50 Fun Facts About The Bronx

Which premium ice cream brand was founded in the Bronx in 1960 by Reuben Mattus and his wife Rose?

Häagen-Dazs means nothing in any language: Reuben Mattus invented the name because he thought it sounded Danish. The letter ä and the pairing zs do not even exist in Danish.

Which music genre is traced to a 1973 back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx?

Hip hop has an official birthplace: New York State recognised the apartment building in 2007. The party was held in its recreation room for Cindy Campbell, whose brother worked the turntables.

Which slugger hit the first home run at the original Yankee Stadium in the Bronx on opening day in 1923?

Babe Ruth drew such crowds that a sportswriter named the ballpark after him the moment it opened. It has been The House That Ruth Built ever since.

Which American writer moved in 1846 into a small cottage that still stands on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx?

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem Annabel Lee in the cottage, reportedly with the family cat on his shoulder. His wife Virginia died of tuberculosis in its bedroom in 1847.

Which martial arts star's film Rumble in the Bronx was shot in Vancouver, with mountains visible behind the action?

Jackie Chan broke through in North America with the film, even though critic Roger Ebert noticed a skyline New York does not have. The crew had also put up fake graffiti each day.

Which pop star, raised in Castle Hill in the Bronx, began as a Fly Girl dancer on In Living Color?

Jennifer Lopez named her debut album On the 6 after the subway line that carried her from her childhood home to Manhattan.

A Bronx cheer, an American term since the early 1920s, is another name for which mocking noise?

A raspberry owes its name to rhyming slang, in which raspberry tart stands in for fart. The sound is made by blowing with the tongue between the lips.

Which venomous snake slipped out of its Bronx Zoo enclosure in 2011 and inspired a popular parody Twitter account?

Egyptian cobra fever ended with a new name for the runaway: the zoo called the snake MIA, for Missing In Action, and put it on exhibit.

Which 2019 film turned an outdoor stairway on West 167th Street in the Bronx into a tourist attraction?

Joker fans arrived to copy Joaquin Phoenix's dance down the steps, and residents complained that the selfie crowds were blocking their commutes.

Which eight-mile tidal strait separates the Bronx from Manhattan, meeting the Hudson at its northern end?

The Harlem River is not a true river at all but a strait, and its northern stretch, once a creek, was heavily altered so that ships could pass.

Which vast green space in the northeast Bronx is the largest in New York City, at 2,772 acres?

Pelham Bay Park is more than three times the size of Central Park. In 1966 neighbours fought off a plan to turn its landfills into one of the city's biggest refuse sites.

Which stretch of shoreline, nicknamed the Bronx Riviera, was created in the 1930s by joining islands with landfill?

Orchard Beach is the only public beach in the borough, and it was built big enough to hold up to 100,000 bathers at the same time.

Which vast Bronx housing development rose in the 1960s on the site of the Freedomland U.S.A. amusement park?

Co-op City is the largest housing cooperative in the world, with more than 15,000 homes spread across 35 high-rise towers and clusters of townhouses.

Which piece of land off the northeast Bronx is New York City's potter's field, where over a million people are buried?

Hart Island has also been a Civil War prison camp, a tuberculosis sanatorium and a boys' reformatory. The city's jail system ran the burial ground until 2019.

Which Bronx community, famous for its seafood restaurants, built yachts that went on to win the America's Cup?

City Island still lives off the water: lobster is the speciality along its main avenue, and its nautical museum fills a schoolhouse built in 1897.

Which suburban county borders the Bronx to the north and once contained all the land that became the borough?

Westchester County lost the area in two bites: the western part was handed to New York City in 1874, and the eastern part followed in 1895.

Which neighborhood is legally part of Manhattan but physically joined to the Bronx since a creek was filled in?

Marble Hill was cut off from the rest of Manhattan by a canal, and the old creek on its far side was later filled with rock dug out to build Grand Central Terminal.

Which rapper raised in the South Bronx became the first solo woman to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album?

Cardi B took her stage name from Bacardi, the rum brand that used to be her nickname. She later gave $100,000 to the Bronx school she attended.

Which Supreme Court justice grew up in a Bronx housing project that was renamed in her honor in 2010?

Sonia Sotomayor lived close enough to Yankee Stadium to become a lifelong Yankees fan. Her mother bought the children an Encyclopaedia Britannica, a rare sight in the projects.

Which four-star general, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was raised in the South Bronx?

Colin Powell picked up Yiddish as a schoolboy, working at a baby furniture store whose shopkeepers and customers spoke it.

Which film director, raised in the Bronx, sold a photo series to Look magazine while still at Taft High School?

Stanley Kubrick turned that sale into a job as a staff photographer for Look, roaming the streets for subjects years before he made his first feature.

Which Marvel Comics writer spent his teens in the Bronx, where a stretch of University Avenue now bears his name?

Stan Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the borough, and in 2019 the city council voted to put his name on the avenue where he lived as a teenager.

Which billionaire fashion designer was born in the Bronx with the surname Lifshitz, which he changed at 16?

Ralph Lauren and his brother dropped the old name after bullying at school. Calvin Klein grew up in the same Bronx Jewish community.

Which actor made his directorial debut with the 1993 film A Bronx Tale, adapted from a one-man play?

Robert De Niro bought the rights from Chazz Palminteri, who had based the stage show on his own childhood and went on to write the screenplay.

Which 1950s Best Picture winner follows an Italian-American butcher who lives in the Bronx with his widowed mother?

Marty also won the first Palme d'Or ever awarded at Cannes, and at 93 minutes it is one of the shortest films to take the top Oscar.

