Paradise bronx, p.50
Paradise Bronx, page 50
The career led her to the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), the nonprofit on the Grand Concourse that had stepped up during the crises of crack and AIDS. Carolyn McLaughlin, CAB’s executive director (now retired), was one of the city’s nonprofit dynamos. McLaughlin grew up in western Pennsylvania, where she graduated from Allegheny College and married a Kenyan fellow student. In 1968, she and her husband moved to the Bronx and she found a job as a caseworker with the city’s welfare department. They had a son, the couple divorced, and she got her master’s at the Columbia University School of Social Work. She remarried and for some years ran programs for the blind in senior citizen centers.
In 1979, the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies hired McLaughlin as executive director of the Citizens Advice Bureau office in the Bronx. It had one paid employee beside herself, two interns, and a fifty-thousand-dollar annual budget. As the head of CAB for the next thirty-four years, she built it into a major force for local assistance and improvement. During her tenure, it changed its name to BronxWorks. Its core mission—to give advice—covers a lot of ground. Its motto is “Whatever your problem, we are here to help.”
She and Vázquez have been friends and allies ever since McLaughlin hired her in the late nineties to run CAB’s after-school programs for children. McLaughlin credits Vázquez as one of the main creators of CAB’s success. Some of the programs taught English and reading to children and their immigrant parents, which also had a community-building function as the parents in the classes got to know one another. Vázquez trained the staff to teach reading by the Whole Language method, which considers words as units, in contrast to the phonics approach of breaking them down into letters and sounding them out. Whole Language presents words not as codes to be cracked but as objects used for a purpose, with a connection to the students’ everyday lives. This meant taking account of their surroundings.
At the time, many of the surroundings were ruins. Why the South Bronx had burned had never stopped bothering her. Senator Moynihan talked about social pathologies and said the people of the Bronx must not want housing or they wouldn’t burn it down. They destroyed their own neighborhoods because these people had something wrong with them, according to him. Vázquez took offense at the explanation, and did not believe it, but she was afraid that she and others had internalized it somehow. For her teaching to make sense in the holistic way she wanted, the question “Why did the Bronx burn?” had to be part of it.
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In the 1990s and early 2000s, the New York City Department of Education broke up many of the city’s bigger high schools into smaller ones, sometimes starting them from scratch with the help of community nonprofits. In 2002, CAB collaborated with a public high school principal to create the Community School for Social Justice, in Mott Haven. Vázquez helped devise the theme of the new high school, hire the teachers, select the students, and write the curriculum. Julia Steele Allen, a twenty-three-year-old activist and performer raised in Manhattan, who had recently left college in California, joined the CAB staff. Together she and Vázquez planned an introductory course in recent Bronx history.
They had never heard of such a course and put it together as they went along. The two had read A Plague on Your Houses: How New York Was Burned Down and Public Health Crumbled, by Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, which had come out a few years earlier. The Wallaces described how an operations research management philosophy resulted in the decision to shut down firehouses during a fire epidemic. Allen and Vázquez’s curriculum looked for that kind of cause and effect in the disaster. They considered the redlining of neighborhoods, the chaos of highway construction, the disinvestment in buildings and infrastructure, the city’s financial crisis, the onset of the fires, and the rise of graffiti and hip-hop. The course was intended for ninth graders as an introduction to the school.
Before the school year started, administrators reviewed their curriculum and rejected it. They said that by treating graffiti as a legitimate form of expression it glorified vandalism, and that its overall approach was “too one-sided.” The decision presaged a wider falling-out; the relationship between the school’s principal and CAB ended two years later. But Allen and Vázquez believed they had been onto something with the course, and they kept thinking about it. Allen told me, “Although the course didn’t get taught at that time, it started an ongoing conversation between Vivian and me to get this history to the young people of the Bronx, who get this stigma of being from the Bronx but don’t have access to this incredible story. We really wanted to reframe it—like, ‘The people of the Bronx didn’t burn the Bronx, the people of the Bronx saved it, and that’s, like, your history.’”
Vázquez continued working with after-school programs; Allen moved on to other community organizing jobs, then decided to go back to California and finish her degree. One night, not long after she moved there, she dreamed that she and Vivian turned their Bronx history course into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. (She thinks being in the moviemaking capital influenced her subconsciously.) So much had happened during the period covered in their course; story lines for a movie seemed to be everywhere. Allen called Vázquez in a rapture over the dream and described the blockbuster-to-be. Vázquez liked the idea, and from then on, the two aimed themselves at making a movie. Allen received her BA in Performance Activism at the New College of California, and in 2008 moved back to New York, where she and Vázquez continued to meet and talk. There was a major drawback: Neither of them had ever made a movie or knew anything about making one.
Coincidentally, a person who had made movies, and on a big scale, was dreaming along the same lines. Baz Luhrmann, the Australian filmmaker famous for his splashy style, also wanted to do a blockbuster drawn from recent Bronx history. According to his later comments, he started thinking about this movie in the early 2000s. He imagined it as a fast-moving, epic panorama sprawling through events such as the fires and the Blackout and the rise of disco and hip-hop. The abundance of plot would extend beyond the scope of a regular film, so he planned to do it as a series of episodes on Netflix, which was looking for multi-episode content at the time and could afford to spend a lot of money.
