Sixteen minutes into Game 2 of the 1977 World Series, a video crew helicoptering above Yankee Stadium captured footage of an inferno. It made for an absurd shot: the ballpark glittering in the night as a nearby South Bronx building burned to the ground. Naturally it attracted the attention of ABC’s play-by-play crew Howard Cosell and Keith Jackson. “My goodness, that’s a huge blaze,” Jackson gasped. “The fire department really has its work cut out for them,” Cosell replied.
Thanks to fungible memories and hazy recollections, that mundane back-and-forth mutated into Cosell’s era-defining pronouncement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” He never said anything close, but the legend endures. It just sounds right. This was Fear City–era New York, and on live national television millions of viewers got their first glimpse of a runaway urban crisis.
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