Short answers, pulled from the story.
The definite article in the Bronx comes from the naming convention applied to rivers. The area took its name from the Bronx River, itself named after Jonas Bronck, the first recorded European settler, and river names in New York traditionally carry the article. The usage first appeared officially in the "Annexed District of The Bronx" created in 1874.
Jonas Bronck was a Swedish-born immigrant from Komstad, in the Norra Ljunga parish of Småland, Sweden, who arrived in New Netherland in the spring of 1639. He leased land from the Dutch West India Company and built a farm called Emmaus near what is today Willis Avenue and 132nd Street in Mott Haven. He accumulated 500 acres between the Harlem River and the Aquahung River, which settlers began calling Bronck's River.
DJ Kool Herc held the genre's foundational parties in the community room of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. There he developed turntablist techniques including mixing and scratching funk records and rapping over extended instrumentals. Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were also significant figures from the Bronx in hip hop's early development.
Between 1970 and 1980, 7 of the Bronx's 289 census tracts lost more than 97% of their buildings to arson and abandonment, and another 44 tracts lost more than 50% of their buildings. By the early 1980s, the South Bronx had experienced a loss of 60% of its population and 40% of its housing units, making it widely considered the most blighted urban area in the country.
The Chestnut Blight pathogen Cryphonectria parasitica was found for the first time outside of Asia at the Bronx Zoo in 1904. Over the following 40 years it spread throughout eastern North America and killed back essentially every American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), causing widespread ecological and economic devastation across the continent.
Bronx County has a total area of 57 square miles, of which 42 square miles is land. About 7,000 acres, roughly one fifth of the borough's total area and one quarter of its land area, is designated as parkland. The largest single park is Pelham Bay Park, the biggest park in all of New York City.