East Tremont - The Bronx
Hiram Tarbox, Robert Moses and the Price of an Omelet
The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s monumental biography of New York’s most notorious builder, Robert Moses, was where I first learned of this week’s neighborhood. I suspect many readers of this newsletter have either read the book or have a copy of the massive tome lingering somewhere on a shelf.
Caro devotes two chapters of the book to East Tremont, the Central Bronx neighborhood that served as both a refuge and a stepping stone for thousands of Jewish families and other newly arrived immigrants fleeing the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side. That refuge, Caro argues, was destroyed by the construction of Moses’s six-lane freeway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, whose central section was completed in 1960.
It’s impossible to calculate how much the expressway contributed to the devastation that swept through the South Bronx in the 1970s. But by carving directly through East Tremont, it almost certainly pushed the zone of decline farther north than it might otherwise have spread.
WIECHQUAESGECK
The land between the Hudson and Bronx Rivers was once the homeland of the Wiechquaesgeck, a Munsee-speaking Lenape band whose territory stretched from northern Manhattan up through the present-day Bronx and into southern Westchester. They hunted in the upland forests, harvested shellfish along tidal creeks, and established trade routes, including the path that would later become Broadway.
That came to a crashing halt with the 1641 arrival of Swedish expat Jonas Bronck, the first documented European landowner in the region that would eventually bear his name.
Though Bronck deemed his new homeland “a veritable paradise,” he believed it needed “the industrious hand of man to make it the finest and most beautiful region in all the world.” If there is anything we can all agree on, it’s that paradise can always be improved by the industrious hand of man. By 1700, the Lenape population had dwindled to a mere 3,000, down from nearly 20,000 when Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon into the bay less than a century earlier.
TARBOX
At the heart of the Wiechquaesgeck’s former territory was what is now the Tremont section of the Bronx. The area, just north of Morrissania, was originally called Upper Morrisania, but the local postmaster, the sublimely named Hiram Tarbox, found that too confusing. In 1856, inspired by the neighborhood’s three highest points—Mount Eden, Mount Hope, and Fairmount—and adding a bit of Francophilic flair, Tarbox rechristened the area Tremont.
East Tremont sits roughly between East 180th Street, Southern Boulevard, Third Avenue, and the Cross Bronx Expressway, which dramatically reshaped the neighborhood in the 1960s.
Besides delivering mail and dreaming up new names, Tarbox was a major player in Tremont’s early days, establishing the Bronx Free Library, the local fire department, and, of course, the post office. A true renaissance man, he also held a patent for something called an “excrement apron.”
By the time Tarbox died, Tremont had developed into a bustling town. A local directory from 1871 listed occupations from butchers and composers to bookbinders and wheelwrights. The surnames were a mix of Griswolds, Condons, Babcocks, and a smattering of Gottliebs, Hupfeldts and O’Briens, suggesting a largely English, German, and Irish population.
KING OF THE BRONX
In a few short years, the population would explode, thanks in part to the efforts of J. Clarence Davies, the so-called “King of the Bronx.” Davies had seen how rapidly Harlem was filling up and recognized that the Harlem River, the main obstacle to development in the Bronx, was only a temporary barrier. By the late 1800s, owners of the vast estates that “lined the banks of the Bronx River or stood along the heights of Fordham,” men named Mott, Morris, Pell, and Lorillard, were decamping to coastal retreats like Newport, Rhode Island. They enlisted Davies, who was alone in recognizing the coming transformation, to sell off their properties. For a while, there was little enthusiasm. Then, almost overnight, a frenzy erupted.
One by one, bridges were built, and the avenues of Manhattan poked exploring noses into the Bronx. The “L” was electrifed, and came trundling out the Post Road, now Third Avenue. At last, with the completion of the West Farms subway in 1904, the boom began. Lots leaped from five hundred dollars to five thousand literally overnight. Farms were dismembered; the Lydig estate, at the West Farms terminus, was almost torn apart by the bidders. Streets sprang out, twisting like the tendrils of some quick-growing plant. Boom traders cleaned up. Householders went mad, sold lots on one street and bought on the next: won, lost.1
In two months, Davies’s sales commissions totaled more than a quarter-million dollars.
