Edenwald - The Bronx

Serpents (and Mr. Wiggly) in the Garden of Eden

Though the name may evoke images of a Tolkien-esque fairyland, the Bronx neighborhood of Edenwald is a far cry from the Shire. Situated on the northern edge of the city, the community is anchored by two contrasting landmarks: the massive Edenwald Houses, the borough’s largest public housing development, and Seton Falls Park, a 30-acre woodland preserve traversed by what remains of Rattlesnake Creek. These two defining features stand almost as mirror images of each other at the heart of the neighborhood, bisected by the busy corridor of Baychester Avenue.

Beyond the park and the housing project, the neighborhood is a mix of one- and two-family homes and row houses.

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When walking the streets of Edenwald, it’s hard to believe that the landscape once inspired Bronx historian Randall Comfort to wax poetic:

“Oh, give me a home ‘mid the vales of rare Edenwald;
No parks formed by man with thy woodlands compare
Nor fountains e’er built or exquisitely chiseled,
Equals old Seton Falls, ‘mid the green bowers there.”

Randall may have been a better historian than poet, but his words evoke just how much the city has changed over the past century. This photograph he took (which really does look like it could be from The Hobbit) even more so.

In addition to photographing his horse and penning mediocre poetry, Randall wrote about a large cave in Seton Falls Park once inhabited by the area’s original Siwanoy people. By the time the Bronx historian visited, it had become “a favorite nook for picnic parties.”

In 1640, the Dutch West India Company “purchased” much of what would become the East Bronx from the local Siwanoy tribe. In 1654, typical of the nebulous conception of real estate and land rights at the time, Thomas Pell also purchased a good portion of the same land from the Siwanoy. Pell, who was English, was allowed to keep his holdings by swearing allegiance to the Dutch until England assumed control. He was granted the title of Lord of the Manor of Pelham in 1666.

Edenwald, part of Pell’s expansive territory, was long considered part of Eastchester. The name survives today in a nearby Bronx neighborhood and another just across the city line in Westchester County.

SNAKES

Topographical survey sheets of the borough of the Bronx easterly of the Bronx River (1905)

Running through the area was Rattlesnake Creek, which once flowed unimpeded from Wakefield to Eastchester Bay. The waterway earned its name from an infestation of rattlesnakes that slithered between and sunned themselves atop the jumble of rocks lining the creek, a serious drawback to settling in the area.

Eventually, someone came up with the bright idea of releasing a drove of feral hogs with a taste for rattlesnake into the woods. Pigs, along with mongooses, honey badgers and hedgehogs, are the only animals that are essentially immune to snake venom. In no time at all, the snakes were gone.

Later, the pigs would turn their attention to the city’s sanitation problem, cheerfully gorging themselves on the mounds of rotting food scraps that clogged New York’s streets. But by the mid-19th century, the little oinkers had worn out their welcome and in the Great Piggery War of 1859, like the rattlesnakes they once feasted on, the pigs were banished from the city.

SETON

Sometime after the Revolutionary War, James Roosevelt, an ancestor of two U.S. Presidents, purchased the former snake pit. Eventually, the land was acquired by the Seton Family whose most famous descendant was Elizabeth Seton, the first American ever canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.

Elizabeth Ann Seton by Amabilia Filicchi

Unlike Saint Patrick, who, similar to the hogs of Edenwald, is credited with driving all the snakes out of Ireland, Seton earned her sainthood by founding the first Catholic schools in the United States. Of course, you can’t achieve official saint status until you’ve performed a few miracles. The particular miracle that cemented Seton’s sainthood occurred in 1963 when Carl Kalin, a Con Ed engineer checked into St Joseph’s hospital in Yonkers with a rare brain disease. After doctors had given him up as a hopeless case, a few nuns from the Sisters of Charity visited Kalin, placed one of Seton’s bones on his comatose body, and prayed. Kalin came out of his coma, asked a nurse what was with the bone sitting on his chest, and quickly made a full recovery, checking out of the hospital ten days later.

Seton’s eldest son, William, built “Cragdon,” a sprawling fifty-one-acre estate in the center of what would become Edenwald. He cut down most of the property’s ancient cedars and dammed the creek to form two ponds and a waterfall. A family album from the time shows the Setons playing croquet, relaxing by their pond, and sledding down the newly deforested hills.

MORE SNAKES

By the early 20th century, the Bronx was officially part of New York City. The Setons had subdivided their property and sold it off. John H. Eden built his own estate in the area, naming the property “Edenwald” (“Eden’s Forest” in German). The name stuck long after his house was gone. The former Cragdon estate was now under Parks Department control, and a small community grew up around it.

A local school was built on the property of a Mr. William Johnson. Johnson, a renaissance man of sorts, began his career in pickle bottling, pivoted to strawberry farming and finally settled into life as a landlord. Unbeknownst to local families, on the same plot as the school, Johnson was renting the barn that used to house his pickle bottling operation to Ellis Joseph, “a buyer and seller of wild beasts.” One morning, a young girl on her way to class heard the unmistakable cackle of a laughing hyena echoing off the factory walls. The local PTA went ballistic.

Panicking parents began “polishing old rifles and fingering rusty triggers,” and demanded action from Johnson, who placated them with promises not to renew the animal trader’s lease. This uneasy peace lasted until a spring day in 1931, when history repeated itself. Three snakes escaped from the makeshift menagerie and slithered toward the schoolhouse. They must have been abnormally large because all three were spotted by vigilant locals who dispatched the escapees, bringing an end to the second serpentine chapter in Edenwald’s history. Several students began attending school in nearby Mount Vernon instead.

