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THE BRONX IS A HAND reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea. Its fellow boroughs are islands or parts of islands; the Bronx hangs on to Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn, with Staten Island trailing at the end of the long towrope of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and keeps the whole business from drifting away on a strong outgoing tide. No water comes between the Bronx (if you leave out its own few islands) and the rest of North America. The Bronx is the continent, and once you’re on it you can go for thousands of miles without seeing ocean again. The other boroughs, for their part, cling to the Bronx for dear life. The chafing and strife of this connection have made all the difference to the Bronx.
No other borough has “the” in its name. We don’t say “the Staten Island” or “the Manhattan”; for some reason, no island is ever called “the.” Only certain more or less continuous geographic features merit a “the,” such as “the Antarctic” or “the tropical rainforest.” Before Europeans had any formal name for what is now the Bronx, they referred to it simply as “the continent,” “the mainland,” or “the maine,” distinguishing it from the ocean they came on and the nearby islands where they’d settled first. Concerning the question of whether to capitalize both words of its modern-day name, the city’s daily newspapers are divided. In The New York Times and the Daily News, “the” is lowercase: “the Bronx.” The Post, however, gives it two caps: “The Bronx.” Perhaps the Post has a hidden agenda; the borough is home to the Post’s printing plant. In this book I follow the majority and write “the Bronx.”
The northernmost part of the Bronx’s western border is the Hudson River. Then Manhattan fits up next to the Bronx on its western side for more than half its length, lying approximately north and south. Here, the Harlem River, which is a strait and not a river, and which connects the East River to the Hudson, runs between the two boroughs. Steep hills and bluffs rise above the Harlem River valley. Much of the Bronx is hilly. Stone ridges extend like tendons, knuckles, and fingers from the northern border of the borough southward; these discouraged the construction of east-west roads and make the Bronx difficult to cross from east to west even today. After the Harlem River branches off around one side of Randall’s Island, a smaller tidal stream, the Bronx Kill, continues along the borough’s southern border. Going along the top of Randall’s, the Bronx Kill also flows into the East River, which is part of Long Island Sound, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. The Bronx’s entire eastern border is the East River and the Sound. Thus, the borough has a major river that comes from inland—the Hudson—to its west, and saltwater on its east. Some of the Bronx is rocky and wooded like upstate, and some is oceanfront marsh and beach.
A straight line with a few bureaucratic zigzags marks the Bronx’s northern border. That line is also the border of New York City. In general, people in the suburbs to the north of this line are richer than most people in the Bronx. By some measurements, large areas of the Bronx are poorer than anywhere else in the nation. But that assumes a population frozen in time. Everybody has to start somewhere, and the poor parts of the Bronx are often where people start when they have very little. They work, and earn, and in time, with luck, they move upward, and new arrivals take their place. This cycle has tended to wear out some areas of the Bronx.
The Bronx is the part of New York where the city merges into the rest of North America. The process has never gone smoothly.
* * *
Its name honks, “Bronx!” Ideally, we could ask for a better-sounding name, one that did not suggest a Bronx cheer, but “Bronx!” is what we’ve got. The name comes from the Bronx River, which begins at a reservoir north of the city and runs south through the middle of the borough until it empties into the East River. The Bronx cuts the Bronx into two sections—east of it and west of it. Surface streets sometimes dead-end at it. If you’re at ground level and not on one of the big highways, you can go a mile or more without finding a bridge. From source to mouth the river is twenty-three miles long, with about eight of those miles in the borough. It is the longest river within the borders of New York City, and it used to be beautiful and idyllic, until the usual city factors ruined it. By the 1980s, it was so full of junk—old refrigerators, washing machines, cars—that you could barely see it. Intrepid environmental groups and the Parks Department cleaned it up. It now runs clear, and parts of it are even almost idyllic again. People sometimes canoe on it, but you’re still not advised to swim in it.
