Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color.

Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates, the most destructive fires were not set by residents but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Ansfield introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress and how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era.

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Ansfield holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians.

Aaron Shkuda is author of The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (University of Chicago Press, April 2016).

Fanta Kaba is a member of the Princeton University class of 2028.