A book examining the South Bronx fires that displaced thousands of families in the 1970s and reshaped the Bronx has been named a finalist for the annual Gotham Book Prize, a $50,000 award recognizing outstanding fiction and non-fiction books about New York City.
Bench Ansfield’s “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City” challenges the longstanding narrative that blamed residents for the wave of arson that ravaged the South Bronx in the 1970s. Instead, Ansfield documents how landlords hired “torches,” often Black and Brown youth, to burn buildings for insurance payouts and also highlights tenant-led movements that pressured insurers and government agencies to act against arsonist landlords.
The book details how the FIRE industry — finance, insurance, and real estate — ignited the policies that made destruction more profitable than preservation.
In the wake of the 1960s uprisings and deepening urban disinvestment, insurers refused to cover areas deemed high-risk, prompting the federal government to create the Fair Access to Insurance Requirement, a state-administered insurance, underwritten by private insurers. The program’s lack of adequate oversight, Ansfield argues, incentivized landlords to burn buildings and collect payouts rather than maintain deteriorating properties.
Ansfield is an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University and a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state and twentieth century U.S. cities. The book draws on decades of research on the Bronx, including Ansfield’s work as a researcher on the 2019 PBS documentary “Decade of Fire”, directed by Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildenbrand.
The book has also been named by The New York Times as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2025, named one of Kirkus Reviews’ 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, and selected as a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work — Nonfiction.
The Gotham Book Prize was co-founded in 2020 by Bradley Tusk, venture capitalist and political strategist and Howard Wolfson, former New York City deputy mayor to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and current Education program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies.
“Now that we’re in year six of the Gotham Book Prize, it’s clearer than ever that our city is an object of fascination and the ideal setting for countless books, both fiction and nonfiction,” co-founders Tusk and Wolfson said.
The winner will be selected in late spring by a jury of New York-based civic leaders, authors, and academics.
The jury includes: Anna Akbari, writer, entrepreneur and sociologist; Ric Burns, documentary filmmaker; Dr. Christina Greer, Associate Professor of Political Science, Fordham University; Mitchell Moss, Professor, NYU Wagner; Tom Healy, writer, trustee of PEN America; Patricia Park, novelist; Pamela Paul, Wall Street Journal writer; and Tusk and Wolfson.
“All these books share New York’s defining contradiction: our city’s seduction and its brutality. Somehow, NYC takes everything from us and still convinces us it’s worth it,” said jury member and writer Tom Healy.
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