Grand Concourse (Bronx)

Where it sits. The Grand Concourse runs roughly four miles north from 138th Street in the South Bronx up the spine of the borough to Mosholu Parkway, holding the high ground between the Harlem River valley to the west and the Bronx River to the east. Yankee Stadium sits at its southern end near 161st Street; Fordham Road crosses it at the northern end. At 180 feet across it is one of the widest streets in New York, divided by tree-lined malls into a central through roadway and two service roads, an arrangement that allowed minor streets to stop rather than cross.

The story behind it. Louis Aloys Risse, an engineer who had emigrated from Saint-Avold in Lorraine, first proposed the boulevard in 1890 as a way of connecting Manhattan to the northern Bronx. Construction ran from 1894 to its opening to traffic in November 1909, with an extension in 1927, and it cost some fourteen million dollars. It was a City Beautiful project explicitly modelled on the Champs-Elysees, and it is both longer and considerably wider than its model. The transport followed: the Jerome Avenue elevated opened a few blocks west in 1917 and the Concourse subway line beneath the boulevard in 1933, and each triggered a building boom. Predominantly Jewish and Italian families moving out of Manhattan's tenements filled nearly three hundred new apartment houses along the route by the mid-1930s — five and six storeys, with wide planted entrance courts, casement windows, corner glazing, terrazzo lobbies and streamlined brick and terracotta detail. The 1939 WPA guide to the city called it the Park Avenue of the middle-class Bronx, and a lease on the Concourse was treated as proof of arrival.

What makes it architecturally important. Those blockfronts add up to one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco and Art Moderne apartment architecture anywhere in the United States, and because the boulevard declined rather than gentrified in the second half of the twentieth century, remarkably little of it was replaced. The buildings were listed on the National Register as a historic district in 1987; the city created a Special Grand Concourse Preservation District in 1989 and designated a landmark district from 153rd to 167th Streets in 2011. Individual monuments punctuate the walk: the Bronx County Courthouse of 1931 to 1934 at 851, a limestone slab of Art Moderne civic architecture by Joseph Freelander and Max Hausle with sculpture and WPA-era murals; Loew's Paradise at 2403, John Eberson's atmospheric movie palace of 1929, once the largest cinema in New York, with a night-sky ceiling and a baroque terracotta front; the Andrew Freedman Home of 1924, built as a retirement house for people who had lost fortunes; the Bronx Museum of the Arts at 165th Street, in a converted synagogue since 1982 and free to enter; and, at 2640, the small wooden Poe Cottage of 1812, where Edgar Allan Poe spent his last years and wrote Annabel Lee.

On screen. Todd Phillips's Joker (2019) is why a new generation of visitors comes: Arthur Fleck's Gotham is largely this part of the Bronx, and the West 167th Street stairs that carry the film's most reproduced sequence are two blocks west of the boulevard in Highbridge. The Concourse's own most celebrated location shoot is much older — the 1974 wedding episode of Rhoda, filmed on the street, with Valerie Harper running across the boulevard in her wedding dress to reach her parents' building. Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) was shot in the South Bronx a short distance south. Productions keep returning for a simple reason: the blockfronts have changed so little that the Concourse can play almost any decade from the 1930s onwards with minimal dressing. Ayn Rand even used it as a shortcut in The Fountainhead, where a character advises driving via the Concourse because there are fewer lights.

Getting there and how to walk it. The B and D trains run directly under the boulevard, with stations at 161st, 167th, 170th, 174th–175th, Tremont, 182nd–183rd, Fordham Road and Kingsbridge Road, which means you can walk any stretch and ride back. A satisfying route is 161st Street to Fordham Road, about two and a half miles, taking in the courthouse, the museum, the Freedman Home and the Paradise. Allow three hours with stops. This is a busy, ordinary, largely residential and commercial boulevard rather than a tourist quarter, and it rewards attention to doorways, lobby glimpses and rooflines. Poe Cottage, Fordham University's Rose Hill campus and the Bronx Zoo are all near the northern end.