A resident at John Adams House receives food as part of the building’s aid program. Photo: Kent M. Wilhelm

In October 1977, Keith Jackson, a sports reporter for ABC News, told the world what the Bronx had known for almost a decade – New York City had abandoned them.

Jackson, who was announcing the second game of the World Series that year, noted from the press box at Yankee Stadium a large structure fire burning in South Bronx.

Without ever saying it directly, Jackson crafted the living metaphor of a burning South Bronx, a symbol of how a shattered local economy and an incoherent leadership strategy at every level of government left residents to fend for themselves.

Nearly 50 years later, the South Bronx faces a very similar crisis during COVID-19.

Just prior to the pandemic, the South Bronx was growing rapidly. Commercial avenues at The Hub, Southern Boulevard and along Third Avenue were bustling, construction cranes dotted the horizon and unemployment stood at 5.7 percent. 

The biggest concern for many long-time residents was that all the new luxury apartment complexes being built would raise rents so high, they could get pushed out.

But the novel coronavirus poses a challenge that could set back much of that hard-fought progress.

Bronx residents have contracted the virus at the highest rates in the city and have suffered more deaths, per capita, than any other borough.  Locally owned businesses that form the South Bronx’s economic backbone have been shuttered by stay-in-place orders, prompting thousands of job losses.

As the city is cleaved into two camps of “essential” and “non-essential” workers, the economic realities of the South Bronx become clear. Workers who remain in “essential” jobs that have kept the rest of the city running — delivery workers, grocery store clerks, subway cleaners, bus drivers, security guards, hospital staffers — face health perils daily.  They have persevered to save their jobs, feed their families and serve their communities.

This, despite the fact that one-quarter of South Bronx residents have no health insurance and one-sixth go without medical care. Bronx residents suffer from high levels of asthma, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, pre-existing conditions that put them at high vulnerability to COVID.  City health reports show that black and brown New Yorkers have succumbed at much higher rates than others; 73 percent of South Bronx residents are Hispanic, and 24 percent are black, according to city data.

COVID-19 has laid bare the inequalities that have persisted through the 50 years since Jackson’s announcement, as governments at all levels failed to provide sufficient resources or the will to address many of the borough’s distinctive problems – and sometimes have exacerbated them.

But South Bronx businesses, nonprofits, civic groups and individuals are stepping into the breach to help their neighborhoods survive.  Some are veterans of those long-ago battles while others are following their example.

As bread lines form around city blocks for the first time since the Great Depression, organizers like Sonia Taylor at Diego Beekman Mutual Housing, a veteran of the borough’s up-by-the-bootstraps efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, are stepping up to provide relief today.

When the virus hit, Taylor diverted her energies from fighting a new jail planned for Mott Haven to distributing food at local church pantries. Volunteers have been outfitted in protective equipment provided not by the city, but by St. Mary’s Church on 147th Street.

In addition to thousands of other Bronxites leaping into action on their own, a group of local business owners, nonprofits, politicians and donors has teamed up to raise $10 million for a new Bronx Community Relief Effort.  They hope their collaboration will extend well beyond the virus.

Acknowledging everyone on the front lines would take volumes.  We hope this sampling will provide a glimpse into the breadth of neighborhood networks and individuals working to hold the South Bronx together, even as essential workers who live there are keeping New York City going in its time of need.

They are all Bronx heroes.