Which author's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities turns on a Wall Street bond trader accidentally driving into the Bronx?

Tom Wolfe researched the book by shadowing the Bronx homicide squad. It first ran in 27 instalments in Rolling Stone, an idea he borrowed from Dickens.

Which Jamaican-born DJ stretched out the drum breaks of funk records on two turntables at 1970s Bronx parties?

DJ Kool Herc called the dancers who waited for those drum sections break-boys and break-girls, which is where the terms b-boy and b-girl come from.

Which Jesuit school, founded in 1841 as St. John's College, has its Rose Hill campus in the Bronx?

Fordham University is the oldest Catholic university in the northeastern United States. Bishop John Hughes bought the Rose Hill farm it stands on for $29,750.

Graduates of the Bronx High School of Science have won more of which honor than any other secondary school's alumni?

Nobel Prize winners from the school are mostly physicists, which is why the American Physical Society named it a Historic Physics Site in 2010.

Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Irving Berlin and Herman Melville all lie in which burial ground in the Bronx?

Woodlawn Cemetery opened during the Civil War on land that was then part of Yonkers. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 2011.

Which sport got its first public course in the United States at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx in 1895?

Golf proved so popular there that the city hired Tom Bendelow, nicknamed the Johnny Appleseed of the game, to double the nine-hole layout four years later.

The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx protects a 50-acre remnant of which landscape that once covered the city?

Old-growth forest survives at the heart of the garden because the tract was never logged. It is the largest remnant of the woods that stood before European settlers arrived.

Which Bronx estate above the Hudson was rented by Theodore Roosevelt's family and later leased by Mark Twain?

Wave Hill later housed the conductor Arturo Toscanini during the Second World War, and after him members of the British delegation to the United Nations.

The first hall of fame in the United States, built on a Bronx campus in 1901, honors which group?

Great Americans are honoured there with busts in an outdoor sculpture gallery designed by Stanford White. The first bust, of Horace Mann, went up in 1907.

Which heavyweight champion knocked out Germany's Max Schmeling in the first round at Yankee Stadium in 1938?

Joe Louis was avenging a 1936 defeat, and Adolf Hitler had followed the rematch closely, urging his countryman to win.

Which team beat the New York Giants at Yankee Stadium in 1958 in the NFL's first sudden-death overtime game?

The Baltimore Colts won 23–17 for the first championship in franchise history, in a contest soon known as the Greatest Game Ever Played.

Which animal did the Bronx Zoo help save from extinction by sending a herd west by rail to Oklahoma in 1907?

American bison had crashed from tens of millions to a few hundred. The zoo shipped six males and nine females to a refuge in the Wichita Mountains.

Which animal, unseen in New York City for some 200 years, was spotted in a Bronx waterway in 2007?

The beaver was named Jose Serrano after the local congressman, and a second arrival in 2010 doubled the city's population of the species.

Which crossing between the Bronx and Manhattan opened in 1848 to carry Croton Aqueduct water and is the city's oldest?

High Bridge was shut to walkers for decades, until a restoration reopened it to pedestrians and bicycles in 2015.

Which city planner conceived the Cross Bronx Expressway, whose construction from 1948 displaced many residents?

Robert Moses threatened to resign, and to cancel federal funding, when a rival plan proposed shifting the route to spare 1,000 houses.

Which Triple Crown horse race was first run in 1867 at Jerome Park Racetrack in what is now the Bronx?

The Belmont Stakes is the oldest of the three Triple Crown races, and it stayed at Jerome Park for more than two decades before moving to a nearby course.

Which sitting US president made an unscheduled visit to the burned-out blocks of Charlotte Street in the South Bronx?

Jimmy Carter stopped by while in town for a United Nations conference. Ronald Reagan came as a candidate three years later and likened the scene to London after the Blitz.

Which Puritan dissenter, banished from Massachusetts, was killed near the Bronx waterway that bears her name?

Anne Hutchinson gave her name to one of the few rivers named after a woman, and a parkway was later named after the river in turn.

Which Founding Father, who wrote the Preamble to the Constitution, is buried at St. Ann's Church in the Bronx?

Gouverneur Morris changed the draft's opening from a list of states to We, the People of the United States. He was born and died on Morrisania, his family's estate.

Jonas Bronck, the 1639 settler whose name lives on in the Bronx, farmed there in a colony run by which people?

The Dutch West India Company controlled New Netherland at the time. Bronck himself is often called Swedish, though his precise origins are disputed.

The definite article in the Bronx's name is attributed to the borough being named after which kind of feature?

A river came first: the waterway was named for settler Jonas Bronck, and the district created beside it in 1874 kept the article, as rivers do.

Which Bronx neighborhood is home to a wholesale market called the largest food distribution center of its kind?

Hunts Point's cooperative market never closes: it trades around the clock on a 60-acre site and earns revenues of more than $2 billion a year.

Bronx County, split off from New York County in 1914, holds which distinction among New York State's 62 counties?

The last one created, it opened its own courts in January 1914. Until then the borough had shared a county, and a district attorney, with Manhattan.

Which sportscaster is wrongly remembered for saying the title line of The Bronx Is Burning during the 1977 World Series?

Howard Cosell was calling Game Two when a fire broke out near Yankee Stadium on live television. The phrase itself had already been the title of a BBC documentary about Bronx firefighters.

Which future US president moved with his family to the Riverdale section of the Bronx as a boy in 1927?

John F. Kennedy's family left Boston partly because of a polio outbreak in Massachusetts and partly for his father's business on Wall Street and in Hollywood.