The Bronx

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bronx is the only borough of New York City that sits almost entirely on the North American mainland, and yet it has spent much of its history feeling like an island unto itself. At the 2020 census, more than 1.4 million people called it home, making it a place larger in population than the entire city of Philadelphia. It is northernmost, it is densest in places, and it is the only borough that takes a definite article as part of its legal name: not simply Bronx, but the Bronx. That grammatical quirk goes all the way back to a Scandinavian farmer who arrived in 1639 and built a homestead on a neck of mainland above Manhattan. His river became the borough's river, and the borough took his name.

  How does a place travel from a single farm on 500 acres of leased Dutch company land to a city within a city of over a million people? How does a borough become the cradle of hip hop, the home of the most decorated franchise in Major League Baseball history, and the address of what was once the poorest congressional district in the entire United States? What does it mean that nearly a quarter of the Bronx's surface is open parkland, including a forest tract that is thousands of years old? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Jonas Bronck's River

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  Documents describe Jonas Bronck as a Swedish-born immigrant from Komstad, in the Norra Ljunga parish of Småland, Sweden, who arrived in New Netherland during the spring of 1639. His precise origins have been disputed by historians, but what is not disputed is that he became the first recorded European settler in the territory that now bears his name. He leased land from the Dutch West India Company on a neck of mainland just north of New Haarlem, and he built a farm he called Emmaus, close to what is today the corner of Willis Avenue and 132nd Street in Mott Haven.

  Bronck did not stop with one lease. He bought additional tracts directly from local tribes, eventually accumulating 500 acres between the Harlem River and the Aquahung River, the waterway that flowed through the territory. Dutch and English settlers began calling that waterway Bronck's River. The land itself became Bronck's Land. From those informal possessions of a single settler, the name spread outward across centuries until it named a county. Brian G. Andersson, a former Commissioner of New York City's Department of Records, helped organize a 375th Anniversary celebration in Bronck's hometown in 2014, marking how seriously scholars now take that Swedish connection.

  Before Bronck arrived, the territory was called Rananchqua by the native Siwanoy band of the Lenape, also known historically as the Delawares. Other Native Americans knew it as Keskeskeck. The Siwanoy were part of the Wappinger Confederacy, and they inhabited a territory the Lenape called Lenapehoking. European settlers displaced them after 1643. A folk story about the definite article holds that it derives from the phrase "visiting the Broncks," as though the settler's family were a local landmark. The more likely explanation, linguists note, is that the name followed the river-naming convention: one says "the Hudson" and "the Harlem," so one says "the Bronx."

• 3. Annexation and County-Making

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  Frederick Philipse, lord of Philipse Manor, owned the King's Bridge when it was built in 1693 where Broadway crossed the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Local farmers on both sides of the creek resented the tolls he charged, and in 1759, Jacobus Dyckman and Benjamin Palmer organized a rival free bridge across the Harlem River. That small act of toll rebellion captures something important about the Bronx's early political identity: its residents were practical people with grievances against distant landlords and far-away authorities.

  The Bronx was originally part of Westchester County, one of the 12 original counties of the English Province of New York. The consolidation that eventually made it a New York City borough happened in two stages. In 1873, the state legislature annexed the towns of Kingsbridge, West Farms, and Morrisania to the city, effective 1874. Then, in 1895, the territory east of the Bronx River followed, including the Town of Westchester, which had actually voted against consolidation a year earlier, along with parts of Eastchester and Pelham. The maritime community of City Island voted separately to join in 1896.

  On the 1st of January 1898, the consolidated New York City came into being with the Bronx as one of its five boroughs. It remained part of New York County until the 19th of April 1912, when those annexed Westchester portions were formally reconstituted as Bronx County. That made it the 62nd and last county to be created by New York State. Bronx County's courts opened for business on the 2nd of January 1914, the same day that John P. Mitchel started work as Mayor of New York City.

• 4. A Borough Transformed

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  In 1900, roughly 200,000 people lived in the Bronx. By 1930, that figure had grown to 1.3 million, a factor-of-six increase driven largely by the subway. When rapid transit linked the Bronx to Manhattan in 1904, a mostly rural railroad suburb began its transformation into a dense urban borough. By 1919, the Bronx had 63 piano factories employing more than 5,000 workers, reflecting the kind of industrial concentration that attracted wave after wave of newcomers.

  By 1937, 592,185 Jews lived in the Bronx, representing 43.9% of the borough's population. Irish, Italian, Polish, French, and German immigrants had all settled here, drawn by residential construction that multiplied block by block as the subway extended north. Bootleggers and gangs were active throughout Prohibition, between 1920 and 1933, and Police Commissioner Richard Enright described speakeasies as gathering places where, in his words, "the vicious elements, bootleggers, gamblers and their friends in all walks of life" cooperated to evade law enforcement.

  The demographic composition shifted dramatically in the mid-20th century. Between 1930 and 1960, moderate and upper income residents, predominantly non-Hispanic white, began leaving the borough's southwestern neighborhoods. Caribbean and Central American communities grew quickly: the Bronx's Hispanic population rose from 27.7% in 1970 to 54.8% in 2020. By 2011, the Jewish population had fallen from its 1937 peak of nearly 600,000 to roughly 54,000, while the number of Jews living in the borough only a few decades earlier remained one of the defining facts of its modern character.

