Grand Concourse, Revisited

The first thing you’ve got to do is walk it. Is it too much to assume you haven’t? No: even many who live on and around it (in those narrow precincts of solid streetwalls, Puerto Rican/lingering elderly Jewish/black/west African striver mixed-up neighborhoods for block after block for miles), even many of those who have never lived anywhere else, who scarcely know the city south of Franz Sigel Park, haven’t walked the full stem. That means starting at the very beginning, at the corner of East 138th St., under the shadow of the Metro North rail bridge. There’s nothing very grand about it here–indeed this wasn’t even a part of the original 1890 design of planner Aloys Risse.

But walk all the way north from there, past Hostos, past the stadium, past the Deco apartment houses’ aluminum door frames, the oversized postwar terrace apartments, over the awful canyon of the Cross Bronx Expressway; walk until you hit Mosholu Parkway, after the tedious commercial corridors, East Tremont, Fordham Road,  each one same as the last, right up to the entrance to the vast green blanket of Van Cortlandt Park–this is one of the great urban walks in the world. It imparts to the walker what every great urban walk should: the sensation, however impossible to qualify, that you just have been in communication with something, and it has privileged you with a sort of secret information.

There has always been talk about the decay of the Grand Concourse, and there has always been talk about reviving it. The most recent chatter has been inspired by the series of lectures, exhibitions, and walking tours organized by the Bronx Museum that comprise the year-long celebration of the boulevard’s centennial. The latest event was the announcement, on Wednesday, of seven finalists in a competition titled “Intersections: Grand Concourse Beyond 100″. The brief challenged architects to imagine a brave new future for the area, and imagine they did: from a field of giant energy-producing windmills, to a string of interconnected rooftop gardens, to (pictured above, from designers EDAW/AECOM) curbside gardens bisected by trolley lines. All of them are intriguing ideas, and more than a few might actually be practicable; Harvard’s Christopher Ryan submitted a fine proposal for spot improvements along the route that would add a fresh visual consistency to the streetscape, as well as increase the area’s functional repertoire with a wide range of new recreational facilities.

One note: If you follow the above link to the announcement, you’ll be carried to Curbed’s post on the subject. You might be better served going to The Architect’s Newspaper. The Curbed commentariat is famously nasty, but this time they’ve outdone themselves for ignorance and shortsightedness. Of course there’s crime and decay in the Bronx. But according to the New York Police Department’s CrimeStat site, the crime rate in the combined districts of the Grand Concourse has declined at an average rate of approximately 9% over the last year alone–to say nothing of the 12% decline from two years ago, or the 33% reduction since 2001. This rate of decline is almost identical to that experienced in what we might call the present Brooklyn “pale of settlement”–all those rapidly gentrifying quarters stretching from the eastern perimeter of Prospect Park, all the way north via Crown Heights into Bushwick, that are currently the preferred redoubt of the post-collegiate crowd (to be followed by the real estate developers who love them).

Not only that, but the actual volume of violent crime in the western Bronx is comparable in every way to that of central Brooklyn: There have been seven murders and 21 reported rapes this year in Bushwick north of Broadway–six murders and 18 rapes around the Concourse south of 174th St. Looking north towards Fordham Road, 123 burglaries have occurred in the Bronx; in Crown Heights and the adjoining areas to the west, 128. These figures are all the more impressive in view of the fact that the Grand Concourse has a higher population density, being comprised almost exculsively of five- and six-storey apartment buildings, whereas the housing stock in central Brooklyn is predominately three- and four-storey brownstones. As a function of population, crime rates in some areas along the Grand Concourse are lower than they are in many more expensive portions of Brooklyn.

And if that isn’t enough to get you up to take the walk, consider the transit possibilities: from Union Square, it’s a scant twenty-five minutes to 167th St. by the number 4 express train. From Columbus Circle, you can get to East Tremont Ave. in twenty on the D. You can be there and back in a twinkling.

Does all of this mean that the GC will be the new Bedford Ave.? Not likely, but not for the reasons you might think. Even if some of the more sensational “Intersections” proposals were adopted, it wouldn’t make too much sense for developers to suddenly dig new rails by building so far away from their current hive of activity: the properities they’ve built over the last ten years in Brooklyn and western Queens actually accrue in value from having other new projects open nearby, so why endanger their prior investments by breaking the mould? What’s more (as you’ll find when you get there) the Grand Concourse isn’t in need of a new influx of residents. Not to say that it’s buzzing with nightlife, but it does buzz–with the comings and goings of many thousands of ordinary, working people, mothers with their infants, old folks out for their constitutional, children going and returning from school. It’s a classic neighborhood, and it’s worth a look. Go on up and see for yourself.