YOU may think the engineer of the Grand Concourse would be remembered by more than a very short street connecting the Grand Concourse and Mosholu Parkway. The Grand Concourse runs up the western end of the Bronx like a zipper. Unzip it and you will find Bronx past, present and future: the grand visions of a suburban borough for the wealthy, that turned into a gritty, urban superhighway from Yankee Stadium to Van Cortlandt Park. FNY has been covering the Concourse from the beginning and the second ForgottenTour took place here on July 18, 1999. This was once of the craziest tours FNY ever ran — we were helping author Stuart Miller research the version of The Blue Guide to New York that would come out the next year (it turned out to be the final comprehensive guide in that series) and eventually we split into two separate parties. My end of the schism ran into a thundershower and a parade — at the same time — on the Concourse, and somehow we finished up north in Norwood, while we watched the Yankees’ David Cone finish a perfect game on a bar TV. And, it was the hottest day of the summer.
Eleven lanes wide from 161st Street north to Mosholu, the Grand Boulevard and Concourse (shortened to Grand Concourse for the benefit of sign makers and cabbies) was built, from 161st Street north, in 1909 by engineer Louis Risse. In 1927, it absorbed Mott Avenue, which ran from 138th north to 161st, and the older street was widened. The Grand Concourse became the Bronx’s showpiece as the Bronx County Courthouse, Yankee Stadium, and an array of elegant apartment buildings were constructed along its length. The Concourse and surrounding streets are a wonderworld of magnificent apartment architecture. Most of the grand apartments were built from 1925-1940. The dominant style is Art Moderne, a streamlined style offshot from Art Deco. In that era most of the Concourse’ residents were Eastern European and Jewish, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s demographics changed, as Co-Op City near the Westchester county line was built and the overall rush to surburbia spurred a move out of the city. Today the Concourse is home to a Latino and Caribbean-American population, and the architecture is seemingly eternal.
Risse Street did not gain its name until 1968 after it was submitted by the Bronx Historical Society. Risse (1850-1925) first envisioned the Concourse in the 1870s, when he was in his twenties. He lived to see a scaled-down version of the road become a reality. In the 1870s, the auto was still science fiction, and Risse’s vision encompassed horse drawn carriages pleasantly clomping up and down tree-lined, shady express route (much like Olmsted and Vaux’ original plans for Ocean and Eastern Parkways in Brooklyn). Detailed plans were drawn up in 1892 with the aid of Louis J. Heintz, who died at age 31 and did not see the plans realized, and Louis F. Haffen, who after succeeding Heintz as Commissioner of Street Improvements, oversaw the Concourse’s construction from 1902 to 1909 as Borough President.
What this short street was called prior to 1968 is a puzzler to me as it was too short to show up on most of the commercial maps produced by Hagstrom, Georgaphia, etc. In fact Risse Street wasn’t depicted until well after it was named. My guess is that it was simply a lane of the Grand Concourse (I should walk it again, after almost 20 years) but, if you know different…Comments are open.
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7/23/25
4 comments
My suspicion is that it would have been considered an “interchange,” like an off-ramp of the eastbound south service road of Mosholu Parkway connecting to the southbound Grand Concourse. If it needed to have a name distinct from either of those main thoroughfares, it may have had to do with more efficient dispatching of emergency vehicles.
What was going on with that bicycle deliveryman with the huge red saddlebags? He seems grossly overloaded, like something you would see in Southeast Asia. This powered-bike food delivery revolution happened so fast, almost overnight. What, is everyone now in the tristate area totally dependent on these deliverymen from Africa, and we’ll starve without them? This is happening so rapidly and without comment.
Bill, tough to tell in the pic but that’s a scooter, not a bicycle, and yes, it would appear that “dependency” has somehow permitted and engendered environment where these delivery guys are riding between lanes, or in a direction opposite traffic, or ignoring street signals, or on sidewalks, etc., etc., etc. I have a motorcycle license that required written and road testing to acquire, and I wonder just how quickly I would get dinged if I EVER tried to do any of the crap that these guys are doing all day, every single day. (To say nothing of registration and insurance.) It is not apparent in this shot, but take a look at the action on any commercial street anywhere in the city, and it is total bedlam, and total B.S. But the cat is out of the bag, and there will be no way to put it back in.
One could try searching the addresses of the apartment building or gas station that border it on ACRIS, and see if the deed images reveal any other original street names in its metes and bounds. FWIW, McNamara’s History In Asphalt does not say that this short street had any previous name other than Grand Concourse.