The Bronx Totally Explained

As of the census of 2000, there were 1,332,650 people, 463,212 households, and 314,984 families residing in the borough. The population density was 12,242.2/km² (31,709.3/sq mi). There were 490,659 housing units at an average density of 4,507.4/km² (11,674.8/sq mi). The racial makeup of the borough was 35.64% Black or African American, 29.87% White, 0.85% Native American, 3.01% Asian, 0.10% Pacific Islander, 24.74% from other races, and 5.78% from two or more races. 48.38% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. (The 2005 U.S. census estimates that the percentage of Latinos has increased to a majority: 51.3%.) The Bronx has one of the highest percentages of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the U.S. with 24.0% and 10.0%, respectively. However, the Puerto Rican population has slowly been declining over the last few years as the Dominican population has increased.
   West Africa is the most frequent region of origin for immigrants to the Bronx. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service data shows that in 1996, about two-thirds of those Ghanaians arriving in the United States, and nearly three-fourths of those naturalized, live in The Bronx. Many have clustered in Bronx communities, including Morris Heights, Highbridge, and Tremont.
   Based on sample data from the 2000 census, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 47.29% of the population five and older speak only English at home. 43.67% speak Spanish at home, either exclusively or along with English. Other languages or groups of languages spoken at home by more than 0.25% of the population of the Bronx include Italian (1.36%), Albanian (1.07%), Kru, Ibo, or Yoruba (0.72%), French (0.54%).
   The African American and Puerto Rican population have recently began to decline, with many of them relocating to cities elsewhere in New York State such as Rochester, Albany, and the southern United States. The Dominican population has increased significantly in the last five years, and by 2010 are expected to be doubled in population compared to 2000. The Jamaican population continues to increase with large amounts of immigration. The White population is seeing growth in some neighborhoods of the Bronx but also losses in others. Some neighborhoods, such as Kingsbridge Heights and Riverdale (both located in the Northwest and already White-Majority neighborhoods) are becoming homes to many ex-Manhattanites (mostly Whites) looking for cheaper rent. Albanians and Russians are some of the recently arrived European immigrants located mainly in the east Bronx. The size of southern Asian-origin ethnicities has grown, as many immigrants are from Bangladesh and other countries are moving to the Bronx.
   There were 463,212 households out of which 38.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 31.4% were married couples living together, 30.4% had a female householder with no husband present, and 32.0% were non-families. 27.4% of all households were made up of individuals and 9.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.78 and the average family size was 3.37.
   The age distribution of the population in the Bronx was as follows: 29.8% under the age of 18, 10.6% from 18 to 24, 30.7% from 25 to 44, 18.8% from 45 to 64, and 10.1% 65 years of age or older. The median age was 31 years. For every 100 females there were 87.0 males.
   The median income for a household in the borough was $27,611, and the median income for a family was $30,682. Males had a median income of $31,178 versus $29,429 for females. The per capita income for the borough was $13,959. About 28.0% of families and 30.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 41.5% of those under age 18 and 21.3% of those age 65 or over.
   Despite the stereotype that the Bronx (especially South Bronx) is a typical poor urban area of New York City, it isn't true of the entire borough. The Bronx has much affordable housing (as compared to most of the rest of the New York metropolitan area, as well as upscale neighborhoods like Riverdale, City Island, Pelham Bay, Kingsbridge Heights, Woodlawn, and Country Club).

Shopping

The Bronx is home to several known shopping areas such as the vicinity of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse, Bay plaza, The Hub, River/Kingsbridge Shopping center, Bruckner Blvd and many other streets especially those aligned underneath the Westchester Avenue, White Plains Road, Jerome Avenue, and Broadway elevated transit lines. The Bronx is home to trend setting, low-cost styles sometimes not found anywhere else in New York city.

