Crystal Chemical Company, ca. 1919 This building once housed the Crystal Chemical Company, a manufacturing space for pharmaceutical drugs and makeup. The company was originally located at 861 Westchester Avenue. Upon its founding, it made only three products. Within a year, it quickly expanded to twenty-eight, and moved to this much larger location. The new, bigger factory opened on September 18th, 1919, with a grand party, attended by prominent doctors, dentists, and retail distributors, who were given a tour of the six floors of the building. The building had facilities to store, distribute, label, and manufacture different medications and makeup. The makeup and beauty products especially were in high demand, due to their reduced price and an extensive marketing campaign; their slogan was "Crystal Products Satisfy."

St. Ann's Episcopal Church of Morrisania, circa 1910. This fieldstone structure is the Bronx's oldest church. Built in 1840-1841, it was financed by New York and Harlem River Railroad executive Gouverneur Morris, Jr. It was donated as a family memorial, and its nearby graveyard is the final resting place of many of the Bronx's most well known colonial families.

Necker Undertaker Storefront, ca.1914. William Necker was born in New Jersey, and after leaving school at age 12, he worked his way up in the ranks at the Braumuller Piano Company in New York City. By the early 1890s, he was the head of the wood-working department. In the mid-1890s Necker changed careers and took a course at United States School of Embalming. Over the next two decades, he opened more than 20 offices in New Jersey and New York City, including this East 138th Street storefront. Necker died suddenly in 1916, and while the business did survive, most of the branches closed. Purchase of another funeral home business in 1948 resulted in the Necker-Sharpe Funeral Home, which the family sold to a former employee in 1958.

Although one of the churches on this walk dates to early Dutch settlers of the Bronx (St. Ann’s built circa 1841), most are churches which were built by and serviced the immigrant communities of Mott Haven and the larger area of the South Bronx. As the Bronx’s population grew in the late 19th and early 20th century it swelled with the influx of German, Irish, and Italian communities. Most remain in service today, ministering to the Spanish-speaking, African American, and African immigrant populations of the South Bronx.

"Willis Avenue, north from E. 140th Street, showing the buildings on the east side of the avenue and the Willis Avenue Methodist Church, at E. 141st Street, April 1941." Built in 1900 and designed by George W. Kramer (who designed churches all over the country and authored a 1897 book called "The What, How, and Why of Church Building"), the original Willis Avenue United Methodist Church (in the distance) is a Gothic Revival building with particularly colorful stained glass windows. The church was shut down in the fall of 2016 due to declining membership and insufficient funding.

The Forum was built as a 2,700-seat vaudeville and movie house. After World War II, the struggling theater found new life as the Teatro de Puerto Rico, catering to The Bronx's growing Latin-American population. The theater featured acts such as Mexico's Cantinflas, Cuba's Tres Patines, romantic duos like the pianist Agustin Lara and the singer Libertad la Marque from Argentina, and Puerto Rican star Iris Chacon. Following a closure in the 1980s, the theatre re-opened as a performing arts venue and has been most recently used by a church congregation.

(George W. Kramer, 1897-1900) The congregation was originally founded in 1865—early in Mott Haven’s residential development—as the First Methodist Episcopal Church of North New-York. This building replaced an earlier frame church on the same site. Its bulky, multi-story appearance is evocative of a flourishing neighborhood and congregation. The main sanctuary had seating for 1,000, there was a 500-seat lecture hall in the basement, and the upper stories contained Sunday school rooms for another 1,000 children. The façade, called English Gothic by the press, is notable for its buff brick with Indiana limestone trim and the expanse of delicate, pointed-arch windows. The corner bell tower was once topped with an upper tier and pyramidal roof.

St. Jerome's Catholic Church was built in 1899-1900 to the designs of the architectural firm Delhi and Howard. The cost of the building was $100,000, a considerable sum for the turn of the 20th century. The Italianate / Baroque Revival building can house a crowd of more than 1400 parishioners. The church is a part of the Mott Haven Historic District, which was designated in 1969. The main thoroughfare of the district, Alexander Avenue (where the church sits on the corner with 138th Street) was once known as "Irish Fifth Avenue."

"E. 143rd Street, adjoining the northeast corner of Willis Avenue showing the North Congregational Church and parish house, 1941." Originally called the Congregation Church of North New York, the direction in the name referenced its location at what was the northern reaches of New York City when the church was constructed in 1903. Designed by Dodge and Morrison, the massive church can fit 1000 parishioners on the main floor and more than 500 on the balcony.

St. Ann’s Church was erected in 1841 by Gouverneur Morris, Jr., as a memorial to his mother Ann Cary Randolph, of Roanoke, VA. The fieldstone church with Gothic arched windows and a tower and cupola sits at an angle to the existing street grid, a vestige of the Morris family’s rural estate that occupied this area and gave rise to the name Morrisania. In the churchyard are buried several members of the Morris family, including Judge Lewis Morris (first Governor of New Jersey), and Major General Lewis Morris III, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

St. Jerome’s Roman Catholic church complex occupies the whole eastern blockfront of Alexander Avenue between East 137th Street and East 138th Street and is dominated by the church’s corner tower with its colonnaded belfry and octagonal dome. The mostly Irish-American congregation of St. Jerome formed in 1869, and built the red-brick Victorian Gothic style school building at the southern end of the block first, in 1871, followed by the neo-Grec style rectory next door. The church itself was the last in the complex to be erected and was completed in 1898 in the Renaissance Revival style to the designs of the Manhattan-based firm Dehli & Howard. The church is an outstanding example of its style, with finely articulated facades of rusticated buff brick ornamented with robust Italian Renaissance-inspired architectural forms such as broken pediments, Ionic and Tuscan columns and elaborate cornices and entablatures. A statue of Jerome, the 4th-century scholar saint, sits at the corner of the church.

"Brown Place, south from but not including East 136th Street to its terminus at East 132nd Street. The two houses at the S.E. and S.W. corners of East 135th Street are in the process of being razed. May 11, 1937.” The buildings between 134th and 135th Streets were cleared for the construction of the Major Deegan Expressway, completed in 1939. At right is Public School 43, built in 1906. The school is named after the first recorded European settler of today’s Bronx, Jonas Bronck. Likely of Swedish origin, Bronck established his farm, “Emmaus,” in 1639, in the vicinity of today’s 132nd Street and Willis Avenue. The name ""Bronx"" evolved from the practice of naming surrounding natural features in relation to the farm (e.g. Bronck’s River).

Early 20th century truck from FDNY Engine 83. The station was built in 1905.

St. Ann's Church. Drawing, circa 1945. In the 1830s much of the area now known as Mott Haven, was purchased by Jordan Mott for his iron works company. Prior to that development the area was owned by the Morris family. St Ann's (named for the recently passed Morris matriarch) was built on a hilltop clearing on Gouverneur Morris Jr's land where his parents had already been buried prior to the construction of the small Gothic Revival structure.

Though the name of this business is advertised as plural bowling alley(s), further research suggests no other locations existed and the narrow width of the buildings makes it seem unlikely that this operation had more than one or two lanes.

625-629 East 138th Street, St. Luke's Roman Catholic Church, September 1931. The original stone basement of the St. Luke's Roman Catholic Church was constructed in 1898 and served the largely Irish and Italian local population. The larger upper church was constructed sometime at the start of the 20th century. In 2013 the oldest working priest in New York City was pastor of St. Luke's. His name was Msgr. Gerald Ryan and he passed away in 2013 at the age of 93 after 47 years as pastor of this church.