• 5. The South Bronx and Its Fires

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  Out of 289 census tracts in the Bronx, 7 tracts lost more than 97% of their buildings to arson and abandonment between 1970 and 1980. Another 44 tracts lost more than 50% of their buildings in the same decade. Those numbers describe the most concentrated episode of urban destruction in American peacetime history.

  Historians and social scientists have proposed multiple overlapping explanations. Robert Moses's Cross Bronx Expressway, as detailed in Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker, is one of them: the expressway destroyed existing residential neighborhoods and, critics argue, created instant slums in its wake. High-rise housing projects in the South Bronx concentrated poverty in ways that destabilized surrounding neighborhoods. Redlining, the practice of denying mortgage loans and insurance policies in certain areas, made it harder for residents to maintain or sell property. There was also debate about rent control laws and whether they made abandonment more financially rational for landlords than renovation.

  Some landlords reportedly burned their own low-value buildings to collect insurance money. Some tenants set fires deliberately in hopes of qualifying for emergency relocation to better housing elsewhere in the city. By the early 1980s, the South Bronx had lost 60% of its population and 40% of its housing units. The district containing it, New York's 15th congressional district, contained what had been the poorest of all 435 U.S. congressional districts, a designation it held until redistricting following the 2020 census.

  Revival began in the late 1980s, stimulated in part by the city's Ten-Year Housing Plan. Church-affiliated groups erected the Nehemiah Homes, approximately 1,000 units of affordable housing. The grassroots organization Nos Quedamos led the Melrose Commons redevelopment effort. Between 2002 and June 2007-33,687 new housing units were built or underway and $4.8 billion had been invested in new housing. In the first six months of 2007 alone, total investment in new residential development reached $965 million.

• 6. The Origin of Hip Hop

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  DJ Kool Herc held parties in the community room of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where he experimented with turntablist techniques including mixing and scratching of funk records, as well as rapping during extended instrumentals. Those gatherings in the Bronx, during a decade of demographic and economic decline, gave the genre its earliest formal shape. Herc was one of three figures at the genre's origin; Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were also significant Bronx DJs from that same period.

  The Bronx had already been a center for the evolution of Latin jazz in the early 20th century, and the Bronx Opera was established in 1967. But the hip hop that emerged in the 1970s was something different: a direct artistic response to the conditions of the South Bronx, born in community spaces in the same neighborhoods where arson and abandonment were hollowing out the housing stock. The Bronx has also been an important base for drill culture, with rappers including Kay Flock and Sha EK among those who emerged from the borough more recently.

  Off-Off-Broadway theater has also found a home in the Bronx. The Pregones Theater, which produces Latin American work, opened a new 130-seat theater in 2005 on Walton Avenue in the South Bronx. Housing prices in that neighborhood nearly quadrupled between 2002 and the time of that opening. The Bronx Museum of the Arts, founded in 1971, holds more than 800 works of art, primarily by artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, across a main space and 11,000 square feet of galleries.

• 7. Parks, Forest, and the Chestnut

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  New York City bought land for the Bronx's major parks in 1888, while it was still open and inexpensive, in anticipation of future development pressure. That decision preserved about 7,000 acres, roughly one fifth of the borough's total area, as parkland. The vision for a system of parks connected by park-like thoroughfares is usually attributed to John Mullaly.

  The Thain Family Forest at the New York Botanical Garden is thousands of years old and stands as New York City's largest remaining tract of original forest. Pelham Bay Park, in the borough's north, is the largest park in New York City. Van Cortlandt Park, the third-largest, borders Yonkers to the west. Woodlawn Cemetery, on 400 acres along the western bank of the Bronx River, opened in 1863 and has had more than 300,000 people interred there since the first burial in 1865.

  In 1904, the Chestnut Blight pathogen known as Cryphonectria parasitica was found for the first time outside of Asia, at the Bronx Zoo. Over the next 40 years it spread throughout eastern North America, killing back essentially every American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), causing ecological and economic devastation on a continental scale. The tree whose destruction rippled across an entire continent was first identified inside the borough that by that same year had just been linked to Manhattan by the new subway.

  In 2006, a five-year, $220-million program of capital improvements and natural restoration was begun across 70 Bronx parks, financed by water and sewer revenues as part of an agreement that permitted a water filtration plant under Mosholu Golf Course. One major aim of that program is opening more of the Bronx River's banks and returning them to a natural state, work that continues alongside the broader urban restoration of the South Bronx.

• 8. The Yankees and the Borough

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  When the original Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, it was the largest baseball park in existence. The New York Yankees have won 27 World Series titles, more than any other team in Major League Baseball, and their roster across the decades has included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle. The team's nickname, the Bronx Bombers, is as much a reference to their address as to their power-hitting style.

  The old stadium also served beyond baseball. It hosted college football games and was home to two National Football League teams: the New York Yankees from 1926-1929 and the New York Giants from 1956-1973. In 2008 it was replaced with the current Yankee Stadium, built on land that had been Macombs Dam Park, which closed in 2007 for the project. The new stadium also hosts the New York City FC, the only Major League Soccer team among the five boroughs.

  Part of the New York City Marathon passes through the Bronx, including the notoriously difficult Mile 20. The Morris Park Racecourse operated from 1889 to 1904, and in its later years the track was used for motor racing, where a new land speed record was set on the course. The borough's college programs add to that sporting fabric: the Fordham Rams and the Lehman Lightning both compete from Bronx campuses, and Fordham University's Rose Hill campus, founded as St. John's College in 1841 by the Diocese of New York, remains one of the larger university campuses within city limits.