The Bronx is a borough of New York City that has a long and storied history. It was originally part of Westchester County, but was ceded to New York County in two main parts (West Bronx, 1874 and East Bronx, 189) before it became Bronx County. The area was first inhabited by the Siwanoy of the Wappinger Confederacy, a part of the Lenapehoking territory of Lenape. After World War II, the nation experienced an era of great prosperity, but the effect in the Bronx was not as positive.
To address this, Majora Carter spearheaded the South Bronx Greenway project, which aimed to transform the South Bronx coastline from a contaminated barrier of concrete and industrial sites to a useful and valuable green space for residents. This project included tree planting, environmental cleaning, and other initiatives to change the physical landscape of the Bronx. Housing was scarce after World War II and people left the Bronx in large numbers to seek new developments that included backyards for their children and their own cars. Despite this, the district was still able to improve with each new construction and housing innovation law that the city adopted. The development of the Bronx was initially under the supervision of Frederic Law Olmstead and the parks department, but their plans to build a permanent Bronx suburb were replaced by public projects with a much more urban than suburban tone.
Orchard Beach was a soft crescent of ocean sand, nicknamed by locals as The Bronx Riviera. In the early 19th century, the Bronx was still recovering from the ravages of the American Revolutionary War and was still a sparsely populated rural landscape. It was during this time that Edgar Allen Poe arrived to convalesce with his wife, who was sick with tuberculosis, by promising to give up drinking. The township's educational institutions include Fordham University (184), Manhattan College (185), Lehman College (196), a division of the City University of New York, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. The Bronx Central Post Office, the Bronx County Jail, and the Triborough and Bronx-Whitestone bridges were some of the large-scale public projects that were launched during this time. In 1930, with more than a million people living in the Bronx, it was predominantly Eastern European Jewish (49% of the population), although many were recent middle-class European immigrants of Irish or Italian descent.
Despite difficult times and extreme need, it was still a place where families were striving to achieve their American dream.
