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

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF 2025 • THE SKIPPED HISTORY PODCAST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “[R]evelatory…Deeply researched and masterfully told.” —Brian Goldstone, New York Times Book Review The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s—and its legacy today. “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 in Born in Flames, the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.