South Bronx, New York

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The South Bronx

"The Hub" is the retail heart of the South Bronx.

976 Simpson Street in the South Bronx (Old building conserved by the City of NY)

The South Bronx is a region of the New York City borough of The Bronx. It strictly refers to the southwestern portion of the borough, and should not be confused with the southern Bronx. It is also the home of Yankee Stadium. It is popular for being the birth place of hip hop music and culture.

The neighborhoods of Tremont and University Heights are often considered part of the South Bronx. Some even argue that the Soundview section is part of the South Bronx, or even its eastern neighbor, Castle Hill. The northern limit of the South Bronx is commonly thought to be at Fordham Road.

1 History
2 Notable natives
3 See also
4 References
5 External link

The Bronx was once considered the "Jewish Borough," which at its peak in 1930 was 49% Jewish.^[1] Jews in South Bronx numbered 364,000 or 57.1% of the total population in the area.^[2] The term was first coined in the 1940s by a group of social workers who identified the Bronx's first pocket of poverty, in the Mott Haven section, the southernmost section of the Bronx. Originally denoting only Mott Haven and Melrose, the South Bronx extended up to the Cross Bronx Expressway by the 1970s, encompassing Hunts Point, Morrisania, and Highbridge. It was around this time that the Bronx was experiencing some of its worst times ever due to white flight, landlord abandonment and government indifference. Some landlords were motivated to burn their buildings for insurance claims and valuable copper pipes.^{[citation needed]} There was also heroin trafficking. The resultant chaos as related by the media brought the term "South Bronx" into common parlance nationwide.

Since the late 1980s the South Bronx has rebounded in many of its neighborhoods with reconstructed, refurbished and brand new residential buildings, including both low and high income single family homes. Since the late 90s the South Bronx has been home to a grassroots art scene. The arts scene that sprouted at the Fashion Moda Gallery, founded by a Viennese artist, Stefan Eins, helped ignite the careers of artists like Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer, and 1980's break dancers like the Rock Steady Crew. It generated enough enthusiasm in the mainstream media for a short while to draw the art world's attention.^[3] The South Bronx today has a much lower crime rate when compared to the 1970s through the early 1990s. Its population is increasing.^[4]^[5]

Any neighborhood that is not considered the South Bronx is automatically the "North Bronx," even if it lies within the southern portion of the borough, as does Throgs Neck in the Bronx's extreme southeast. South Bronx residents often dislike the term because it obscures the actual neighborhoods in the area. However, it should not be ignored that the heavy reliance on using the region of the South Bronx as a geographic marker over the years has caused the names of its neighborhoods to decline in usage, to the point of residents of Mott Haven and Morris Heights not even knowing the actual name of their neighborhood. Others point out that there is great socio-economic diversity within the neighborhoods that are lumped together under the "South Bronx" heading.

The South Bronx in many ways is more a state of mind than an actual location. Also, the more notable dichotomy in the Bronx is that of the West Bronx vs. the East Bronx; the West Bronx is hillier, less heavily populated, and closer to Manhattan, while the East Bronx is flatter, more residential, and closer to the Long Island Sound. The "North Bronx" designation therefore groups together neighborhoods on opposite ends of the Bronx which have little in common, such as Kingsbridge and Pelham Bay.

It is important to note that the expanded use of the term South Bronx and the thirty years since the coining of the term have brought great changes to the area that it refers to. The South Bronx of today is very different from that of the years gone by; now, it is one of the more calm parts of the Bronx due to the population drop, with a lower crime rate than areas north of the Cross-Bronx Expressway.