Talk about bad luck: seven weeks before the devastating attack on the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein had signed a 99-year lease to manage the property. Yet in this detailed and candid account, the author shows how grit and persistence and a healthy dose of diplomacy helped create not only an extraordinary tribute to those who died on 9/11 but also reshaped the neighborhood into a vibrant place to work and live. New York governor Andrew Cuomo does not come off well, and neither does New Jersey governor Chris Christie, with their mutual pique directed at Mayor Mike Bloomberg for his expert management of the memorial site itself. And don’t get Silverstein started on the Port Authority, whose officials, in his opinion, were in way over their head. Were all these headaches for Silverstein worth it? Head to the memorial, preferably on a late-summer morning with a sky as blue as the day the towers fell, and gaze at the names of the perished around the two underground pools, both with cascading waterfalls and located on the exact footprints of the two towers, and you will find your answer.
For some, it’s hard to think of New York City’s northern borough without recalling Ogden Nash’s famous line “The Bronx? No Thonx!” Ian Frazier, whose previous books include Travels in Siberia and Great Plains, has been walking around the Bronx for 15 years, and beautifully proves in this book that sometimes the best stories in the world are a subway ride away. Jonas Bronck, who bought the land from local Lenape tribes, may be the name on the door, but the Bronx is about immigrants, the Yankees, the Young Lords, Grandmaster Flash, the worst neighborhood crime of Robert Moses (that would be the Cross Bronx Expressway), and the very brief residency of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader who lived in a fifth-floor apartment on Vyse Avenue in 1917 before heading back to Russia to help lead the revolution. Paradise Bronxis as much about its people as it is about its history and its streets, and Frazier turns the borough’s resurrection from its ravaged 60s and 70s into a feel-good story that is not in the least bit sappy.
