IN THE LAST HALF of the nineteenth century, the sparsely populated acres blanketing southern Westchester County—the territory that would one day be known as the Bronx—might have struck most New Yorkers as the dullest place on earth; the action in those years occurred largely in Manhattan. But to a quartet of young municipal engineers who spent their workdays mapping the Town of Morrisania in the early 1870s, at least one portion of this area was rich with attractions: the expanse called Bathgate Woods that was thick with old-growth forest and vegetation. Bathgate Woods, later known as Crotona Park,...

THE NAME THEODORE DREISER conjures images of the windswept prairies of the Midwest or the grimmer precincts of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, the place some of his more hapless characters end up. Between 1904 and 1906, however, this writer so closely associated with the heartland lived in a drab apartment at 399 Mott Avenue in the Bronx, less than a mile south of the spot where great quantities of earth were being moved to make way for the roadbed of the Grand Concourse. Dreiser was miserable on Mott Avenue, and the experience seared itself so deeply into his consciousness that a few...

THE CREATION MYTH for the style known as Art Deco has a breathtaking simplicity. It decrees that Art Deco was born during a single glorious moment at a single glorious event—the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne held in Paris in 1925. The story is compelling and, like so many creation myths, not particularly accurate. Art Deco was incubated in cultural developments that long preceded the extravaganza along the banks of the Seine, and the term by which the style would be known came into vogue well after the last exhibitor had packed up and left town....

IN THE MID-1950S, the artist Franz Kline used the phrase “Miss Grand Concourse” to express his disdain for Ruth Kligman, the sexpot from New Jersey who was Jackson Pollock’s lover, the sole survivor of the car crash that hurled Pollock’s body into a tree and, with what everyone who hung out at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village regarded as unseemly haste, the lover of Pollock’s great friend and fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning.

Kline was not the only person to speak dismissively of Kligman. The poet Frank O’Hara famously dubbed her the “death car girl,” and de Kooning’s...

OF ALL THE MEMORY-DRENCHED spots along the Grand Concourse, the place remembered with the greatest fondness is almost certainly Loew’s Paradise, the gorgeous picture palace just south of Fordham Road. Decades after its heyday, the mere mention of its name elicits sighs, even among people who have not laid eyes on its Italian Baroque splendor for more years than they can count. Yet one of the most eloquent tributes to Loew’s Paradise takes the form of a grainy, six-minute video made by a young visual artist who was born four decades after the theater’s opening in a city more than...

IN NOVEMBER 1945, in the wake of the Holocaust, the greatest cataclysm Jews the world over had ever known, a new magazine sponsored by the American Jewish Committee burst onto the American scene. The publication’s name wasCommentary, and although its official goal was to engage young Jewish intellectuals in the great issues of the day, one of its most beguiling features was a series of essays exploring what it was like to be a normal American Jew living in relatively tranquil times.

The chatty and almost intimate pieces ranged widely in subject matter, analyzing the cultural significance of everything...

MANY MEMOIRISTS and a few novelists have drawn compelling portraits of what it was like to live on and near the Grand Concourse during the years of its greatest fame, portraits ranging in tone from grim to sugarcoated. One of the most revealing depictions, however, takes the form of a long-out-of-print first novel that hardly anyone remembers and even fewer people have actually read.

The work, set in the final years of the Depression and published in 1954, is called, simply,Grand Concourse. Without the Internet, one might stumble upon the novel only accidentally, perhaps in a secondhand bookstore or...

EXECUTIVE TOWERS, the last luxury apartment house on the boulevard to be built with private money, opened at 165th Street in June 1963. With its wave-shaped balconies punctuating a curvy façade of glazed white brick, the twenty-three-story building looked like a vagabond from the Upper East Side come to settle in an unlikely yet still respectable part of town. Within weeks of the opening, many of the nearly 450 apartments were being dressed in flocked wallpaper, and deliverymen were carting mohair sofas edged with fringe into the spacious living rooms.

“It definitely represented a step up in the world,” recalled...

PEOPLE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE or something to blame for the tumultuous changes washing over the Grand Concourse didn’t have to look far. Co-op City, the cluster of brick towers on the great sweep of marshland along the Hutchinson River, emerged as so potent a symbol of the dismal fortunes of Louis Risse’s great boulevard that decades’ worth of motorists crawling along the Hutchinson River Parkway found it impossible to pass the huge apartment complex off to the west without the thought crossing their minds, “There it is. That’s what killed the Grand Concourse.”

Although Co-op City has the immutable look...

ONE UNS EASONABLY WARM EVENING in the autumn of 2005, a group of Bronx residents came together to talk about the place where they lived. The gathering, held at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, was the first in a series of events examining how a thoroughfare draped in memories could take its place in a twenty-first-century metropolis so different from the one in which it had come of age. Although the centennial of the Grand Concourse lay four years in the future, the events seemed to sum up all the issues facing the boulevard as the street and its...