2014 saw the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the creation of The Bronx as a county (and the 375th anniversary of Jonas Bronck settling in our borough) and to commemorate that, Welcome2TheBronx began creating lists of fun facts about The Bronx which everyone loved. To that end, we have decided to continue wowing you with little (and popularly) known facts and tidbits about our beautiful borough!
Tag: Bronx History
The Bronx was brewing before Prohibition began on January 16, 1920. In Melrose and Morrisania…
Without much as a whisper of her passing, Bronx born and raised Bess Myerson, America’s first and only Jewish Miss America, passed away last month on December 14th at the age of 90. She was known as the woman who refused to change her name so it wouldn’t sound too Jewish.
Myerson, who was crowned Miss America in 1945 just days after the end of World War II, lived in Van Cortlandt Village area of The Bronx with her family at Shalom Aleichem Cooperative, one of the country’s first residential cooperatives.
Without much as a whisper of her passing, Bronx born and raised Bess Myerson, America’s first and only Jewish Miss America, passed away last month on December 14th at the age of 90. She was known as the woman who refused to change her name so it wouldn’t sound too Jewish.
Myerson, who was crowned Miss America in 1945 just days after the end of World War II, lived in Van Cortlandt Village area of The Bronx with her family at Shalom Aleichem Cooperative, one of the country’s first residential cooperatives.
When I was ten, Aunt Esther took me to Carnegie Hall to hear the then popular pianist, Jan August. That was the day I decided to become a concert pianist.
There wasn’t any room for a piano in the family budget, so for a while I kept my mouth shut.
Then I read a biography of George Gershwin. I thought I was reading about myself. He’d grown up in a New York apartment overlooking a noisy street. Me, too. He was the younger of two brothers. Me, too. He was from a Jewish family. Me, too. He had a funny-shaped nose. Me, too. Okay, so he was from Brooklyn and I was from the Bronx, but hadn’t my parents lived in Brooklyn before I was born? Gershwin died less than fourteen months before I was born. There was no question about it. I was the reincarnation of George Gershwin.
Florence was dead. Josh cried at the cemetery. He even said Kiddush, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Josh’s family wasn’t religious. He’d never even been bar-mitzvahed, so saying Kiddush was a lot. Josh later said he’d wanted to do the right thing for his mother.
We went back to his house in New Jersey from the cemetery. Florence’s sister Anna was there, now in her nineties, feeble and almost blind. “Why couldn’t they take me,” she wailed. “She was so good.”
Josh, almost fifty, his eyes puffy from crying, took me down to his basement playroom. “I’m an orphan now, Bobby,” he said, his voice breaking. He’d been holding it in all day except for the time at the cemetery. I hugged him.
Excerpt from The New York Times:
“Nobody would mistake the municipality of Savsjo for the borough of the Bronx.
Savsjo, surrounded by dense forests in southern Sweden between Stockholm and Malmo, has about 5,000 inhabitants (about one-tenth as many as the Co-op City section of the borough alone, but about 10 times as many as the number of Bronxites who claim Swedish heritage). Its medieval churches date to the 12th century (the oldest existing house in the Bronx was built in 1748). Savsjo’s best-known sports team plays handball, not baseball.
And yet the two localities share one largely forgotten favorite son, whose Swedish heritage has only recently been confirmed: Jonas Bronck.
In an interview on CBS our beloved Bronx Historian, Lloyd Ultan, gave viewers several places of interest outside the typical tourist attractions of the borough to consider visiting.
He was a beanpole. Six foot two, a hundred forty pounds. Johnny had light-blue eyes, a thin face and crooked front teeth. When he smiled, his upper gums showed. Johnny had a crescent-shaped scar on the bridge of his straight thin nose; it was a visible reminder of a time in Taft’s dustbowl when he’d gotten too close to Tommy D when Tommy was swinging a baseball bat, and the bat clipped him.
Johnny was two years older than me, four years older than my best friend Josh. He was a rare Protestant in a Jewish neighborhood. His parents were divorced, which was unusual in our neighborhood in the early fifties. He lived on the top floor of the apartment building next to mine with his father, his brother Miltie, and his grandmother, Mrs. F, a short, frail woman in her mid-eighties. She was blind in one eye, and one of her eyeglass lenses was frosted and bound with clear tape to hold it in place.
This past Saturday July 12th, 26 teams comprised of 4 individuals each gathered on the steps…
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