WHERE: The Madison Avenue Bridge and Willis Avenue Bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx.
START: 135 Street subway station (2 and 3 trains), fully accessible
FINISH: East 125 Street and 2 Avenue, Manhattan, with these buses to fully accessible subway stations:
M15 to 96 Street (Q train)
M60 SBS to Astoria Boulevard (N and W trains)
M125 to 3 Avenue - 149 Street (2 and 5 trains)
M60 SBS and M125 to 125 Street (4, 5, 6 trains and Metro North Railroad)
M60 SBS and M125 to 125 Street (A, B, C, D trains)
DISTANCE: 2.2 miles (3.5 kilometers)
Photographs by Michael Cairl except as noted. Map courtesy footpathmap.com.
Route of this walk, reading from left to right.
Continuing my occasional walks across the walkable bridges of New York City, today I tackled two short bridges across the Harlem River that I have biked across before but had never walked across. This walk started at the subway station at West 135 Street and Lenox Avenue, across from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of the New York Public Library. For more about the Schomburg Center see the post on this page entitled “Harlem and Heights History Walk.” Walking past Public School 197, I noticed this mural.
Crossing 5 Avenue and turning left, I passed the Riverton Houses. These apartment towers were built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the 1940s, at the same time as Metropolitan Life’s Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan and Parkchester in the Bronx. When they were built the latter two were restricted to white residents, while Riverton was for African-Americans. An apartment in Riverton was considered a step or two up for the people who moved in. Metropolitan Life no longer owns these apartment complexes and they are no longer racially restricted.
Riverton Houses, seen from 5 Avenue.
From 5 Avenue I turned onto the ramp to the Madison Avenue Bridge at East 138 Street. This is a swing bridge that opened in 1910, replacing a smaller bridge that opened in 1882. The slope up to the main span is gentle and the walkway is in excellent condition all the way across.
From the Bronx end of the bridge, for a few blocks to Grand Concourse, one needs to walk with care because of all the cross streets and a lot of turning traffic.
At Park Avenue the Metro North Railroad tracks cross overhead. At this location, on the south side of East 138 Street, there used to be a grand station built by the New York Central Railroad in 1886. The station was closed and demolished in 1973. Nothing remains except a pair of manhole covers.
138 Street station. Image courtesy flickr.com.
Manhole cover at East 138 Street and Park Avenue. NYC&HRRR stands for New York Central and Hudson River Railroad (the name of the New York Central prior to 1914).
I turned north onto Third Avenue, then east onto East 140 Street. (Third Avenue is the only “numbered” Avenue in the Bronx, and is rendered as 3 Avenue only in the subway.). At the corner of East 140 Street and Alexander Avenue is the Mott Haven branch of the New York Public Library, which opened in 1905. A stately center of learning in a low-income neighborhood.
Mott Haven branch, New York Public Library.
Around the corner, on Alexander Avenue, are row houses from the 1890s that would not be out of place in “Brownstone Brooklyn.”
The intersection of East 138 Street and Alexander Avenue is dominated by the 40th Precinct station house of the New York Police Department and St. Jerome Roman Catholic Church.
St. Jerome Church.
The plaque on this statue of Saint Jerome reads “Love without truth is just sentimental. Truth without love is sterile.”
Plaque at the 40th Precinct station house.
This part of the Bronx is known as Mott Haven, named for Jordan L. Mott, who built an iron works on the Harlem River in 1828. The part of the Grand Concourse south of Franz Sigel Park was once known as Mott Avenue. The 138 Street - Grand Concourse subway station was called Mott Haven when it opened in 1918, and in a recent station renovation that got everything right except that it was not made fully accessible, some of the original Mott Haven station mosaics were restored, while other, aesthetically similar mosaics read “138 Street” and “138 Street Mott Haven.”
Mott Haven is a low-income area, part of what has been the poorest Congressional district in the United States, that used to have a lot of light industry, from Mott’s iron works to piano factories (their heyday was in the decades preceding World War I). Near the Harlem River there is still industry but also truck and bus garages and rail lines. After World War II, and after the Third Avenue Elevated was discontinued south of 149 Street in 1955, huge public housing projects were built in the southern Bronx. Through a lot of dislocation, crime, drugs, substandard housing, and much else, people have gone about their lives in an old, largely neglected neighborhood. Recently, new high-rise apartment towers have risen near the Harlem River, and shops and restaurants cater to the new arrivals. I will leave it for people who live in the southern Bronx, including Mott Haven, to say whether this change is good, but it is here. A sleek-looking wine and spirits shop on East 138 Street looked incongruous only at first.
I walked east on East 138 Street past St. Jerome Church and another public housing project, then south onto Willis Avenue. Between East 133 Street (now Bruckner Boulevard) and East 143 Street, the Third Avenue Elevated ran in a private right-of-way, a “clothesline alley,” between Alexander and Willis Avenues. There is no trace of that and most of those blocks have been obliterated by housing projects. Approaching East 135 Street on Willis Avenue there is broken sidewalk by a public housing building, so walk with care. Crossing the Major Deegan Expressway (Interstate 87), I came to the Willis Avenue Bridge. This is an early 2000s replacement of the 1901 Willis Avenue Bridge. The bike and pedestrian path is excellent.
Harlem River rail yard, circa 1920. Collection of Frank Pfuhler via nycsubway.org.
Remnant of the Harlem River rail yard, taken from the same vantage point as the preceding image.
When the city reconstructed this bridge it placed interpretive posters along the walkway. Though marred by graffiti, they still offer valuable history of the area. Beneath the Bronx end of the bridge used to be a freight yard of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, and the Harlem River passenger terminal of the New Haven’s subsidiary New York, Westchester, and Boston Railway. I have written about the “Westchester” in the “East Bronx Ramble” post on “The Stair Streets of New York City” page. The Second Avenue and Third Avenue Elevateds cut across and above the freight yards from the Harlem River bridge (between the Willis Avenue Bridge and the Third Avenue Bridge) to “clothesline alley.”
The walk ended at East 125 Street and 2 Avenue, not a subway stop but where there are bus connections to many subway lines. This walk encompassed an area with a lot of change underway. In the last ten years, Mott Haven has seen a lot of change but its many problems remain. I will be back before long to walk across the Third Avenue Bridge.
UPDATE - 13 SEPTEMBER 2023: On WNYC’s “Radio Rookies” series there was an excellent piece on the changes happening in this part of the Bronx, by a young resident of the area. Listen. http://www.wnyc.org/story/christina-adja-gentrification-bronx/