The Bronx
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50 free The Bronx trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Bronx is the borough New Yorkers argue about most and outsiders know least. It has given the world a music culture, a baseball dynasty and a long list of famous sons and daughters, yet much of its story stays hidden behind the headlines of the 1970s. This quiz covers the whole borough: how it got its name and its borders, the parks and waterfront that fill about a quarter of its land, Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo, the Grand Concourse, the films and novels set on its streets, and the people who grew up there before they became household names. It is written for locals, former locals, New York history fans and anyone warming up for a trivia night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which premium ice cream brand was founded in the Bronx in 1960 by Reuben Mattus and his wife Rose?
Häagen-Dazs
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.
Q 02Which music genre is traced to a 1973 back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx?
Hip hop
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.
Q 03Which slugger hit the first home run at the original Yankee Stadium in the Bronx on opening day in 1923?
Babe Ruth
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.
Q 04Which American writer moved in 1846 into a small cottage that still stands on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx?
Edgar Allan Poe
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.
Q 05Which martial arts star's film Rumble in the Bronx was shot in Vancouver, with mountains visible behind the action?
Jackie Chan
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.
Q 06Which pop star, raised in Castle Hill in the Bronx, began as a Fly Girl dancer on In Living Color?
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez named her debut album On the 6 after the subway line that carried her from her childhood home to Manhattan.
Q 07A Bronx cheer, an American term since the early 1920s, is another name for which mocking noise?
A raspberry
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.
Q 08Which venomous snake slipped out of its Bronx Zoo enclosure in 2011 and inspired a popular parody Twitter account?
Egyptian cobra
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.
Q 09Which 2019 film turned an outdoor stairway on West 167th Street in the Bronx into a tourist attraction?
Joker
Joker fans arrived to copy Joaquin Phoenix's dance down the steps, and residents complained that the selfie crowds were blocking their commutes.
Q 10Which eight-mile tidal strait separates the Bronx from Manhattan, meeting the Hudson at its northern end?
Harlem River
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.
Q 11Which vast green space in the northeast Bronx is the largest in New York City, at 2,772 acres?
Pelham Bay Park
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.
Q 12Which stretch of shoreline, nicknamed the Bronx Riviera, was created in the 1930s by joining islands with landfill?
Orchard Beach
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.
Q 13Which vast Bronx housing development rose in the 1960s on the site of the Freedomland U.S.A. amusement park?
Co-op City
Q 21Which film director, raised in the Bronx, sold a photo series to Look magazine while still at Taft High School?
Stanley Kubrick
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.
Q 22Which Marvel Comics writer spent his teens in the Bronx, where a stretch of University Avenue now bears his name?
Stan Lee
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.
Q 23Which billionaire fashion designer was born in the Bronx with the surname Lifshitz, which he changed at 16?
Ralph Lauren
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.
Q 14Which piece of land off the northeast Bronx is New York City's potter's field, where over a million people are buried?
Hart Island
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.
Q 15Which Bronx community, famous for its seafood restaurants, built yachts that went on to win the America's Cup?
City Island
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.
Q 16Which suburban county borders the Bronx to the north and once contained all the land that became the borough?
Westchester
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.
Q 17Which neighborhood is legally part of Manhattan but physically joined to the Bronx since a creek was filled in?
Marble Hill
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.
Q 18Which rapper raised in the South Bronx became the first solo woman to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album?
Cardi B
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.
Q 19Which Supreme Court justice grew up in a Bronx housing project that was renamed in her honor in 2010?
Sonia Sotomayor
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.
Q 20Which four-star general, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was raised in the South Bronx?
Colin Powell
Colin Powell picked up Yiddish as a schoolboy, working at a baby furniture store whose shopkeepers and customers spoke it.
Ralph Lauren and his brother dropped the old name after bullying at school. Calvin Klein grew up in the same Bronx Jewish community.
Q 24Which actor made his directorial debut with the 1993 film A Bronx Tale, adapted from a one-man play?
Robert De Niro
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.
Q 25Which 1950s Best Picture winner follows an Italian-American butcher who lives in the Bronx with his widowed mother?
Marty
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.
Q 26Which author's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities turns on a Wall Street bond trader accidentally driving into the Bronx?
Tom Wolfe
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.
Q 27Which Jamaican-born DJ stretched out the drum breaks of funk records on two turntables at 1970s Bronx parties?
DJ Kool Herc
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.
Q 28Which Jesuit school, founded in 1841 as St. John's College, has its Rose Hill campus in the Bronx?
Fordham University
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.
Q 29Graduates of the Bronx High School of Science have won more of which honor than any other secondary school's alumni?
Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize winners from the school are mostly physicists, which is why the American Physical Society named it a Historic Physics Site in 2010.
Q 30Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Irving Berlin and Herman Melville all lie in which burial ground in the Bronx?
Woodlawn Cemetery
Woodlawn Cemetery opened during the Civil War on land that was then part of Yonkers. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 2011.