Bronx Savings Bank, Westchester Square, February 3, 1942. The Westchester Square neighborhood dates to a the 17th century Dutch settlement of Oostdorp, and was later part of the 19th century Town of Westchester before being incorporated into the New York City in 1895.

View north along Lane Avenue, from Westchester Avenue, under the IRT Pelham Bay Park subway line, August 25, 1935. Today, the both the building with the dark cornice in the middle of the frame and the large apartment house in the distance remain standing. The edge of a structure can be seen at extreme left. It is the 1883-completed Huntington Free Library, which also remains extant.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church viewed from the Manhattan-bound platform of the Westchester Square station on the IRT Pelham Line, July 1, 1928.

Ferris Family Burial Plot, July 25, 1928. The Ferris family settled in the area now known as Westchester Square in 1667. The family maintained this small burial plot for generations. A tiny piece of land, it was long overgrown (as seen in this 1928 photograph) and littered with garbage (as visitors to the family cemetery noted in the late 1990s). Through the recent efforts of the Kiwanis Club of Parkchester, the small cemetery has been cleaned up and now sits behind sturdy and protective fence.

Lane Avenue (Westchester Square), from Owen F. Dolen Park, July 25, 1928. From this view, only the brick hardware store remains. The two free-standing houses at left were demolished in the early 1940s to make way for a Bronx Savings Bank branch. The improbably-named Thomas Bible Funeral Chapel at right is now a McDonald’s.

Although Westchester Square may now be subsumed within the sprawl of The Bronx’s residential and industrial neighborhoods, the community’s roots as the nucleus of a rural village can still be seen today in its layout. Westchester Square’s initial European settlement dates to the Dutch period, when the area was known as Oostdorp, or “East Village,” to denote its geographic relationship to New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan. By 1653, before the English formally seized the Dutch territory, settlers from the New Haven Colony had settled in New Netherland and named their community “Westchester.” In 1683, a few decades after the English takeover, the Province of New York created Westchester, one of the twelve original counties in the state, and identified the Village of Westchester as its seat. The center of regional government, Westchester Square soon became the home of the Parish of Saint Peter’s, one of the city’s oldest. Surrounding the village green, now Owen F. Dolen Park, Westchester grew into a small center of activity within the otherwise bucolic setting of The Bronx in the 18th Century. Located near the boat landing at the head of Westchester Creek and along a long- established road, now known as Westchester Avenue, the village gained economic prominence as commercial activity grew. The geographically advantageous setting of the village took on tactical importance during the Revolutionary War. During the war, the community saw a skirmish at the bridging of the creek, rebel encampments on the village green, and the burial of soldiers in Saint Peter’s cemetery. In the following century, this district of The Bronx retained its rural character even as Westchester Square saw slow, but steady, growth. Estates and farmlands were slowly subdivided and sold off for development, such as the construction of the Van Schaick Free Reading Room in 1883, while the street grid that was platted out on maps began to take shape. This nascent residential neighborhood was characterized by relatively large single-family houses, many of which still survive today. Westchester Village served as the center of government for the Town of Westchester until 1895, when the town was annexed into New York City. Like other communities in the expanded New York City, Westchester Square was dramatically transformed with the introduction of subway service in 1920. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s Pelham Line began in the South Bronx and ran above Westchester Avenue as an elevated line. Now the 6 Train, it included a stop on East Tremont Avenue which left the old village green and Saint Peter’s Church in its shadow. The accompanying speculative development turned Westchester Square into a dense neighborhood of one- and two-family homes complemented by corridors of shopping and commercial activity. The demographic character of the neighborhood changed as well, with upwardly mobile Irish and Italian immigrants following the newly constructed housing. Westchester Square still hosts an immigrant community, now largely comprised of Latin Americans and South Asians, and boasts a built environment with remarkable reminders of the community’s varying stages of development.

Westchester Square Library, 1938. The New York Public Library’s Westchester Square Branch opened to the public in 1937, operating out of a refurbished comfort station in Owen F. Dolen Park. The library moved to a new location on nearby Glebe Avenue in 1956. In 1925, local resident Owen F. Dolen gave a speech dedicating a new World War I memorial in the park, then known as Westchester Square. Dolen, who had been a leading advocate for the monument, collapsed from heart attack shortly after concluding his remarks. The park was renamed in his memory the following year.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, June, 1926. St. Peter’s was founded in 1693, in what was then the Village of Westchester. The current Gothic Revival church is the third St. Peter’s to stand on the site, which was once occupied by the original Westchester Town Hall.