BOROUGH HALL
The rapidly expanding borough needed a municipal building to house the offices of the borough president and other officials. The northwest corner of Crotona Park, at Third Avenue and Tremont Avenue, was deemed the perfect location. The newly constructed Third Avenue Elevated offered a direct connection to City Hall. Architect George B. Post, whose works include the New York Stock Exchange, designed a three-story yellow brick structure with brown terra cotta trim. Bronx Borough Hall opened in 1897.
Barely a decade later, the borough president deemed the building as “entirely inadequate” for the needs of the rapidly growing Bronx. By 1934, nearly all borough offices and government services had moved to the newly constructed Supreme Courthouse on the Grand Concourse. A fire swept through the then vacant Old Borough Hall in 1968, and it was demolished the following year. Only the grand curving stairs leading to nowhere remain as a reminder of what once stood there.
EAST TREMONT GROWS
By the turn of the century, East Tremont’s newest residents were Jewish families seeking to escape the Lower East Side’s dark and airless tenements, infamous for their sky-high rates of tuberculosis, typhoid, and cholera. When families finally saved enough to move out, they headed for newly accessible neighborhoods like Brownsville, Harlem, or the Bronx.
In the Bronx, the closer you lived to the Grand Concourse, the better off you were. An apartment in East Tremont, while not as prestigious as one just off the Concourse, was still leaps and bounds better than anything on the Lower East Side.
The extension of the IRT elevated line made East Tremont a realistic option for thousands of garment workers commuting into Manhattan. Soon the five-story walk-ups were filled with families. At its peak, the neighborhood reached a remarkable density of 441 people per acre. Today, New York City averages around 45 people per acre, even Manhattan tops out at 114.
East Tremont Avenue, the neighborhood’s main commercial corridor, bustled with bakeries, butcher shops, and boutiques. There were good schools, stable jobs, and the green expanse of nearby Crotona Park.
“Our suburbs, our summer country homes, our camps, our banks and braes, our America the Beautiful, our fields of gaming and dalliance and voyeurism, were in Crotona Park, whose northern border fronted on Tremont Avenue.”2
Most importantly, it was affordable. One tenant paid $69 a month for a six-room apartment: three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen with a large dining area, and even a foyer with a recess big enough to serve as a full formal dining room.3
After World War II, East Tremont became one of the few truly integrated New York neighborhoods. Black and Puerto Rican families moved in, yet the typical pattern of white flight seen across the city never fully materialized. By 1950, 18 percent of the neighborhood was non-white. Affordability played a major role (finding another apartment of similar size elsewhere was nearly impossible), but there was also a cultural component. As Caro notes, the existing Jewish population consisted of “liberals, utopianists, socialists, fiery radical labor unionists,” a political identity that would soon galvanize the neighborhood against the forces intent on destroying it.
A FEW EGGS
In 1952, hundreds of East Tremont families received a letter informing them that their homes lay directly in the proposed path of the Cross Bronx Expressway and would be demolished. They had ninety days to move.
“I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs”
Robert Moses
Residents came up with what they saw as an obvious alternative: shift the proposed route just two blocks south, along the edge of Crotona Park. The change would spare 150 buildings housing 1,530 apartments, and save the city and state millions in relocation and demolition costs. The alternative route would demolish only six dilapidated brownstones housing nineteen families, plus an old bus depot. It seemed like a no brainer.
But Robert Moses refused.
Self-described housewife Lillian Edelstein formed the East Tremont Neighborhood Association (ETNA). They held rallies, circulated petitions, and hired their own engineers, all of whom confirmed that the Crotona Park route was feasible and even preferable. ETNA also appealed to Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons, who pledged unwavering support, declaring he stood with the residents “one hundred percent” and would fight the plan “until hell freezes over.”
It must have been a particularly cold winter. The following year, Lyons voted in favor of Moses’s plan.
From that point on, the highway’s course, and the destruction it would bring, was a fait accompli.
AFTERMATH
On January 1st, 1954, the city formally took title to 159 buildings in East Tremont. A few days later, the heat and hot water in many of the buildings was cut off.