Culture: from Poe to hip-hop

Author Edgar Allan Poe spent the last years of his life (1846 to 1849) in the Bronx at Poe Cottage, now located at Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse. A small wooden farmhouse built about 1812, the cottage once commanded unobstructed vistas over the rolling Bronx hills to the shores of Long Island.
   In recent years, the Bronx has become an important center of African-American culture. Hip hop first emerged in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. The New York Times has identified 1520 Sedgwick Avenue "an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx Expressway and hard along the Major Deegan Expressway" as the starting point, where DJ Kool Herc presided over parties in the community room. Beginning with the advent of beat match DJing, in which Bronx DJs including Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc extended the breaks of funk records, a major new musical genre emerged that sought to isolate the percussion breaks of hit funk, disco and soul songs. As hip hop's popularity grew, performers began speaking ("rapping") in sync with the beats, and became known as MCs or emcees. The Herculoids, made up of Herc, Coke La Rock, and Clark Kent, were the earliest to gain major fame. The Bronx is referred to in hip-hop slang as "The Boogie Down Bronx", or just "The Boogie Down". This was hip-hop pioneer KRS-One's inspiration for his thought provoking group BDP, or Boogie Down Productions, which included DJ Scott La Rock. Newer hip hop artists from the Bronx include Fat Joe, Big Pun (deceased), Terror Squad.
   The Bronx is home to several Off-Off-Broadway theaters, many staging new works by immigrant playwrights from Latin America and Africa. The Pregones Theater, which produces Latin American work, opened a new 130-seat theater in 2005 on Walton Avenue in the South Bronx. Artists from elsewhere in New York City have begun to converge in the area, and housing prices have nearly quadrupled in the area since 2002.
   The Bronx Museum of the Arts, founded in 1971, exhibits 20th century and contemporary art through its central museum space and of galleries. Many of its exhibitions are on themes of special interest to the Bronx. Its permanent collection features more than 800 works of art, primarily by artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America, including paintings, photographs, prints, drawings, and mixed media. The museum was temporarily closed in 2006 while it underwent a major expansion designed by the architectural firm Arquitectonica.
   Other major cultural sites in the Bronx include The New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo, and the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a national landmark overlooking the Harlem River and designed by the renowned architect Stanford White. Yankee Stadium is the home of the New York Yankees, and houses "Monument Park", a tribute to great Yankees of the past.

The Bronx in the movies

Originally, movies set in the Bronx portrayed densely-settled, working-class, urban culture. Paddy Chayefsky's Academy-award winning Marty is the epitome of this, with its tag line, "What are you doing, Marty? Nothing." This thematic line has continued to some extent as in the 1993 Robert De Niro/Chazz Palminteri film, A Bronx Tale and Spike Lee's 1999 movie Summer of Sam, centered in an Italian-American Bronx community. Other movies have used the term, "Bronx" for comic effect, such as the 1995 Jackie Chan film Rumble in the Bronx (Hong faan kui in Cantonese) -- which had nothing to do with the real Bronx, and "Bronx," the character on the Disney animated series Gargoyles.
   However, starting in the 1970s, the Bronx often symbolized violence, decay, and urban ruin. In casual French "c'est le Bronx" stands for "what a mess". The wave of arson in the South Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s launched the phrase "the Bronx is burning": in 1974 it was the title of both a New York Times editorial and a BBC documentary film. However, the line entered the pop-consciousness with Game Two of the 1977 World Series, when a fire broke out near Yankee Stadium as the team was playing the Los Angeles Dodgers. As the fire was captured on live television, announcer Howard Cosell intoned, "There it is, ladies and gentlemen: The Bronx is burning". Historians of New York City frequently point to Cosell's remark as a sign of both the city and the borough's decline. A new feature-length documentary film by Edwin Pagan called "Bronx Burning" is in production in 2006, chronicling what led up to the arson-for-insurance fraud fires of the 1970s and the subsequent rebirth of the community.
   These themes have been especially pervasive in representations of the Bronx in cinema. There are good depictions of Bronx gangs in the 1974 novel The Wanderers by Bronx native Richard Price and the 1979 movie of the same name. They are set in the heart of the Bronx, showing apartment life and the then-landmark Krums ice cream parlor. In the 1979 film The Warriors (film), the eponymous gang go to a meeting in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and have to fight their way back to Coney Island in Brooklyn. The 2005 video game adaptation features levels called Pelham, Tremont, and "Gunhill" (an apparent corruption of the name Gun Hill Road).
   A somewhat ironic use of this theme is the title of The Bronx is Burning: an eight-part ESPN TV mini-series (2007) about the New York Yankees' drive to winning baseball's 1977 World Series championship. The TV series emphasizes the boisterous nature of the team, led by manager Billy Martin, catcher Thurman Munson and outfielder Reggie Jackson (however, a significant part of the mini-series also deals with the malaise of the Bronx and New York City in general during that time, such as the blackout, the financial problems, the arson issues, and the election of Ed Koch to mayor).
   The 1981 film Fort Apache, The Bronx also portrayed the Bronx as gang- and crime-ridden. The film's title is from the nickname for the 41st Police Precinct in the South Bronx. This movie was condemned by community leaders for condoning police brutality, and for unflattering depiction of the borough; former Young Lords member and Puerto Rican activist Richie Perez formed a protest group, "The Committee Against Fort Apache". By contrast, Knights of the South Bronx, a true story of a teacher who worked with disadvantaged children, is also set in the Bronx.
   The Bronx was the setting for the 1983 film Fuga dal Bronx, (also known as Bronx Warriors 2 and Escape 2000,) an Italian B-movie best known for its appearance on the television series Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The plot revolves around a sinister construction corporation's plans to depopulate, destroy and redevelop the Bronx, and a band of rebels who are out to expose the corporation's murderous ways and save their homes. The film is memorable for its almost incessant use of the phrase, "Leave the Bronx!"

