Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough

Winner of the 2025 Gotham Book Prize

Ian Frazier’s magnum opus: a love song to New York City’s most heterogeneous and alive borough.

Ian Frazier, one of our best observers and describers, has been walking the Bronx for fifteen years. Paradise Bronx goes deep into the eventful and tumultuous history of this amazing New York City borough, a super-vibrant in-between place that attaches the rest of the city to North America. From Jonas Bronck, who bought land from the local Lenape tribes, to the formerly gang-wracked South Bronx, which gave birth to hip-hop, Frazier’s loving exploration of this singular cityscape is a richly textured, raucous, moving tour de force about the polyglot culture that is the United States today.

During the American Revolution, when the Bronx was disputed territory known as the Neutral Ground, George Washington’s troops fought some of the war’s decisive battles there. Gouverneur Morris, the most outlandish of the Founding Fathers, who wrote the Preamble to the Constitution and served as ambassador to France during the Terror, owned a huge swath of the Bronx, lived and died there, and put it and the rest of the city on a path to greatness.

Frazier shows us how the coming of the railroads and the subways drove the settling of the Bronx in successive waves of migration—Irish, German, Italian, Jewish (think the Grand Concourse), African American, Caribbean, Puerto Rican (J.Lo is one of the Bronx’s most famous citizens). The romance of the Yankees, the disaster of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the flowering of hip-hop and rap, the resurgence of community as neighborhood heroes banded together and rebuilt after the years of destruction and fire—all are described and celebrated in
Frazier’s inimitable voice.

This is a book like no other about a quintessential American place and the resilience and resourcefulness of its citizens.