Courtesy of the Bronx County Historical Society Research Library A 1919 photograph shows a carriage heading west off the Grand Concourse, toward the elevated train line (now the No. 4 subway) and the growing Highbridge neighborhood. In the background at right is the old Huber’s Hotel, now the site of the new Yankee Stadium.Grand Concourse, the Bronx’s most famous street, has been compared with Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, because of its concentration of Art Deco and Art Moderne architecture, and the Champs-Élysées in Paris, because of its grand proportions and its emergence from the City Beautiful movement.
Conceived in 1890 as a way of connecting Manhattan to the northern Bronx, the Grand Concourse was designed by Louis Aloys Risse, an Alsatian-born engineer, and opened in November 1909.
To honor the centennial of the Grand Concourse, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has organized a yearlong, three-part exhibition. The first installment, “Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100,” about the history of the boulevard, opened on March 5 and is on view through July 20. Subsequent installments, about the street’s present and future, will open in August and November. As the culmination of the series, seven new designs — representing visions for the Grand Concourse’s future — will be selected through an international architectural competition co-organized by the museum and the Design Trust for Public Space.
Courtesy of the Bronx County Historical Society Research Library The block that now contains the Bronx Museum of the Arts, at Grand Concourse and 165th Street, as it appeared in 1906. The museum was founded in 1971.The first installment of the exhibition traces the Grand Concourse’s remarkable history with works of art, architectural drawings, prints, photographs and other objects. The show traces Risse’s vision of a “transverse road,” slicing through farmlands; the rapid expansion of the area that accompanied the extension of what are now the D and No. 4 subway lines and the spurt of Art Deco and Art Moderne residential buildings that lined the boulevard in the 1930s.
Among the items I found the most intriguing during my visit to the exhibition last weekend were a series of eight black-and-white photographs — their maker unknown — of the unveiling of the Heinrich Heine Monument in 1899. (The fountain is also the subject of a 2000 video installation, by Pia Lindman, also in the exhibition.)
The Heine memorial, a sculpted fountain that is often called the Lorelei Fountain, honors Heine, the German Jewish Romantic poet who died in 1856. The memorial was intended to be placed in Düsseldorf, Heine’s birthplace, but because of anti-Semitism it was without a home. Efforts by German-American New Yorkers, including Carl Schurz, led to the statue’s placement in the Bronx, where it now stands, at the southern end of Joyce Kilmer Park.
The show also includes Diane Arbus’s famous photograph, “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx,” showing Eddie Carmel towering over his parents. Carmel, who grew to be 8 feet 9 inches because of a pituitary-gland disorder, died in 1972, two years after the picture was made.
Perhaps the highlight of the show is an artwork by Skowmon Hastanan, a series of brightly colored vinyl tiles, arranged in a loose grid-like time line, containing quotes, excerpts and narratives about the Bronx’s decay and revival — a narrative in which the Grand Concourse has been deeply embedded.
Many New Yorkers have forgotten that the Grand Concourse was once called the “Park Avenue of the middle class,” and a model for real-estate developers (and speculators) who extolled the intense planning that transformed the rocky, rustic landscape into a magnificent north-south thoroughfare. Archival materials like a 1929 real estate prospectus from the Crawford and Hammersley estates, and a 1935 issue of the American Builder magazine, show the close ties that existed between urban planning and the real estate industry.
As the South Bronx slipped into decay in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a national symbol of urban blight, there were efforts to preserve the Grand Concourse as a sort of buffer that would prevent the whole of the Bronx — including its priciest, more fancy sections, like Riverdale and Marble Hill (geographically in the Bronx, though considered Manhattan) — from falling to the forces of disinvestment, arson and crime.
The blight is documented, in the show, by a gritty series of 1976 photographs of South Bronx residents, taken by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica.
Slowly, as the Hastanan work documents, the combined efforts of community development corporations, city planners and others took fruit, giving rise to the revival for which the Bronx has become famous.
Courtesy of Daniel Hauben Daniel Hauben’s unfinished painting “Bronx Vortex,” which he started this year. The work is part of the first installment of a yearlong, three-part exhibition honoring the centennial of the Grand Concourse.
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