Demolition began the moment a tenant moved out. Remaining tenants endured the gradual destruction of their own buildings. Roofs were removed once top-floor apartments were vacated. Windows were boarded up and debris was piled out in the open begging to be ignited. Gangs picked through the abandoned structures for scrap metal. The air was thick with rock dust, a byproduct of the constant drilling and blasting of bedrock for the expressway.
As the neighborhood literally came down around them, families reluctantly began to move out. The city had promised relocation help, but vacancies were scarce, rents were exponentially higher and the newly built housing projects had long waiting lists.
Ray Bromley, Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Planning at the University at Albany, SUNY, wrote a piece “Not So Simple! Caro, Moses, and the Impact of the Cross-Bronx Expressway,” which doesn’t quite exonerate Moses, but spreads the blame around.
Bromley argues that the expressway’s route had been public since 1944. Anticipating demolition (and the coming payouts) landlords had cut maintenance, so the neighborhood was already deteriorating. Moses, he suggests, was simply the most public face of a far more complex process.
LETTERS
Earlier this week I went to the New York Public Library to dig through some of Robert Moses’s papers. Surely my finely honed research skills would turn up something Caro had missed. Out of the library’s 430 boxes of Moses material, only one contained a folder explicitly labeled “Cross-Bronx,” so I requested it.
The box arrived packed with manila folders stuffed with neatly typed, single-spaced correspondence. Page after page of Moses missives on translucent onionskin paper, filled with gems like: “Too many of our management and budget experts are white-collar sleuths armed with shiny badges, junior bloodhounds with big bowwow collars, petty expense-account auditors and meter readers who snatch eagerly at little things because they can’t grasp big ones.”
But the Cross-Bronx folder itself was almost empty. One of the only items was a letter from a Mrs. Grace Spears, who asked Moses for help with moving expenses after she and her husband, pushed out of the neighborhood and priced out of the city, had found a place upstate. She wrote:
I understand there is a certain amount of money allocated for each family in line with the expressway, and I would appreciate it very much if you would answer me and let me know if by my moving in advance and saving the city the expense of relocating me, would they help me with my moving expenses.
Moses’s response, a typed form letter with a penciled note across the top reading “Sample of type of reply Mr. Moses sends to people in path of Cross Bronx Expressway,” was as follows:
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s field recording starts out outside the Resurrection Prayer Temple, moves down East Tremont Avenue, captures some sound from the never-ending hum of the Cross Bronx Expressway before finishing up where we started.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPH
This picture from the Museum of the City of New York’s collection shows the view from 3rd Ave & 178 St looking south in 1900. The photographic credit is only listed as Manhattan Railway Company, unknown.
ODDS AND END
Last week I put together City of Sound, an interactive map that has all my neighborhood field recordings.
Click on a neighborhood and the associated recording should pop up. It’s still a work in progress and I am open to any suggestions for improvement!
In 1953, Lee Harvey Oswald, then thirteen, lived with his mother in an apartment at 825 East 179th Street where he got in trouble for firing a BB gun out his window into a neighboring building.
825 East 179th,. Municipal Archives of New York. When I mentioned to my friend, the exceedingly well-read MD, that I was writing about East Tremont, he recommended and promptly lent me a copy of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, which follows the lives of two women in Tremont. I’m only about halfway through, but the book, the product of ten years of reporting, is a powerful and unflinching portrait of the neighborhood in the late ’90s.
Riding on Hiram Tarbox’s coattails (or excrement apron), inventor Henry W. Lamp came up with a new and improved Apparatus for Collecting Animal Excrement in 1994.
I still have a few copies of the inaugural print edition of this newsletter, The Neighborhoods Vol. 1 , in my studio. If you upgrade to a paid subscription , I’ll send you a free copy while supplies last.
Coates, Robert M. “King of the Bronx.” The New Yorker, 30 Nov. 1929.
Simon, Kate. Bronx Primitive. HarperCollins Publishers, 1982.
Caro, Robert A.. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Not Goya cans, but still!
For those interested in The Bronx (and who isn't) I highly recommend Ian Frazier's book "Paradise Bronx."