2847 Dudley Avenue, The Bronx (ca. 1923, Jorgensen Realty and Construction Co.) Christine Jorgensen (1926-89) was a transgender woman who famously underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1951-53, becoming the first person in the United States to be widely known for doing so. Upon returning home from Denmark, where the surgery was performed, she was mobbed by reporters both at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport and at her childhood home in The Bronx, and became a household name. Jorgensen used her fame to advocate for transgender rights and saw herself as being at the forefront of the sexual revolution. Her story encouraged others to question gender as a set binary and was largely responsible for bringing the word “transsexual” into the American vocabulary. After her surgery, she became a well-known actress and singer into the 1960s and published an autobiography entitled “Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography” in 1967. Jorgensen’s childhood home was built by her father’s construction company and still stands today as a reminder of Jorgensen’s legacy and contribution to trans history. Photo by Christopher D. Brazee/NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project.

New York City is known for many things: Art Deco skyscrapers, picturesque parks, the world’s greatest theater district, venerable museums and educational institutions, not to mention bagels and pizza! But above all of these, New York is most important as home to some of the world’s most fascinating and significant people and as the site of impactful and significant happenings throughout history. The city’s cultural influence is, perhaps, its greatest contribution to the world, and its built environment stands as a grand scavenger hunt of clues waiting to be uncovered. Lucky for us, the city’s Landmarks Law, passed in 1965, provides the legal framework for protecting the physical reminders of the city’s cultural wealth. In fact, one of the stated purposes of the Landmarks Law is to “safeguard the city’s historic, aesthetic and cultural heritage.” In the first 50 years that landmarks were designated by the City, much emphasis was placed on the historic and aesthetic. In recent years, though, more consideration has been made for the importance of sites associated with people or historical events, rather than just for their architectural or historical value. In 2015, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the Stonewall Inn as an Individual Landmark solely for its association with the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. In 2018, the Commission designated the Central Harlem—West 130th-132nd Streets Historic District, describing it as “not only representative of Central Harlem’s residential architecture, but the rich social, cultural, and political life of its African American population in the 20th century.” Also, in recent years, Greenwich Village’s Caffe Cino and Julius’ Bar were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as significant and influential sites connected to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBTQ) community, The New York Times profiled a historian giving tours of Muslim sites of significance in Harlem, and the City is commemorating some of our most storied and accomplished female citizens with the installation of statues in all five boroughs. Indeed, grassroots preservation activism around the city is also swelling around sites of cultural significance: Tin Pan Alley and Little Syria in Manhattan, Walt Whitman’s house in Brooklyn, Arthur Avenue in The Bronx and a recently-rediscovered African burial ground in Queens, to name a few. In response to this movement of interest in cultural landmarks, the Historic Districts Council undertook an initiative to highlight such places as one of its Six to Celebrate in 2018. The culmination of that effort was a conference in October 2018 entitled “Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Rethinking Sites of Cultural History.” The conference convened preservationists, historians, artists, planners, place-makers and more to work together to clarify what cultural significance is and how it can work, how to document and create compelling narratives around cultural sites, and how to identify the specific challenges of cultural sites from a preservationist perspective. This tour provides just a sample of some of the city’s cultural landmarks, organized thematically and representing all five boroughs. The list includes some sites that are legally protected — in some cases by more than one government body — and some that are unfortunately in danger of being lost. Preserving culturally significant sites that may not possess overtly aesthetic value often requires a particularly active and engaged form of advocacy to achieve protection from the wrecking ball. But, as long as there are interesting people making their mark on New York City and crucial events taking place here, that effort will never be in vain, since those stories are the lifeblood of this vibrant place.

2474 Westchester Avenue, The Bronx (1867-68, Leopold Eidlitz) NYC IL, NR-P The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) was founded in 1998 “\[for] women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community to have a physical space in The Bronx to experience and/or create dance, theater, visual art, written work, and performance that is empowering to them free from the prejudices of society,” as described in BAAD!’s vision statement. Its founders are Arthur Aviles, a renowned dancer and choreographer, and Charles Rice-Gonzalez, a writer and activist. At the time of BAAD!’s founding, its mission to provide a safe and welcoming environment for LGBTQ artists and artists of color was an extraordinary social advancement since the foundations of gay rights were still fragile in the late 1990’s. The academy continues to be a progressive force for good in The Bronx and beyond. Originally located in a south Bronx community center, BAAD! rented space in the American Bank Note Company Printing Plant in Hunts Point before moving in 2013 to its present location in the chapel of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Westchester Square. This part of The Bronx was once the town of Westchester, the county seat of Westchester County, which was formed in 1683. The Victorian Gothic-style chapel, designed by a former apprentice to Richard Upjohn (architect of Trinity Church in Manhattan), stands on the site of the town’s old courthouse.

Shops on the eastern side of Westchester Square, ca. 1913. At left is the James Butler grocery store. Butler, an Irish immigrant, founded a successful chain of grocery stores in the 1880s. Forgotten today, Butler’s chain was once the sixth-largest in the country, with over 1,100 locations.