Julia Allen had a friend, Gretchen Hildebran, who grew up in a small town in Vermont. Hildebran’s family never fit in there, but that was fine with Hildebran, because it gave her the experience of being an outsider—a useful perspective for a documentary filmmaker. She had not yet done a feature-length doc (as the word is abbreviated in doc circles). Now living in the city, she was editing films for the United Nations and making harm-reduction spots for state health agencies and the like. Recently she had completed a short subject about gay couples raising children in Kentucky, and how the state’s proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage would affect them. At one of Allen and Vázquez’s meetings, the subject of Hildebran came up. Hildebran told me, “Julia was, like, brains on fire with this idea of working with Vivian, and one day she came to me and said, ‘You know how to make movies.’”
Allen introduced Hildebran to Vázquez, and now there were three at the discussions of how to proceed—which turned out to be, slowly. As a first step, Hildebran lowered the sights. The siren-song desire for the blockbuster and the epic can throw you. It’s exciting to think about, but then you have to step back. A form that’s too big can leave you with nothing. Overreaching for the epic has been a recurring artistic problem in America. Hildebran said that rather than wedding themselves to the sweeping fictional blockbuster, they should first try for a nonfiction documentary. If that got attention, then they could think about a bigger, fictional movie. Vázquez and Allen agreed. Now they had the format of their film: It would be a feature documentary. In time, it evolved into a film directed by both Hildebran and Vázquez and produced by all three.
They considered their resources. First was Vázquez herself, who had grown up in the story. She could be a powerful on-camera presence. As a family, the Vázquezes had taken a lot of photos and made home movies. That suggested a biographical element, and maybe a structure. None of the co-producers sat down and wrote a screenplay. They thought they would ask people to talk about their experiences of the fire years, and work from there. Hildebran shot the first footage—scenes of Vázquez talking with family and neighbors—in 2008.
Finishing the film took ten more years; during that time, none of them quit her day job. Vázquez continued to run after-school programs, moving to the New Settlement Community Center and then to other Bronx nonprofits. Allen worked as a community organizer and parents’ advocate and toured with a play about solitary confinement. For a while, Hildebran had an assistantship at Big Noise Films, known for its documentary Dirty Wars, and she continued freelance film editing and producing. She told Vázquez and Allen they could do the doc on a modest scale for a local audience, or as a full-length feature. The second would be a less-sure thing and require a bigger time commitment. At this in-or-out point all three agreed to go with the full-length feature film. They got serious about looking for support, held an online fundraiser on Kickstarter, raised money from family and friends, and searched for potential big-time funders, many of whom told them that nobody would go to see a film about the Bronx.
A break came when a group that connects film projects with funders put them in touch with Chi-hui Yang, of the Ford Foundation. He liked their idea, and when the foundation provided some backing, it gave them a legitimacy sometimes referred to as the “Ford halo.” ITVS (Independent Television Services) then joined the funders—another boost, because ITVS supports programs that appear on Public Broadcasting, which meant that when they finished their film PBS television might air it. Eventually more than a dozen major organizations contributed, including ITVS, PBS, the Ford Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, Black Public Media, the New York Council on the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Women in Film Finishing Fund, the DCTV Rough Cut Lab, Docs in Progress, and WMM (Women Make Movies).
Meanwhile, Netflix and others plentifully funded Baz Luhrmann. When Allen, who handled research for their documentary, went in search of archival news footage, she often arrived at CBS News or the Associated Press or Getty Images or wherever to find that researchers for the Luhrmann film had been there the day before. She felt she sometimes lost out in getting clips. On the other hand, the Luhrmann crew paid to have some of the old, falling-apart film converted to digital, and the Decade of Fire project was able to use some of that rescued footage. Luhrmann’s project kept to a demanding and speeded-up schedule. Filming for his series, to be titled The Get Down, started in 2015.
People often told Vázquez and company that they should ask Jennifer Lopez to fund their movie and be in it. This happened so often, they referred to it as “getting J-Loed.” When offered by a potential funder, the suggestion was a synonym for no. Lopez seemed an unlikely choice anyway, and they never considered her. But potential sources of money wanted a celebrity! The co-producers thought of celebrities who might be interested, but in the end decided that nobody famous should tell this story of Bronx neighborhood people. This brought them back to Vázquez.
Viewed from a distance, the larger plot did not provide enough points where her family’s past coincided with it. The Vázquezes’ building hadn’t burned. The one personal-historic intersection was her father’s losing his job at Paradise Furniture because of the Blackout. But if the film concentrated instead on Vivian herself, and on her quest for meaning in the disaster, it could look at her as a part standing for the whole. Hildebran told me, “Vivian is not an actor, she’s not a historian, she’s just a person. And she really did want to tell this story. She was super committed. She would try anything, and it was lucky we had these years of getting to know each other before we got to that point of intensity because she had to trust that we were going to do justice to her story.”