MR. WIGGLY

In more recent years, there has been another reason to avoid Seton Falls Park. According to local legend, a man, nicknamed Mr. Wiggly for reasons that will soon become apparent, was said to live in a shack in the woods. Others claim he didn’t live there but rather rode through the woods on a moped which, given the terrain, seems unlikely.

In some versions of his story, Mr Wiggly is a terrifying psychopath who lures unsuspecting locals into the dark where he tortures and kills them, the Bronx’s own Cropsey. The 2011 movie Seton Falls Park: The Urban Legend of Mr. Wiggly, starring Al Pussycat, a former bodyguard for Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe as Mr. Wiggly, embraces this most extreme version of the myth.

The more probable but still undeniably creepy version tells of a man who lurked at the edge of the park and exposed himself (and wiggled) to anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path.

NAVAJOS, INTERCRIME AND THE BRONX 120

Across Baychester Avenue sits the Edenwald Houses, the Bronx’s largest public housing project; forty buildings, a mix of low-slung three-story units and fourteen-story towers, spread across fifty acres and home to over 2,000 residents. When they opened in 1953, they were supposed to offer a model for modern urban living. Less than two years later they were already making headlines for gang activity, a specter which would plague the development for decades.

On May 5th, 1955, Frank Santana, a member of the local Navajo gang, who wore bandanas and matching leather jackets emblazoned with the image of a Native American chief, shot 15-year-old William Blankenship after mistaking him for a rival from the Golden Guineas. The Navajos were said to be “openly contemptuous of the project’s small security force,” and when the Housing Authority brought in reinforcements, the teenagers responded with sniper fire and threats.

A little over a decade later, the Intercrime gang, led by Joseph Pratt, controlled the Edenwald Houses until Pratt’s arrest in 1970. By the 1980s, the rise of crack cocaine led to the emergence of entrepreneurial gangs that amassed vast fortunes almost overnight. George “Geto” Silva headed the “41 Crew,” which was reportedly selling $20,000 worth of crack every day. His crew spent a million dollars in the summer of 1988 alone, a claim that sounds absurd until you see Geto’s outfits.

More recently, on the morning of April 27th, 2016, under the heavy chop of NYPD helicopters, hundreds of helmeted police and federal officers, armed with flash grenades and battering rams, swarmed the Edenwald Houses and nearby Eastchester Gardens. 87 alleged gang members were arrested. The 16-month investigation had led to charges against 120 people, supposed members of two rival gangs: 2Fly and the Big Money Bosses. The indictments included charges of murder, drug trafficking, and other crimes under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Under RICO, originally created to combat the Mafia, simply belonging to a group accused of a crime can make you complicit in it.

While the “largest gang takedown in New York City history” dominated the headlines and was touted as a major victory by then U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the reality was more complicated. Very few of those arrested were ever convicted of the crimes they were charged with. Of the 120, 115 took plea deals, so the evidence of their crimes was never tested in court. Residents of the projects, those whose sons, brothers, and fathers were swept up in the raid, accused law enforcement of heavy handed tactics and of casting far too wide a net.

The operation was part of a broader NYPD initiative known as Operation Crew Cut, which was launched in 2012 just as stop-and-frisk was being ruled unconstitutional. It relied on social media monitoring, tracking the online lives of thousands of young people, some as young as ten, and fueled a series of similarly sweeping raids throughout the city.

PACT

When I visited the Edenwald Houses this week, it was abuzz with more construction activity than the East Wing of the White House. Most of the buildings were surrounded by construction fencing and dozens of workers, perched in cherry pickers or behind bulldozers, were working on practically every building in the development.

I later learned that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had recently made a nearly $500 million investment in Edenwald Houses through PACT, a program where NYCHA continues to own the land and buildings, but partners with private and non-profit developers who manage day-to-day operations and oversee renovations. Though tenants have been understandably skeptical of involvement from the private sector, rents remain capped at no more than 30 percent of their income.

The adjacent Baychester Houses, which underwent the conversion to PACT in 2020, are cause for optimism. The newly refurbished buildings, with gray facades with brown wooden panels, and lush, well-tended landscaping, are a noticeable improvement over the Edenwald campus just across the street. Construction is expected to finish next year.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s audio captures the ceaseless sounds of construction at the Edenwald Houses before moving off to Seton Falls Park and the adjacent John Philip Sousa Elementary School.

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Best buddy/roadtrip movie premise ever.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Robert Louis Bracklow (1849-1919) sometimes known as Daylight Bob for his fear of the dark (including darkrooms), documented the changing landscape of New York at the turn of the century. Bracklow, who didn’t start taking pictures until he was in his thirties, ran his own stationery store in Lower Manhattan. Before work, he would take to the streets of the city to photograph. Bracklow was one of the first members of The Camera Club of New York where he rubbed shoulders with photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. The Camera Club, which opened in 1884, is one of New York’s oldest arts organizations, and supported my From Roof to Table project with a darkroom residency in 2012.

Here are some photos Bracklow took of Rattlesnake Brook and Seton Falls in 1913/1914.

You can see more of Bracklow’s work that was digitized by the New-York Historical Society here.

ODDS AND END

• A story from the New York Times about Grenada Built to Win, the summer basketball league at Edenwald Houses that started in 2012.

  

• The Intercept produced this video that profiles Kraig Lewis, one of 120 people swept up in the 2016 raid in New York City history.

• Designed by Marvel Architects, the recently constructed Northeast Bronx YMCA is a welcome addition to the neighborhood.

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