NEW YORK (AP) - It was once called the Park Avenue of the Bronx, a bustling thoroughfare modeled after Paris’ Champs-Elysees. Babe Ruth once lived there, as have countless immigrants who made it one of their first stops in America. World-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind calls it “one of the great boulevards of the world.”
The Grand Concourse may not be as iconic to the rest of the world as Broadway, Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue, but it is closely woven into the fabric of New York City. It is especially meaningful to the generations of immigrants who have called it home.
The boulevard is enjoying renewed attention during a yearlong commemoration of its 100th anniversary, which seeks to reinvigorate sluggish efforts to landmark the country’s largest collection of art deco-style apartment buildings. An international competition for ideas on housing, green space and transportation is being held as part of the centennial celebrations.
More than a thoroughfare, the Grand Concourse has become “the touchstone for the people of the Bronx and the city of New York,” Dr. Gary Hermalyn, executive director of the Bronx County Historical Society, said during a recent two-day conference titled “Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100.”
Sam Goodman, a resident and an urban planner with the Bronx borough president’s office, said there’s “a passion about this street.”
“How many people celebrate the centennial of Park Avenue or Madison Avenue?” he said.
Bronx officials hope that the landmarking effort adds more to the street’s aura.
The Grand Concourse already is on the National Register of Historic Places. But New York City has yet to designate the boulevard as a historic district, a distinction that would protect historic buildings from being razed. A Bronx historic buildings task force has called landmarking the residential half of the Concourse its highest priority.
Alsatian-born engineer Louis Risse began designing The Grand Boulevard and Concourse in the 1890s and modeled the residential roadway on the Champs-Elysees, one of the world’s most beautiful boulevards.
The Grand Concourse was built so residents of urban Manhattan could escape to the bucolic Bronx countryside, just to the north, and enjoy its thousands of acres of verdant parklands.
The north-south roadway was a marvel of modern engineering. It was built over a series of tunnels so trolleys, buses and cars could travel on east-west roads through major intersections beneath it.
Local citizens failed to appreciate the engineering milestone, derisively dubbing it “the Great Wall of China” because its roadway towered as high as 100 feet as it snaked over parts of the hilly Bronx.
But it wasn’t long before the Grand Concourse became a destination for New Yorkers.
The opening of a subway line in 1918 and an apartment building boom lured Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants from Manhattan’s crowded Lower East Side to the large apartments on the Concourse.
The neighborhoods of the Bronx at the time were defined by ethnicity, and most residents of the Grand Concourse were Jewish professionals. The less affluent lived in walk-up tenements on the crowded side streets.
Hundreds of art deco- and art moderne-style apartment buildings line the 4.5-mile-long Grand Concourse. Built with private financing during the 1930s, they remain elegant, showing their age with only faded graffiti stains on the building facades.
Some buildings still have thick black metal security gates that confine the large open courtyards that once welcomed visitors. Passers-by can glimpse the large decorative stone water fountains now crumbling in the centers of the formerly landscaped courtyards.
The arrival of the Grand Concourse also marked a coming of age of sorts for the Bronx, which swelled from 100,000 residents in 1890 to 1.2 million by 1930, making it the fastest-growing of the city’s five boroughs. Yankee Stadium was built in the Bronx in 1923, and Babe Ruth hit the first home run there for the New York Yankees, nicknamed the Bronx Bombers.
The slugger lived nearby at the new, luxury Concourse Plaza Hotel, on the Concourse. A wedding reception or bar mitzvah party at the hotel, dubbed The Waldorf-Astoria of the Bronx, was a prized status symbol that came with bragging rights good for at least two generations.
On Memorial Day years ago, World War II veterans proudly marched shoulder-to-shoulder with soldiers from earlier wars along the tree-lined boulevard. Medians dividing its roadways were shaded by maple trees planted in honor of dead World War I veterans.
The trees are long gone; the Grand Concourse’s three roads are separated by thick concrete barriers.
Despite the diverse mix of immigrants in the early years, it took decades for the Grand Concourse to be integrated.
Blacks had been living in the Bronx since the 1930s but were prevented by the prevailing racial segregation from renting apartments on the Grand Concourse.
“This was not a place of romance to black people in the ’40s and ’50s,” said Dr. Mark Naison, a professor of history and African-American studies at nearby Fordham University.
In the late 1960s, immigrants from Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados began calling the Grand Concourse home. An apartment building on nearby Sedgewick Avenue has been named the birthplace of hip-hop during the 1970s.
The Bronx’s 1.3 million current residents are mostly Hispanic, including an established Puerto Rican community and more than 200,000 immigrants from the Dominican Republic. The latest immigrants are Mexicans and West Africans, many from Ghana.
Libeskind, the master planner of the post-Sept. 11 World Trade Center site, moved to the Bronx from Poland as a teenager in the mid-1960s. He recalled the Grand Concourse as “a very dignified, very European place,” where families strolled together on the weekends.
But many Grand Concourse residents who enjoyed its heyday fled as arson destroyed hundreds of apartment buildings during the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Bronx became a national symbol of urban blight. More than 300,000 residents left the Bronx between 1970 and 1980.
The Concourse survived “the Bronx is burning” era with its historic buildings unscathed.
Those who have followed the street’s ups and downs are unsure what the future has in store.
“The economic downturn makes you wonder how the story is going to end,” said Connie Rosenblum, author of an upcoming book about the street. “There’s a lot of optimism, a lot of hope, and it centers on the Grand Concourse.”
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