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.

Between 1954 and 1957, the Municipal Art Society surveyed historic buildings in all five boroughs to create a database of potential landmarks to preserve. Local residents and MAS staff compiled individual sheets devoted to about 200 buildings. Each sheet outlined the building’s date, location, and style and provided a description and a small photograph. This is the list of Bronx buildings with descriptions by architectural historian Agnes A. Gilchrist.

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.

The Bronx is named after Jonas Bronck, a Nordic European settler who arrived in the colony of New Netherlands in 1639. Bronck and his Dutch wife, Teuntje Joriaens, established their farmstead in what is now Mott Haven at the confluence of the Harlem River and Bronx Kill overlooking Randall’s Island. In 1670 much of the area was acquired by the Morris family, who established a large manor called Morissania. The family retained ownership—and the area remained sparsely populated—through the early 19th century. It was the arrival of the New York and Harlem Railroad line, announced in 1840, that finally persuaded the Morrises to embrace suburban development on their estate. Jordan L. Mott, the neighborhood’s namesake, purchased sizable tracts from the Morris family in 1841 and 1848. Hoping to create a “downtown of Westchester County” (of which this area was then still a part), he laid out streets and building lots and began marketing the new hamlet called Mott Haven. According to Mott’s plan, the southern portion was devoted to industrial uses, including his own iron works, all served by a purpose-built, 3,000-foot canal. The northern section was reserved for tidy residential buildings, protected by restrictive covenants from anything “pernicious to health or noxious or offensive to the neighborhood.” Other developers soon followed Mott to the South Bronx, purchasing large tracts from the Morris family and laying out their own suburbs such as Wilton (subdivided 1857) and North New York (1860)—now both part of the neighborhood of Mott Haven. The Morris family itself entered the development business, planning the industrial neighborhood of Port Morris. Development of these tracts was steady, if not as rapid as their promoters may have wanted. Mott Haven proper—which consisted of the area between Third Avenue and the Harlem River—was the most populous, containing a concentration of modest, mostly wood-framed, houses built for local factory workers. By the 1860s the area even boasted a few brick rowhouses, some of which still survive. Much of the area, however, remained in the hands of real estate investors waiting for the area to gain in value. The Panic of 1873 delayed this by several years, although around the same time, in 1874, the South Bronx was annexed into New York City, likely ensuring its eventual development as an urban neighborhood. The arrival of mass transit (the 1887 opening of the Suburban Rapid Transit Company’s 138th Street Station, later part of the IRT Third Avenue Elevated) provided the ultimate spark for the area’s growth. Within a decade or two, most of Mott Haven’s streets were completely built up with a diverse range of buildings, from comfortable single-family rowhouses, to larger multi-family tenements and apartment buildings. Industry also blossomed. Mott’s iron works, now controlled by his descendants, continued to expand. Other manufacturers moved into the area including a remarkable number of piano manufacturers. In fact, by the early 20th century the Bronx had (by one count) 63 piano factories—43 of them in Mott Haven—producing more than 100,000 instruments a year. Mott Haven’s dense industrial base meant the neighborhood was particularly hard hit by the deindustrialization of New York City in the mid 20th century. Though the South Bronx became a symbol of urban decay and disinvestment by the 1970s, it also remained a vibrant immigrant neighborhood with new institutions, such as the Teatro de Puerto Rico, moving into the many surviving historic buildings. The rich history and architectural distinction of Mott Haven has been recognized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission through the designation of three historic districts (including the first in the Bronx) and several individual landmarks.

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. 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.