Media

The Bronx has featured in much fiction. One rich tale is Avery Corman's The Old Neighborhood (1980) in which the upper-middle class white protagonist returns to his birth neighborhood (Fordham Road and Grand Concourse, and learns that even though the folks are poor Hispanic and African-American, they're good people. By contrast, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) starts with an account of a similar upper-middle class white protagonist getting lost and off the Deegan Expressway in the South Bronx and having a vicious altercation with a local gang. A substantial piece of the last part of the book is set in the resulting riotous trial at the Bronx County Court House.
   The Bronx has several local newspapers, including The Riverdale Press, Riverdale Review, The Bronx Times Reporter, Inner City Press and Co-Op City Times. Four non-profit news outlets, Norwood News, Mount Hope Monitor, Highbridge Horizon and The Hunts Point Express serve the borough's poorer communities. The editor and co-publisher of The Riverdale Press, Bernard Stein, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for his editorials about Bronx and New York City issues in 1998. (Stein graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959.)
   The Bronx once had its own daily newspaper, The Bronx Home News, started January 20, 1907 and merged into the New York Post in 1948. It became a special section of the Post, sold only in the Bronx, and eventually disappeared from view.
   One of New York City's major non-commercial radio broadcasters is WFUV, a 50,000 watt station broadcasting from Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. The radio station's antenna is atop Montefiore Medical Center, the borough's tallest building.
   The City of New York has an official television station run by the NYC Media Group and broadcasting from Bronx Community College, and Cablevision operates News 12 The Bronx, both of which feature programming based in the Bronx. Co-op City was the first area in The Bronx to have its own cable provider outside of Manhattan. The local cable access station BRONXNET provides public affairs programming in addition to programming produced by Bronx residents. Its website showcases Bronx Music Vol.1; a CD featuring the old and new sounds and artists of The Bronx. (External Link

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The Bronx in poetry

In poetry, The Bronx has been immortalized by one of the world's shortest couplets:
� The Bronx

    No Thonx � : Ogden Nash, The New Yorker, 1931

Nash later repented 33 years after his calumny, in 1964 he wrote the following prose poem in 1964 to the Dean of Bronx Community College:
� I can't seem to escape

   the sins of my smart-alec youth; � Here are my amends.

   I wrote those line, "The Bronx? � No thonx";

   I shudder to confess them. � Now I'm an older, wiser man

   I cry, "The Bronx? God � bless them!":

See also: Culture of New York City, Music of New York City, and List of people from The Bronx

