Todd Heisler/The New York Times

CONVERGENCE Shoppers navigate the intersection of Southern Boulevard, Boston Road and 174th Street, a business hub in Crotona Park East. New construction has replaced blight in many parts of the neighborhood.

After being eviscerated by highway projects, poverty, public health crises and crime, this square-mile South Bronx neighborhood took its final blow in the form of arson, both by tenants and landlords, which helped to reduce rows of tenements to rubble.

The ruined streets conjured fear when used as film locations, whether for horror movies (“Wolfen”) or police dramas (“Fort Apache the Bronx”). They also served as a different type of media backdrop when, 31 years ago this month, President Jimmy Carter  paid a visit, describing the area as America’s “worst slum.”

In the intervening decades, much has changed. Once-desolate lots now have housing, whether rebuilt two-families or luxury condominiums.

One lot that Mr. Carter visited is now the site of Interval Green and Louis Nine House, a $46 million complex with 173 moderately priced apartments, built with planted roofs and leafy courtyards by the nonprofit Women Housing and Economic Development Corporation. It is to open to renters next month.

Some new homes in the area make use of materials that are sensitive to Crotona high asthma rates. In fact, 28 new brick-and-stone two- and three-families with nontoxic rugs and paints built by the Blue Sea Development Company, won a city environmental award in September.

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At Busy South Bronx Pool, an Unlikely Team Keeps the Peace

Crotona Pool’s manager, Kevin Walker, calls everyone out of the water at the end of the morning session. The Bronx pool has up to 1,400 visitors a day.

James Harrigan, 21, an ex-gang member who is one of a group of young pool volunteers, raised a flag he made.

He is known by the name tattooed on his left arm: Scorpio. He favors diamond earrings and designer sunglasses. He takes pills to control his angry outbursts, and sometimes carries a pistol, a .22 or a .45, depending on his mood.

On this day, on the street outside the Crotona Pool in the Bronx, where hundreds of children wait to get inside, he wears the earrings and sunglasses, but does not have a gun.

“Don’t move!” he shouts when a boy in navy trunks tries to tiptoe to the front of the line of sugar-fueled children, some wrapped in SpongeBob SquarePants towels, others wearing neon flip-flops. The boy gets back in line.

Scorpio, who is known by this name, is Terrance Carpenter, 26. He is one of a dozen or so young men who volunteer unofficially each week at the pool, which sits amid an area long fractured by hostilities among gangs like the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings. Some of the volunteers are gang members, but others have turned their backs on crime.

Crotona Pool was one of several huge public pools to open in 1936 in New York. Built by Robert Moses with financing from the Works Progress Administration, they were heralded as some of the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.

But the pool, like the park it abuts, went into steep decline starting in the 1960s, as middle-class residents fled the surrounding neighborhoods — Morrisania, Crotona, East Tremont, West Farms — and poverty and violence took hold. Today the area has come far from its worst days, thanks in part to a citywide decline in crime and in part to the efforts of residents. The young volunteers, some of whom have contributed to their neighborhood’s violence, now seek to help keep the peace, at least in the neutral zone of the pool.

The volunteers have no enforcement powers; their duties are not clearly defined. But at the enormous pool full of excited — sometimes overexcited — children and teenagers, they provide extra ears and eyes for the officials charged with maintaining order. When the children violate the no-diving rule, they scold them. When horseplay gets too rowdy, they tone it down. When they see loiterers looking for trouble on the streets outside the pool, they swagger over to ward them off.

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George Washington From The Bronx? 

I GREW up in the rough-and-tumble Morrisania section of the East Bronx. I’m not sure when Morrisania’s gangs began, but they were already there during the Revolutionary War.

It wasn’t patriots and Tories who battled it out in Morrisania during the British occupation of Manhattan, a period that lasted from 1776 to 1783, but their surrogates, called Skinners and Cowboys, who scalped men, molested women and murdered children of both sides.

The gangs of Boston Road and Southern Boulevard circa 1950 weren’t as mean and malicious, but I lived in a whirlwind of chaos nevertheless, where I was my own urban guerrilla who had to battle his way to school block by block.

There were terrible racial and religious divides in Morrisania. I belonged to the little enclave of poor Polish and Russian Jews that collected at the borders of Crotona Park.

There might have been physicists living in the Byzantine palaces of Crotona Park East, but they were failed physicists, men inhabiting some mysterious cocoon that no one could explain, least of all themselves.

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