Title: The Bronx Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide
By William B. Helmreich
Princeton University Press
433 pages
It’s hard to think of anyone who knew more about New York City than William Helmreich. The author of The Brooklyn Nobody Knows, The Manhattan Nobody Knows, and The Queens Nobody Knows, he hadn’t just talked the talk, he had literally walked the walk: 6,000 miles worth, up and down every boulevard, avenue and street in the five boroughs. Together with his wife and walking partner Helaine Helmreich, he had provided the tourist (and urban historian) with a remarkably detailed, earthy view of the Bronx at the street-level.
This most recent collection of maps, interviews and insights is unfortunately his last. William Helmreich was one of the first New Yorkers to succumb to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. This work was a virtually finished manuscript during those bewildering months when his beloved city began to shut down. Helaine was able to complete the work and bring it to press, the last great work of a remarkable scholar of Gotham.
Helmreich’s thesis seeks to dispel the widely-held assumption of the Bronx as a crime-ridden wasteland. He breaks down the numbers, pointing out that in 2018 the borough tragically experienced three murders per 100,000 people. Los Angeles, by contrast, had double that number, and the rate for Chicago was 19 per 100,000. Even Houston, Texas, not known as especially prone to violent crime, had 15.
On the contrary, argues Helmreich, the dominant mood of the Bronx is one of hope. He demonstrates this with pungent, wide-ranging interviews held with ordinary residents and owner-operators of small businesses. Raphael Barbosa of the Port Morris Distillery on E. 133rd Street, for example, doesn’t complain about the racket made by the Hell Gate trains that travel over his distillery. The building shakes as they pass, but that literally aids the distilling process by agitating the mix. In the Bronx it seems that people are good at making lemonade out of lemons (or in this case, beer).
Helmreich moves slowly, neighborhood by neighborhood. Each section of the book begins with a map and some history, followed by a walk that features unique sites, conversations with people on the street, and a wonderful array of quirky facts that only someone who gets into granular local history would discover.
Readers of The Jewish Press will especially appreciate the book’s Jewish content. Helmreich notes that in the middle of the 20th century, the Bronx was home to approximately 600,000 Jews, over half the local population. He identifies dozens of synagogues, schools and other sites of Jewish interest, including the gorgeous former synagogue at E 167th Street, preserved gem-like inside the Daughters of Jacob nursing home. Sadly, however, with the exception of the neighborhood of Riverdale, most of those synagogues are no longer functioning, as much of the Jewish population has decamped for other boroughs, or even (gasp) across the river to New Jersey.
It’s rare that a tour guide engages in such depth, exuding scholarship in equal measure to the obvious love that Helmreich has for the city. With The Bronx Nobody Knows, William Helmreich has bestowed a gift to New Yorkers and historians alike. It is a worthwhile read for anyone who values the city, its storied past, and its hopeful future.