Transportation

Roads

The Bronx street grid is irregular. Much of the west Bronx follows the Manhattan street grid, and some of the streets are numbered (the numbering comes from the Manhattan grid, but doesn't match it exactly). The west Bronx's hilly terrain, however, leaves a relatively free street grid that closely resembles that of extreme upper Manhattan, which has similar terrain. Because the street numbering carries over from upper Manhattan, the lowest numbered street in the Bronx is East 132nd Street. The east Bronx is considerably flatter, and the street layout tends to be more regular. However, only the Wakefield neighborhood picks up the street numbering.
Three major north-south thoroughfares run between Manhattan and the Bronx: Third Avenue, Park Avenue, and Broadway. Other major north-south roads include the Grand Concourse, Jerome Avenue, Webster Avenue, and White Plains Road. Major east-west streets include Gun Hill Road, Fordham Road, Pelham Parkway, Boston Road and Tremont Avenue. Many east-west streets are prefixed with either "East" or "West," to indicate on which side of Jerome Avenue they lie (continuing the similar system in Manhattan, which uses Fifth Avenue as the dividing line).
Several major expressways and highways traverse the Bronx. These include:

the Bronx River Parkway
the Bruckner Expressway (I-278/I-95)
the Cross-Bronx Expressway (I-95/I-295)
the New England Thruway (I-95)
the Henry Hudson Parkway (NY-9A)
the Hutchinson River Parkway
the Major Deegan Expressway(New York Thruway) (I-87)

Bridges

Many bridges connect the Bronx to Manhattan and Queens. These include, from west to east:
To Manhattan: the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Broadway Bridge, the University Heights Bridge, the Washington Bridge, the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, the High Bridge, the Concourse Tunnel, the Macombs Dam Bridge, the 145th Street Bridge, the 149th Street Tunnel, the Madison Avenue Bridge, the Park Avenue Bridge, the Lexington Avenue Tunnel, the Third Avenue Bridge (southbound traffic only), and the Willis Avenue Bridge (northbound traffic only). To Manhattan or Queens: the Triborough Bridge To Queens: the Bronx Whitestone Bridge and the Throgs Neck Bridge

Mass transit

The Bronx is served by six lines of the New York City Subway:

IND Concourse Line

IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line

IRT Dyre Avenue Line

IRT Jerome Avenue Line

IRT Pelham Line

IRT White Plains Road Line Two Metro-North Railroad commuter rail lines (the Harlem Line and the Hudson Line) serve 12 stations in the Bronx. In addition, trains serving the New Haven Line stop at Fordham Road.

Education

Education in the Bronx is provided by a large number of public and private institutions. Public schools in the borough are managed by the New York City Department of Education. Private schools range from elite independent schools to parochial schools run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Jewish organizations.
   Many high schools are located in the borough including the Bronx High School of Science, American Studies, Clinton, and the Grace H. Dodge Vocational & Technical H.S.. Parochial (Catholic-linked) high schools include St. Raymond High School for Boys, All Hallows High School, Cardinal Hayes, Cardinal Spellman High School, Fordham Preparatory School, Academy of Mount Saint Ursula, Aquinas High School, Preston, St. Catharines Academy, and Mount Saint Michael Academy. The Bronx is home to three of New York City's most elite private schools: Fieldston, Horace Mann, and Riverdale Country School.
   Starting in the 1990s New York City began closing large, public high schools in The Bronx and replacing them with small high schools. Cited reasons for the changes include poor graduation rates and concerns about safety. Schools that have been closed or reduced in size include James Monroe, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Evander Childs, Christopher Columbus, Morris, Walton, and South Bronx High Schools. More recently the City has started phasing out large middle schools, also replacing them with smaller schools.
   Several colleges and universities are located in The Bronx. Fordham University, a coeducational undergraduate and graduate university, was founded in 1841. It is officially an independent institution but strongly embraces its Jesuit heritage. The Bronx campus, known as Rose Hill is the main campus of the university. Addionally, the main campus of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, part of Yeshiva University, is in Morris Park. Three campuses of the City University of New York are in The Bronx, including Bronx Community College (occupying the former University Heights Campus of New York University), Hostos Community College, and Lehman College (formerly the uptown campus of Hunter College). The College of Mount Saint Vincent is a Catholic liberal arts college located Riverdale and is under the direction of the Sisters of Charity of New York. Founded in 1847 as a school for girls, the academy became a degree-granting college in 1911 and began admitting men in 1974. The school serves 1,600 students. Manhattan College is a Catholic college in Riverdale. Manhattan College offers undergraduate programs in the arts, business, education, engineering, and science. Graduate programs are offered for education and engineering. Monroe College is a private college with a campus in the Bronx. It offers both two-year and four-year programs. The State University of New York Maritime College is a national leader in maritime education.

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