Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx

2. “Get a New Resident for the Bronx”

34 “A Drive of extraordinary Delightfulness” had to be bridged with a structure engineers called the “Great Wall of China” so a roadway could be built atop it. But many more of the obstacles were man-made, among them a scandal in which three commissioners for the boulevard were each paid eighty-five thousand dollars for what the Times described as “fat condemnation jobs.” Before long, legislators were routinely describing the road as a giant boondoggle that would cost too much and, more to the point, “lead to nowhere.” By the time the boulevard was completed, so much time had passed and the world had changed so profoundly that the side roads intended for horse-drawn carriages had to be paved to accommodate the newly fashionable automobile, not even a gleam in Risse’s eye when he drew up his initial plans. 1 • 2 One of hundreds of photographs taken by the city to record construction of the Grand Concourse between 1902 and 1909. They make the project look exciting, although living through seven years of digging and drilling must have taken its toll on residents of the Victorian houses along the street’s route. (Bronx County Historical Society) “A Drive of extraordinary Delightfulness” 35 The ceremony marking the opening of the Grand Concourse took place on November 24, 1909, the day before Thanksgiving. From the point of view of the little band of prominent Bronxites who turned out for the event, the timing could not have been worse. A devastating winter storm swept through the Northeast that day, lashing New York City with special force. Driving sleet combined with thirty-mile-an-hour winds to cause multiple injuries and at least one death: a sixty-eight-year-old man who had climbed to the roof of his building on the Lower East Side to say his prayers was bashed in the head by the door of a coal scuttle, which fractured his skull. Elsewhere in the city, gusts hurled flower pots and window panes to the ground, sending chunks of glass and pottery onto passersby. Up in the Bronx, at 161st Street, the official gateway to the new boulevard , some seventy-five men bundled in overcoats and mufflers stood shivering as acting Borough president John Murray presided over exercises that “were planned to be very simple originally,” according to the Times, and “had to be curtailed on account of the discomfort entailed on the spectators by the bad weather.” From the steps of the pedestal of the bronze statue honoring Louis Heintz, borough president-elect Cyrus Miller and his longtime predecessor Louis Haffen delivered short addresses and “speculated enthusiastically on the benefits the new road would bring to the Bronx.” Afterward, the entire party was taken in automobiles along the length of the new roadway, which was to begin welcoming the public the following day. Despite the cheerful rhetoric, remarkably little fanfare greeted a project nearly two decades in the making, and the sense of anticlimax was echoed in news accounts of the ceremonies. The brief article in the following day’s Times, published beneath the headline “$1,000,000 Parkway Open: The Bronx Grand Concourse Starts Its Career under Stress of Weather,” was buried deep inside the paper, nudged off the front page by reports of an arrest at the Metropolitan Opera House (“Sleuth in Evening Clothes Captures an Operagoer, Calling Him a Pickpocket”), the efforts of students to expand a local high school (“Girls’ Witchery Won Eight-Story School”), and the travails of a Queens teenager who was discovered drunk in his classroom (“Bottle of Gin, Half Empty, Found in His Desk”). As was so often the case in the years that followed, an event hailed as transformative uptown seemed of singularly little interest to the reporters from Manhattan. 36 “A Drive of extraordinary Delightfulness” And, in fact, the price tag had been much higher than the headline suggested. Though estimates of the boulevard’s cost fluctuated over the years, according to an article published in the Times about a decade later, the actual cost was $6.6 million—the equivalent of $114 million in 2008 dollars—a figure that included $3 million for acquisition of the necessary land and $2 million for expenses ranging from site preparation to the purchase of the shade trees that would be such a distinctive feature of the boulevard for generations to come. The following Sunday brought what Bronx...