Vázquez is soft-spoken but intense; she’s the teacher who lets you know you’ve done right or wrong with just a look. She told me she learned to hold her emotions in check because she always hated the cliché of the emotional Latina. On-screen her self-possession comes off well. A writer friend of mine who has a problem of weeping at the poignancy of his own writing when he reads in public says that an acting teacher told him, “When you cry, your audience doesn’t have to.” But the opposite, fortunately, is also true. As the film concentrates on Vivian, her restraint draws the viewer in. But during the filming, she and her co-producers agreed that at some point she also had to let go and reach out with strong feeling, like someone stepping out from behind a door.
Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down aired on Netflix between August 2016 and April 2017, with fanfare that included ubiquitous subway ads. The series is mainly about the music business and some of its young aspirants in the Bronx, and how a period of civic breakdown backlit the rise of disco and hip-hop. Lots of city sunsets, streetlights, disco lights, singing, dancing, gang clashes; the flames of burning buildings flicker. Mylene, a girl with a beautiful voice, wants to break into disco, but her father, a repressive Pentecostal preacher, sends her to her room. The boy who loves her, a gifted poet nicknamed “Books,” dreams of being with her but is afraid of jeopardizing his rap career. He and his friends learn the deejaying secrets of a character based on Grandmaster Flash.
Drug dealers, a political boss played by Jimmy Smits, a Congressman Koch who hates graffiti, and Eric Bogosian, as a substance-abusing disco songwriter having a breakdown, all figure in the plot. The young actor Justice Smith plays Books, and the newcomer Herizen F. Guardiola is Mylene. There’s a sense of historical significance that elevates the action; the young actors are sweet, Bogosian is funny, Smits smolders, but then somehow things seem to scatter and the story gets lost. Although The Get Down received mostly good reviews, Netflix canceled it after eleven episodes.
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Nas, the rap star, narrates parts of The Get Down. Vázquez narrates her own film, in a voice that’s both low-key and passionate. The structure the three producers finally decided on has her telling the story to Antonio, her college-age son, in the kitchen of her sun-filled house in the north Bronx. His presence as listener is presumed throughout. Vázquez knew she needed to demonstrate, emotionally, how the fires crushed her family and her neighbors and herself. “Gretchen and Julia and I were struggling with my not expressing that enough,” she told me. One day while looking through records of the response to the upsurge in fires—she’s in the quiet setting of the library at the New York Fire Department Academy in Queens—she suddenly understands that the city had not cared in the least about their suffering. For a minute or two her composure breaks, and she starts to cry.
The first time I saw the movie, the scene hit me, and it continues to on rewatching. We all have our lives, our families, our friends we love, our funny stories, our household belongings with their small or large meanings. But to people in power—her more distant neighbors in the city and in the region—none of that mattered. Her siblings, her parents, her friends, her Sweet Sixteen parties: The powers of New York cared about none of it. They let her world be destroyed, and did nothing, and said the disaster was the Bronx’s own fault.
Decade of Fire premiered at DOC NYC, a film festival for documentaries, on November 10, 2018. The theater showing it sold out, the audience cheered, the reviewers praised it. But two hundred other films were screened during the festival. Decade of Fire got lost in the crush. It traveled to twenty other film festivals and Vázquez often accompanied it. The Metrograph Theater, on the Lower East Side, ran it for a week; audiences kept coming and the run was extended another four weeks. PBS then decided to air Decade of Fire nationally, as part of the Independent Lens series. In November 2019, an audience of about two million people across the United States saw or streamed the film.
It established some important facts, for the record: Buildings in the fire-affected areas were old. Redlining made it all but impossible to get loans to repair them. Vázquez’s family had planned to leave the neighborhood and move to a house, but her father was turned down for a loan, despite his having been at the same job for many years. Loading modern appliances onto the old wiring in the buildings had put a strain on it; many fires were caused by faulty wiring. Response times to fires became slower after the fire department reduced the number of firehouses. Senator Moynihan claimed, with no apparent hard evidence, that most of the fires were set. The newspapers said a lot about the youths and gangs who supposedly were setting the fires, but little about who might be paying them to set them. John Finucane, a former Bronx firefighter who appears in the film, noted that in the thousands of fires he witnessed, nobody ever went to jail.
The film highlights books by Joe Flood (The Fires) and Evelyn Diaz Gonzalez (The Bronx), who both appear in it. As historians who had looked closely at this then-little-known story, they described some of the important circumstances. Gonzales talked about urban renewal, and the gentrification of Manhattan that sent at least a hundred thousand poor people into inadequate housing in the Bronx. Flood explained the kickback schemes among insurance appraisers, insurers, and landlords that defrauded the insurance pool established by the state to provide fire insurance in high-risk neighborhoods. In this collusion, he says, “everybody got paid.” The film establishes, based on a 1982 federal investigation of arson-for-profit, that the state insurance pool and Lloyd’s of London had paid out, between them, $250 million (in 2018 dollars) in fire insurance claims by 1980. Vázquez wonders, in her narration, how much other insurance companies paid.
