Two Sides of the Family--One Building

Oh, by the way (and you know this, have known it for years), you need a new computer badly. I wish I could help.

Don't know whether this is a topic for discussion or just me rambling, but I felt like talking about it.

Look at the two short brown buildings south of the white building. I lived in the northernmost one with my family. We moved there after eleven years in a tenement. We had arrived.

In the 1930s in a building on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx

This history by Constance Rosenblum, a New York Times reporter and editor, is being released just before Nov.24,2009 when the Grand Concourse will celebrate its 100th birthday.

In the years before the Grand Concourse was constructed, the Bronx consisted largely of farms and park land.

It was annexed from Westchester County by New York City in 1874, becoming the only part of the city attached to the mainland.

Louis Risse, a French engineer who settled in New York at the age of 17, designed the Grand Concourse as an 11-lane speedway where wealthy New Yorkers could race their horses while, at the same time, it served as a link to the parks of the Bronx.

Conceived in 1892, the Grand Concourse was dedicated in 1909,by which time the horses had given way to automobiles.

In short order, the Victorian houses lining the Grand Concourse were replaced by opulent five- and six-story Art Deco apartment houses. Upwardly mobile Jewish families from the Lower East Side moved into these apartments.

By 1930,the Bronx had 585,000 Jews,many of them living on the Grand Concourse or its surrounding streets.

The actual number was determined by counting how many students were absent from school on Yom Kippur.

On the High Holy Days, the Grand Concourse bustled with well-dressed people heading home from the synagogues in the area.

Their weddings and bar mitzvahs were held in the luxurious ballrooms of the Concourse Plaza at 161st Street and the Grand Concourse or in the many nearby catering halls.

Close to the Concourse Plaza was the Yankee Stadium, which saw its first game on April 18,1923 and which is now replaced by a new Yankee Stadium.

Further to the north where Fordham Road crosses the Grand Concourse, a shopping area, featuring Alexander’s and Loehmann’s, attracted customers.

In that same neighborhood, the Loew’s Paradise began business in 1929 with its Italian Baroque architecture and a blue sky ceiling with twinkling stars.

Close by were the ice cream parlors: Krum’s,Jahn’s,and Addie Vallins.

What’s up with those yellow and red signs sprouting up on Concourse lampposts?

More or less distinguished sons and daughters of the Bronx are honored on a Walk of Fame, including Rita Moreno, Bobby Darin, Robert Klein and Charles Fox. Charles who? He’s a composer who wrote the theme to “Laverne and Shirley” (created by another Walk of Famer, Garry Marshall).

Cardinal Hayes High School was once known as the “School that Makes the Concourse Grand,” educating generations of Catholic schoolboys, including Martin Scorsese, Regis Philbin and Don De Lillo. George Carlin called it the coolest school in the Bronx . He was expelled after three semesters.