Tenney Place may be the shortest street in the Bronx that isn’t a dead end, and there may be dead ends longer than Tenney Place. The street runs for a few feet between University Avenue (Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd) and Andrews Avenue South just north of West 175th.
Though the Bronx’s street system is a grid that is an eastern extension of the Manhattan numbered grid (The Bronx and Manhattan comprised New York County until 1914, when the Bronx became its own county) there are additional named streets among the grid that give the borough a richness that is sort of missing from Manhattan’s mostly uniform numbered grid, which leaves little room for alleys above 14th Street.
Such is Tenney Place. It was apparently laid out and named in the 1920s; Bronx historian John McNamara reports in History in Asphalt that it was apparently named for a property administrator named Levi Tunney. The street is so short, it has no addresses.
Tenney Place has always reminded me of figurehead World Wrestling Federation honcho Jack Tunney.
Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”
7/24/20
3 comments
I probably passed this place on my way north to start my journey down Tremont Ave during my last visit to the city before the Big Sick. So short, would not have noticed it.
From OpenStreetMaps there appears to be no addresses associated with it.
It reminds me of the very short but important street that runs between Broadway and Warburton in downtown Yonkers just north of Dock Street and Larkin Plaza. It can’t be more than 2 bus lengths long, and it doesn’t have a name, at least according to my printed Hagstrom map and Mapquest. But it is a defined street, not a traffic lane or off ramp. It goes between two buildings like in the photo of Tenney here. I believe it hassidewalks too. Mapquest labels it as US 9, which most people would say is Broadway, but brother, it ain’t Broadway.
Doubtful, but maybe it has a connection with Fred Tenney, NY Giants 1907-09, who revolutionized first base defense and had 2100 career hits. The Polo Grounds was just a few El stops south. But Tenney played most of his career with the Boston NL club, then called the Orphans or the Beaneaters.