Norwood was originally part of the Varian family’s dairy farm. The name either comes from “North Woods” or from Carlisle Norwood, a friend of Leonard Jerome, the grandfather of Winston Churchill who owned the nearby Jerome Park Race Track in the 1860s. The neighborhood was laid out in 1889 by entrepreneur Josiah Briggs.
For a couple of decades in the late-20th century, Norwood and, to the south, Bedford Park, were major Irish enclaves, after immigrants from Northern Island during the era of The Troubles fled and settled here, in Woodlawn Heights to the north, and in Queens’ Woodside. For a time Norwood became known as “Little Belfast” and was a hotbed for supporters of the Irish Republican Army, which sought to sever Northern Ireland’s ties with the United Kingdom by violent means. Eventually the Irish influence in the area lessened, as many Irish returned home to participate in the homeland’s roaring economy in the 1990s and early-2000s. Traces of Little Belfast, though, can still be found along Bainbridge Ave. Norwood was where the Irish-American band Black 47 first attracted notice.
Though Brooklyn has the lion’s share of pre-Revolutionary War houses, there’s one in Norwood that just barely qualifies. In 1758 blacksmith Isaac Valentine purchased property from the Dutch Reformed Church at today’s Bainbridge Ave. and Van Cortlandt Ave. East, and, depending on what account you read, built this fieldstone cottage either in the 1750s or as a successor to a previous home in 1775.
Like the Old Stone House in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the Valentine cottage was the scene of a Revolutionary war battle: by 1777 the home was occupied by British and Hessians but was recaptured by General William Heath after a brief but fierce battle which left the house surprisingly intact.
By 1791 the house and land had been sold to an Isaac Varian, whose grandson, Isaac L. Varian, became NYC mayor between 1839 and 1841. After changing hands several times the house became home to the Bronx County Historical Society in 1965 and was moved across the street. Interestingly, Van Cortlandt Ave. East, near where the cottage stands, was the original post road to Boston, which ran from Spuyten Duyvil east and northeast.
The Bronx and Byram Rivers water system was built between 1880 and 1889 to supply those sections of the Bronx not served by the Old Croton Aqueduct via pipeline from the Bronx River and the upstate Byram River and Kensico Reservoir. Water was stored in the Williamsbridge Receiving Reservoir, built in 1888, in Norwood northeast of Bainbridge Ave. and E. 207th St. By 1925, this reservoir was no longer needed, and it was drained and filled in. In 1937 NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses constructed a new playground and park in the space vacated by the reservoir. Reservoir Oval, just to the north of Bronx Historical, surrounds the former reservoir.
At Reservoir Oval and Putnam Pl. you’ll find the old reservoir keeper’s stone house, built in 1889. The stones used to build the house were pieces of granite taken from the excavation of the reservoir it was to serve. After the reservoir was drained, it became a private residence for five decades, and has been under the protection of the Mosholu Preservationist Corporation, which it serves as the organization’s headquarters. The local publication Norwood News also has its offices there.
One of the city’s great brick clock towers, ranking with Woodhaven’s Lalance and Grosjean’s kitchenware factory, can be found at this police station house at Webster Ave. and Mosholu Parkway. The clock’s surrounded by colorful terra cotta. The tower’s design is based on Tuscan villas. The police station was designated a New York City Individual Landmark in 1974 and added to the State and National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Nearby is Frisch Field, named for baseball’s Frankie Frisch, the “Fordham Flash” who starred with the New York Giants and St. Louis Cardinals from 1919 to 1937.
Norwood was originally part of the Varian family’s dairy farm. The Varians, who produced a New York City mayor, owned the oldest house in the area, which is still standing. The name either comes from “North Woods” or from Carlisle Norwood, a friend of Leonard Jerome, the grandfather of Winston Churchill who owned the nearby Jerome Park Race Track in the 1860s. The neighborhood was laid out in 1889 by entrepreneur Josiah Briggs.
St. Brendan’s is a Catholic parish and boasts an imaginative piece of architecture on Perry Ave. between E. 206th and 207th. The parish was organized in 1908 and gained this church building, built in the form of a ship, in 1967. According to legend, St. Brendan, who lived in the sixth century, was a sailor and navigator and journeyed to what he called ”the island of the blessed” or St. Brendan’s Island, considered by some to be the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, or further west to Newfoundland, making him the first European to visit North America, centuries before the Norse made it.
East Gun Hill Rd., a couple of blocks east of the reservoir, crosses the Bronx River on a stone bridge marked with the letters “BRPR” and the date 1918. According to the late Bronx historian Bill Twomey, the letters stand for “Bronx River Parkway Reservation.” The Reservation parallels the Bronx River from the New York Botanical Gardens north to Kensico Dam, Valhalla, in Westchester County. It’s a 15.5-mile swath of parkland designed in the early years of the 20th century by the Bronx Parkway Commission; architect Charles Stoughton designed many of the bridges and other architectural elements, including this one, and the bridge also has his name inscribed on it.
Mosholu Parkway is among the many Native-American place names that have been woven into the city’s fabric. Mo-sho-lu, or “smooth stones” was the Algonquin name of Tibbett’s Brook running through the heart of what became the Bronx’s Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale neighborhoods, since placed in underground sewers but now the subject of a proposal to expose it again in parkland areas.
In 1888, Mosholu Parkway was laid out as a true parkway, a relatively narrow carriage road lined with trees and foliage, along a former waterway known to the Dutch as Schuil Brook. Mosholu Parkway originally ran only between Bronx and Van Cortlandt Parks, with through traffic running in the center and local and commercial traffic on the service roads. The general concept of the parkway system, devised by master urban architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s, was to extend large parks by making the roads that connected them into parks themselves. Olmsted’s vision can be seen in Brooklyn’s Ocean and Eastern Parkways, and in the Bronx’s Mosholu Parkway and Pelham Parkway (whose official name is the Bronx and Pelham Parkway because it connects Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks). The parkway’s original stretch between the Bronx and Van Cortlandt Parks is still beautifully intact. Robert Moses was rebuffed in a proposal to turn the Mosholu and Pelham Parkways into expressways.
Patience and Fortitude, the two marble lions guarding the New York Public Library entrance at 5th Ave. and 42nd St., were sculpted right here in Mott Haven, at St. Ann's Ave. and E. 142nd St., by the Piccirilli Brothers Monument Sculptors, whose family had migrated here from Massa, Italy, in 1888. The firm also created the pediment of the New York Stock Exchange; the Maine Memorial in Central Park; Civic Virtue, the “scandalous” sculpture banished from City Hall Park to Kew Gardens, Queens in 1941, as well as Abe Lincoln at his Memorial in Washington.
It’s surprising that Mott Haven isn’t better known for the six Piccirilli Brothers, who were in business from 1893 to 1945 at Willis Ave. and E. 142nd St. Attilio Piccirilli (1866-1945) was the foremost artisan in the family (he executed the Daniel French portrait of Lincoln at the Memorial) and he was on good terms with Enrico Caruso, Fiorello LaGuardia, and John D. Rockefeller. Three Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, paid a call to the Piccirilli Studios. This striking Columbian memorial is on Arthur Ave., at D’auria-Murphy Square, where E. 183rd, E. 184th, Crescent and Arthur Aves. all meet.
The park’s centerpiece is a statue of Christopher Columbus that was moved here in 1992 from P.S. 45 on Bathgate Ave. and Lorillard Pl. It’s also the work of Attilio Piccirilli.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)