The Grand Concourse
The Grand Concourse was designed in the 1890s and completed in the early 1900s as a wide Parisian-style boulevard — modelled partly on the Champs-Élysées — intended to make the Bronx attractive for middle-class New Yorkers moving out of crowded Manhattan. By the 1920s and 1930s, it was lined with Art Deco apartment buildings that are still standing and still architecturally significant: ornate limestone and brick buildings with streamlined details, decorative lobbies, and a scale that feels genuinely monumental.
The Bronx Museum of the Arts
Located directly on the Grand Concourse at 165th Street, the Bronx Museum specialises in contemporary art with particular focus on artists of African, Asian, and Latin American descent — reflecting the Bronx's actual population rather than the traditional museum canon. Free admission makes it easy to include in any Bronx itinerary.
Fordham University
A major Jesuit university whose Rose Hill campus in the Fordham neighbourhood gives that area the particular energy of a university town within the city. The campus itself is open and walkable, with genuinely handsome Gothic-revival architecture.
Getting there
The B and D trains run directly along the Grand Concourse — the elevated tracks shadow the boulevard for much of its length, which is itself a piece of New York infrastructure history worth noticing.