Reviewed by: Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx Vincent DiGirolamo (bio) Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. By Constance Rosenblum. New York: New York University Press, 2009). v + 267 pp. No landmark evokes the shifting fortunes of the West Bronx and its magnificently troubled thoroughfare, the Grand Boulevard and Concourse, better than the Lorelei fountain. The marble sculpture depicts the legendary siren of Heinrich Heine’s most famous poem perched atop a pedestal ringed by mermaids and dolphins. The piece was purchased by German Americans and installed at the 161st Street entrance to the boulevard in 1899. Defaced soon after, the fountain gradually won acceptance [End Page 102] and earned a prominent place opposite the new Bronx County Courthouse during the 1930s. It was later shunted to the north end of Joyce Kilmer Park but still lent cachet to the rising middle-class neighborhood. In the late 1960s, however, the fountain became a receptacle for garbage and a target of graffiti. In 1999, after years of neglect, the fountain was refurbished, rededicated, and returned to the southern tip of the park, where it remains today a symbol of urban splendor, crisis, and renewal. Reading Constance Rosenblum’s affectionate yet clear- eyed account of the borough’s 4.5 mile-long, 182-foot wide “Boulevard of Dreams” and the art, architecture, and community life that flourished along its banks has the effect of watching time-lapse photography. The author, a veteran New York Times editor, swiftly traces the transformation of the boulevard from a tree-covered ridge to an elegant parkway to a high-speed traffic artery, illuminating how it fostered and then left in ruins one of the city’s most vital, predominately Jewish enclaves. It is local and ethnic history, to be sure, but one that captures the fleeting reciprocal process by which all city people shape and are shaped by their built environment. The story unfolds in three acts. The first, “A Promenade for the Bronx,” excavates the road’s origins in the mind of a French surveyor, Louis Risse, who in the early 1890s envisioned a “Speedway” linking the woods and farms of the north with the tightly packed metropolis to the south. “For the Bronx, geography was destiny,” writes Rosenblum, referring to the trio of north-south running ridges that dictated the path of the Grand Concourse (23). But there was nothing predetermined about the scale and stateliness of Risse’s “avenue of pleasure” (25). It featured bridle paths and roadways shared by horses, carriages, pedestrians, cyclists, and, eventually, motorists, their progress hastened by a system of crossroad underpasses. Financed with public and private funds, the $6.6 million parkway opened to little fanfare in November 1909. However, it would take the completion of the Jerome Avenue subway line nine years later to really open up the area for settlement. Al Jolson spoke for many Lower East Side residents in the 1927 talkie The Jazz Singer when he promised his Mama, “Oh, yes, we’re gonna move up to the Bronx. A lot of nice green grass up there, and whole lot of people you know. There’s the Ginsbergs, the Guttenbergs, the Goldbergs, and a whole lot of Bergs” (45). Indeed, by 1930, some seven out of ten residents of concourse neighborhoods were Jewish. Part of the area’s appeal was its stunning new apartment houses: the Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Morris, and dozens of others that invited comparisons with the Champs Elysees in Paris. These buildings came in [End Page 103] an array of styles and featured such modernist touches as wraparound windows and zigzag facades. Inside, sunken living rooms and chintz drapes further attested to hard-won gains. The apartments performed a dual function, says Rosenblum: “They allowed escape from the squalor and congestion of the ghetto . . . while at the same time replicated aspects of the urban experience that, often subconsciously, these newcomers had come to cherish” (81). A certain tenement sociability persisted, as caricatured on radio and television in the person of Molly Goldberg, the fictional Bronx housewife who could never quite break the...