An eminent old-time historian wrote that the Indians called the river Aquahung. I find that hard to believe, but I can’t explain why. Tribes with villages in what’s now the Bronx were the Siwanoy, the Munsee, and the Weckquaesgeek, all subgroups of the Lenape. They belonged to the Algonquian language family, an eastern linguistic grouping that did not include the powerful Iroquois, their inland enemies. In December 1639, several local Munsee headmen sold five hundred acres of land adjoining the river to Jonas Bronck, or Bronk, a Swede who had arrived on his own ship, The Fire of Troy. (One day, fire and destruction would be what people thought of when they thought of the Bronx.) Jonas Bronck also paid the Dutch West India Company for the land. The Dutch were the European power in the region and had founded New Amsterdam, their outpost on lower Manhattan Island, fifteen years before.
Bronck built a house on what’s now 132nd Street, or maybe 138th Street—in either case, it was in what’s now a southerly part of the South Bronx—and leased his land out for farming maize and tobacco. Eventually the river at the eastern edge of his holdings became known as Bronk’s River, and Bronk’s Land was the area in general. A man named Pieter Schorstinaveger (chimney sweep, in Dutch) owned a farm next to Bronck’s, which he cultivated using Black slaves. Apparently, “Schorstinaveger’s River” was never even in the running as a name, such being the workings of everyday poetics and spoken language.
In 1939, three hundred years after Jonas Bronck, three reporters set out to discover if he still had any descendants in the area. In the magazine article they wrote, they noted that “there are no Broncks in the Bronx.” The reporters did find one descendant, William H. Bronk (by then the family had dropped the c), who lived in Pelham, just north of the Bronx. He said he commuted on the New Haven Railroad every day past the site of his ancestor’s house and never gave it a thought. Another Bronk, a retired lawyer named Leonard Bronk Lampman, who had been living at the Yale Club for twenty-two years, cleared up a question about the Bronx borough flag. It depicts a rising sun with a bowling-pin-shaped bird standing above it. Lampman said that the bird is an auk, a species found in the Faroe Islands, where Jonas Bronck lived before going to Holland and then to America. The bird and the rising sun are on the Bronck family coat of arms, along with the motto Ne Cede Malis, “Do Not Yield to Evil,” which became the motto of the Bronx. Designers included the Bronck coat of arms—motto, bird, and all—in the borough flag when they created it, in the late nineteenth century.
Jonas Bronck and his wife, Antonia Slagboom, had a son named Pieter. He moved to Coxsackie, New York, near Albany, and built a stone farmhouse that still stands. I meant to visit it—it’s now a museum—but it was closed because of the virus. Pieter Bronk had offspring and there are many Bronks in the Coxsackie area. A poet named William Bronk (1918–1999), who claimed descent from Jonas, ran his family’s coal and lumber business in Hudson Falls, a town about eighty miles north of Coxsackie. He never got a driver’s license and, in his lifetime, published about two dozen books of poetry, one of which won a National Book Award.
* * *
Thirteen bridges connect Manhattan to the Bronx, and two more cross the East River from Queens. Other links exist underground in tunnels and pipes, which carry subway lines, drinking water, gas mains, power cables, and wastewater. Every which way, the Bronx is sewn and bound and grappled and clamped to the rest of the city. Every kind of transportation passes through it or over it. Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, stunned by the loudness of the trucks (no other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point Market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food distribution depot in the world), I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. Even during the emptiest days of the Covid shutdown the Bronx’s pulse of transport kept pounding.
Interstate highways slice and dice the borough. The interstates within the Bronx’s borders are these: On the west, running approximately north and south, is I-87, also known (in the city) as the Major Deegan Expressway, or simply the Deegan. I-87 is bound for Albany and Canada. The Bruckner Elevated Expressway, aka I-278, connects to I-87 in the southern part of the borough. From there I-278 veers to the northeast. Across the borough’s middle, Interstate 95, aka the Cross Bronx Expressway, that road of infamous history, moves traffic east and west before I-95 merges with the Bruckner, veers north, and then follows the coast up to New England. A spur, I-295, splits off and goes south across the Throgs Neck Bridge to Queens. Another spur, I-678, also goes to Queens, over the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. At the point where I-678 goes south from I-95, the Hutchinson River Parkway goes north from I-95, crosses the Bronx, and continues into Westchester County.
