2715 Creston Avenue, 1925.

H.B. Claflin estate gatekeeper's house, 1923. Horace B. Clafin was a dry goods merchant who rose to prominence as the foremost wholesale merchant in the city in the early and middle 19th century. In the 1860s he began assembling a large estate in the then-rural countryside of the Bronx. The estate grew to more than 100 acres and eventually included three large mansions and a number of outbuildings (like this gatekeeper's lodge). The H.B. Claflin & Company became insolvent in 1914 and in 1919 the estate was divided and put up for sale (a section of the property had been earlier been sold to the city for the construction of the Jerome Park Reservoir). The property included about 300 lots which, while originally rural countryside, were by 1919 conveniently located near considerable mass transit infrastructure. Today the streetscape is densely populated with apartment houses and private residences.

Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s greatest writers, spent the last years of his life in this modest cottage in the Bronx.

Walton High School, ca. 1935.

2754 Grand Concourse, ca. 1925.

The small white farmhouse now known as Poe's Cottage was built circa 1812. The structure once occupied a plot across the street from its current location in Poe Park (once a large apple orchard). In 1846 poet Edgar Allan Poe and his wife Virginia began renting the cottage for $100 a year. Virginia, who suffered from tuberculous, died in 1846 and Poe lived in the cottage, at least part of the time, until his death two years later. Around the turn of the 20th century, the home was in danger of demolition because of the proposed widening of Kingsbridge Road. A local literary group petitioned for the house to be moved across the street and to have a park created around the structure. Poe Park opened in 1902 and was a bucolic area of winding paths, trees, and flowerbeds. In 1913 the home was moved once more (only a few hundred feet) to its current position and has been in the care and custody of The Bronx County Historical Society since 1975.

Fordham Manor Dutch Reformed Church, February 1940. The congregation of the Fordham Manor Reformed Church celebrated its 300th anniversary in 1996. In 1696 founding members of the church were given a charter by the King of England to built a chapel. The original sanctuary was constructed in 1706 nearby at what is now Devoe Park on W. 190th St. and University Ave. The original structure was burned to the ground by British troops during the Revolutionary War. The church moved to this plot on Reservoir Ave. in 1800 and the building seen in this photograph (with the four-story wooden steeple) was constructed in the 1849 and was razed 1940 to make way for the current structure.

"An elevated railroad station with the Kingsbridge Armory behind it. A streetcar and an automobile are visible on the road, circa 1915." The Kingsbridge Armory was supposedly the largest armory in the world when it was constructed between 1912 and 1917. It remains the largest armory in New York City. Designed by Pilcher and Tachau, the building occupied nearly 5 acres, the main drill floor is 300 by 600 feet, and the style of the structure evokes many of the railroad stations built around the time of its construction. Originally the building housed munitions as well as the Eighth Regiment, once known for their role as the honor guard at George Washington's inauguration. The military functions of the massive building ceased in 1990s when most of the operations were being run out of a different building, though one small National Guard unit still uses one of the armory annex buildings. In 2013 a proposal was announced to create the world's largest indoor ice center within the armory but as of the start of 2017 the work had still not begun.

Town Towers, ca. 1984. This Art Deco apartment building was built in 1931 and designed by Horace Ginsbern, who was the architect for a number of the Art Deco Grand Concourse apartments. The crenelated parapet (the alternating raised and lowered sections of the roofline) called out its style from a distance. The AIA Guide to New York also notes that the lobby of the building is "spectacular." Unfortunately at some point since this photograph was taken the roofline details have been removed, leaving the six-story apartment with a unadorned flat roofline.

In the middle of the 20th century, Wigorot Lundin began making prints of the New York Transit Authority's photographic negatives. Taken in the 1910s and 20s, the photographs show a city in transition, expanding with the advent of new technology. Lundin's Bronx photographs display a borough, growing and consolidating as it becomes further interwoven with transit.