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