"Under its earlier title, We're Still Here, Jill Jonnes's recounting of the rise, fall, and resurrection of the Bronx was hailed as a vivid history of the borough from its origins as colonial farmland to its status in the 1980s as one of the nation's worst urban disasters. Now, in this expanded new edition, the monumental rebuilding of the Bronx by grass-roots groups, already under way in 1984, is fully described."

"The book tells the story of the borough's development as a New York suburb and boomtown with the influx of hundreds of thousands of German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, which became a major base of political power for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his powerful lieutenant, Boss Ed Flynn. After World War II, the Bronx underwent its second boom, beginning with immigrants from Puerto Rico and African Americans from Manhattan. On their heels came the camp followers of modern urban poverty: drug dealers, real estate pirates, arsonists. By the 1970s, the Bronx was burning. Block after block of formerly working-class and middle-class housing was now abandoned and destroyed.

This borough, which in its heyday had produced such notable Americans as Clifford Odets, Paddy Cheyefsky, Lauren Bacall, Herman Wouk, Jules Feiffer, Jake LaMotta, Stanley Kubrick, E.L. Doctorow, Neil Simon, and Tony Curtis, now lay in ashes, visible mainly as a dreadful object lesson."--Jacket.