South Bronx fire crisis of the 1970s

Between 1970 and 1980, the South Bronx experienced a period of extreme urban devastation characterized by frequent and massive building fires. During this decade, more than 5,000 entire buildings were destroyed, with some years seeing between 30,000 and 40,000 fires. On the night of the July 13, 1977, blackout, approximately 1,000 homes burned in the Bronx alone.

Residents lived in a state of constant readiness, often sleeping in their clothes and keeping emergency bags of documents and cash by their doors to survive potential stairwell fires in multi-story brick buildings. While official reports at the time often attributed the destruction to vandalism or self-destructive impulses among the local Puerto Rican, Black, and Irish communities, the scale of the fires mirrored a war front within the city.