, a slightly mad look in his eye. “That’ll ring your head like a bell,” he said.
