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A review by jasonfurman
Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood by Will Eisner
5.0
This stunning historical panorama of one Bronx neighborhood--mostly focused on one lot on one street--is the culmination of Will Eisner's amazing trilogy (the first two are Contract with God and A Life Force). It begins with the English displacing the Dutch, skips rapidly through a few centuries, but then concentrates on the twentieth century as waves of immigrants and migrants move in and partially displace the previous waves--Irish, Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Hasids--often with significant friction, bigotry, violence and corruption--and less often with the traditional melting pot of American imagination.
The characters are great too, many of them recurring over the course of fifty or more years, like Abie Gold who we first meet hitting a baseball through a window in the 1930s (or thereabouts) but then grows up to be a lawyer, city councilman, and then when his patron is killed a lawyer again helping in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. A number of other characters, including a boxer turned political boss and a succession of ethnically-appropriate priests make a number of reappearances throughout the book.
The story is one of constant change and motion but also stasis--as the same patterns occur over and over again. And just when you think the story has a redemptive ending, think again as a new set of immigrants come in, the older residents flee, and the neighborhood goes back into a downward spiral. The only thing Eisner misses in the story is gentrification, which clearly had not come to Dropsie in 1995. Maybe someone should write that sequel.
The characters are great too, many of them recurring over the course of fifty or more years, like Abie Gold who we first meet hitting a baseball through a window in the 1930s (or thereabouts) but then grows up to be a lawyer, city councilman, and then when his patron is killed a lawyer again helping in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. A number of other characters, including a boxer turned political boss and a succession of ethnically-appropriate priests make a number of reappearances throughout the book.
The story is one of constant change and motion but also stasis--as the same patterns occur over and over again. And just when you think the story has a redemptive ending, think again as a new set of immigrants come in, the older residents flee, and the neighborhood goes back into a downward spiral. The only thing Eisner misses in the story is gentrification, which clearly had not come to Dropsie in 1995. Maybe someone should write that sequel.