I am leaving out several other parkways, such as the Mosholu Parkway, the Bronx River Parkway, and the Pelham Bay Parkway. These roads refer to an earlier, more optimistic era of travel, and they sometimes have green spaces along them. Otherwise, the parkways now resemble the interstates in most respects, and aid and abet them. All the major highway corridors and their street approaches are generally filled with traffic. The speed limit on the Cross Bronx Expressway is fifty miles an hour, but the average speed on it during the evening rush hour is fourteen. For a while in the mid-twentieth century, planners thought that building new highways would relieve the already bad congestion, but the new highways became just as busy. Night and day, the wheels roll. Potholes are common. Among the most common signs in the borough are the red letters that announce, on a yellow background, FLAT FIX.
Before the highways, transportation was more Bronx-friendly. In the early 1900s, the subways came, building north from Manhattan. In 1905, the tracks for what are now the number 2 and number 5 trains reached a terminus at the neighborhood called West Farms, on the Bronx River. By 1910, the Broadway Local, also known as the number 1 train, which goes up the West Side, got to Van Cortlandt Park, in the northwest Bronx. By 1920, tracks for today’s number 4 and number 6 trains had also been completed in the Bronx (to its near-middle and northeasterly parts, respectively).
All these trains were mostly elevated in the Bronx, and still are. The lines spread out in a generally north-south configuration, causing land booms and frenzied construction along their routes. In the 1920s, the population of the Bronx increased by 72 percent. Another subway line, this one entirely underground, carrying the B and D trains, came in the thirties. In 1900, the borough had 200,507 residents. By 1940, almost 1.4 million people lived in the Bronx. Then, in the 1940s, the city and state started pushing through the big limited-access highways that would become interstates or link up to them.
A history of the Bronx in the twentieth century can be sketched in a sentence: The subways created the modern Bronx and the highways almost destroyed it.
* * *
I started wandering the Bronx about fifteen years ago. Usually I had a destination, a place I wanted to check out. At first, I was interested in the neighborhood of the Stella D’oro Bakery, at Broadway and 237th Street, in Kingsbridge, in the northwest Bronx. I was writing an article about a strike that took place at the bakery after a hedge fund bought it; previously, a generous and public-minded local family had owned it. People all over the city knew this good Bronx company. It won its reputation with its breadsticks, its anisette toast, and its chocolate-cream-center cookies, all baked with no dairy products, for reasons of keeping kosher. New immigrants got jobs at Stella D’oro, earned good wages and benefits, and put their children through college. Everybody in the neighborhood knew the smell of the bakery, with its emanations of chocolate and almond and licorice. The Major Deegan Expressway’s six lanes ran right behind the bakery, and drivers stuck in traffic inhaled its aromas and briefly felt happier and more sane.
My first Bronx walks were to discover how far the smell of cookies extended from the bakery. I went in every direction all around it, seeing the mansion-covered hills of Riverdale, the fields of Van Cortlandt Park, the diners of farthest upper Broadway, and the offices of a small Bronx newspaper that had once been firebombed by Islamic terrorists. The baking cookie smell became undetectable about half a mile from the factory, though if the wind was right, it could spread for a mile. The wealthy owners of the hedge fund, located in Greenwich, Connecticut, in one of the richest counties in America, outfoxed the strikers by selling Stella D’oro to a snack-food giant with headquarters in North Carolina, and the giant moved the bakery to a nonunion factory in the Midwest. One hundred and thirty-four workers, most of them Bronx residents, lost their jobs. The aroma of Stella D’oro cookies now wafts unsmelled through a second-growth forest in semirural Ohio.
