The Grand Concourse's Century: And The Feeding Tree Too

This broad, eleven lane avenue connecting Manhattan to the parklands in the upper Bronx was the brainchild of an Alsatian immigrant, engineer Louis Aloys Risse, and took almost forty years from conception to its grand opening in 1909.  Truthfully, there’s not much to see and do along the middle reaches of the Concourse.  It could be any neighborhood in the south Bronx: discount stores, Latino diners, posters for mariachi and merengue shows. But there is one grand sight.

Loew’s Paradise Theater, just above 184th Street, was the largest cinema in the city, seating four thousand customers, when it opened in 1929. The façade, lined with statues of chubby cherubs, is beautifully preserved.

The interior was not only opulent, but so vast that projectors were used to give the impression of clouds floating across the twinkling night-sky of the ceiling.   A few blocks south of Loew's, there's another gigantic former cinema, surely seating almost as large an audience, now an evangelical meeting house, the Love Gospel Assembly.

These buildings speak eloquently of the history of this neighborhood. Italian, German and Jewish families left crowded downtown Manhattan in huge numbers in the 1920s and ‘30s, moving to the spacious apartment buildings which sprang up along the GC after the arrival of the subway. Cinemas, theaters, and baseball provided their recreation.  In the first talking picture, “The Jazz Singer” (1927), Al Jolson could turn to his mother and yell “Ma, I’m rich! We’re moving to the Bronx!”

Jolson’s triumphant cry is reproduced, along with countless other comments and events from the GC’s history, in Skowmon Hastanan’s “Timeline,” an adventurously non-chronological collage in the Bronx Museum’s new show “Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100” (thru June 20). You can see footage of the Paradise Theater’s original interior too, as part of Pablo Helguera’s absorbing video work “Paradise.”  After viewing the Concourse exhibit, step past Jean-Michel Basquiat’s hilariously abrasive “Six Icons” series in the corridor and into the Museum’s south building, where a wildly eclectic show of modern art from the JP Morgan Chase collection finds Cindy Sherman jostling with abstract expressionists, minimalists and Gilbert & George (thru May 10).

It’s a quick walk from the Museum down to Joyce Kilmer Park, where a statue of the Lorelei, from Heine’s Rhineland poem about a lovelorn siren luring sailors to their doom, turns its back on the 1923 Yankee Stadium.  Right now the house of Babe Ruth stands shoulder to shoulder with the brand new Yankee Stadium, and at the time I visited, there was a gentle hum of pre-season activity.

I got lucky, for once, with the camera.  Note the pigeon in full flight across what I can't help thinking is a sort of post-Nuremberg facade. 

Anyway, for refreshment, turn right on 161st Street, ignore the fast food franchises, and make for The Feeding Tree, a Jamaican café serving spicy jerk dishes for about eight dollars, with fragrant rice and peas.

Service isn't zippy, but it's most pleasant.  This is not the best neighborhood for bar-hopping.  The beer-halls along the side of the old stadium, with names like Stan's and Billy's, are hectic mosh-pits when a game is on, deserted otherwise, and closed out of season.  The wise choice - at least when the Yankees aren't playing - is the Yankee Tavern, a real bar - in fact an atmospheric 1928 bar packed with memorabilia.  It's a long, soothingly high-ceilinged room, with a tiled floor and plenty of bar-stools; food is served in a dining room in the rear.

I wonder how the beer-halls will fare, with the new stadium an extra block or two away.  Further to stagger, I guess.

For Bronx Museum information, click here.