From the Stella D’oro smell radius I then went farther. When you cover any distance in this borough, its ridged, up-and-down geography lets you know you’re on a hike, and registers in your calves. I walked thoroughfares that traversed the borough north to south, such as Boston Road, which at one time was the post road to Boston; for most of a day I followed it, all the way to the northern border, where the road leaves the Bronx. I also walked Tremont Avenue, which goes from the Harlem River, on the west, to the East River, on the east, and I contemplated how Tremont Avenue’s survival has been the survival of the Bronx. I took inventory of the parklands, of which the Bronx has four thousand acres, and went along off-map paths under interstate highway overpasses and plunged through phragmites-reed thickets next to rocky beaches.
On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, now empty and in disrepair, which John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was eleven. I peered through the windows at its huge downstairs rooms and empty parquet floors; John’s mother once was obliged to invite the children of his father’s mistress, Gloria Swanson, to a Halloween party with the Kennedy siblings here. Now planes flew overhead, perhaps on their way to John F. Kennedy International Airport, in Queens, but the house where the president-to-be spent a part of his boyhood bears no plaque or marker. In that way it resembles most other places of historical significance in the borough. From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 815 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1952. Not only is there no historic marker, but the building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and the address itself seems to have been abolished.
As I walked in the Bronx I watched the sky—the way it opens out at the ends of streets approaching the water, the way it goes upward to heaven at the tops of “stair streets,” which is the name for sections of streets so steep that they morph into stairways. A stair street with 132 steps, which I was accustomed to climbing at the continuation of 167th Street at Shakespeare Avenue, one day suddenly had drawn a crowd of French and Asian tourists all up and down it, recording themselves with cell phones. I inquired and found out that it’s the stairway on which the Joker dances in a Batman-related movie. The sky that the stairway frames is towering and cinematic in the extreme.
At the same time as I watched the sky, I kept an eye on the ground. All kinds of things are on the ground in the Bronx:
Q-tips. A pigeon foot. Those Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from rearview mirrors. Syringes with pale orange plastic stoppers on their needles. Sunglass lenses. The butts of menthol cigarettes. A bathroom sink. A single pink, almond-shaped artificial fingernail. The white plastic tips of cigarillos. Little bags that once held fortune cookies, with pagodas faintly printed on them in red. Inside-out surgical gloves. Pennies. Scratched-off scratch-off tickets. Green puddles of antifreeze. Hair picks with handles shaped like fists. Pieces of broken mirrors. Flattened pieces of sugarcane. Corona beer bottle tops. Coconut husks. Crumpled paper handouts offering cash for diabetic test strips, with a number to call. Crushed traffic cones. Dashboard dice. Skeins of hair from reweavings. Spiced-whiskey bottles with devil silhouettes on the labels. Covid masks. Black plastic takeout bags that skitter, ankle-high, on the wind. Pavement graffiti: “Lost Virginity at this Spot 11–1–16.”
In the middle of the Bronx, a block and a half from the Cross Bronx Expressway, I came across words written in the cement of a sidewalk. They’re at the corner of Fairmount Place and Crotona Avenue, in a neighborhood of apartment buildings and Pentecostal churches. I wrote the words down and have returned to the place more than a few times. They are not only graffiti, but an inscription, a historical marker, and a Bronx poem that takes up eighteen or twenty feet:
I RUN
THIS FUCKING
Block
Since
1988
YA KNOW
WHO
THE FUCK
I aM
BEBO
FUCK YOU
FUCK
POLICE
MATTER
FACT
FUCK
THE WORLD
I STAN
ALONE
I have lingered at the inscription and asked passersby if they know who this Bebo is or was, but no one does. It’s not an uncommon nickname. Fifty Cent, in his song “Ghetto Qur’an,” refers to “crews like Bebo and killers like Pappy Mason.” Everywhere I’ve walked I’ve looked for this Bebo’s writing again, and recently I found another Bebo inscription, about a mile away on Crotona Avenue, across from the main entrance of the Grace Hoadley Dodge Vocational High School. The handwriting is the same. This one says, simply:
Copyright © 2024 by Ian Frazier
