The West Bronx neighborhood of University Heights is adjacent to Morris Heights and, in many ways, feels like an extension of its southern neighbor. Its main distinguishing characteristic, and the source of its name, is the 55-acre Bronx Community College campus, home to an impressive mix of classical and modernist architecture. Bounded to the north by Fordham Road and to the south by Burnside Avenue, University Heights rises sharply from the banks of the Harlem River before gradually descending toward Jerome Avenue, lined with block after block of tire shops and muffler repair joints beneath the ceaseless rumble of city-bound 4 trains.

Long a Jewish and Irish Catholic enclave, the neighborhood today has a largely Dominican population. According to The Encyclopedia of New York City, it also contains one of the New York’s largest concentrations of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, many of whom resettled here under the Refugee Act of 1980.

This was a particularly bracing week to explore the area with arctic winds whipping off the river and the sidewalks slick and gleaming beneath a thick, pockmarked skin of dirty ice.

While I didn’t manage to get onto the campus (more on that below), I did find University Heights an interesting place to walk around: a mix of five and six-story apartment buildings, large freestanding homes (some of them former fraternity houses), and row houses. The old aqueduct trail, aka “the Bronx’s High Line,” runs right through the center of University Heights and offers a welcome respite from the neighborhood’s perpetually busy streets and sidewalks.

For the first fifty years of its existence, NYU, which was founded in Greenwich Village in 1835 as the University of the City of New York, enrolled fewer than one hundred students. By the late nineteenth century, with the university looking to expand and the area around Washington Square becoming increasingly commercial, administrators began to search for a more rural location that would “fulfill more nearly the American ideal of a college.”

Mali Estate with the Mali Mansion in the background (from here)

In June of 1891, then-chancellor Henry MacCracken placed a down payment on a large plot of land in The Bronx situated 170 feet above sea level, on an escarpment overlooking the Harlem River with a commanding view of the New Jersey Palisades.

The property belonged to Henry Mali, an NYU graduate and U.S. envoy to Belgium. Mali was also at the helm of what would become the longest continuously operated business in New York City: Henry W. T. Mali & Co. Founded in 1826 and in business until 2006, the company’s longevity could be attributed to the enduring popularity of its surprisingly lucrative flagship product, billiard felt.

In a bid to rehabilitate his tarnished reputation, robber baron Jay Gould, and later his daughter Helen, contributed funds for the new campus. MacCracken hired the storied architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to design and build the university. Charles McKim was occupied with Columbia University’s new campus in Morningside Heights so Stanford White was placed in charge of the NYU project. MacCracken and White, who shared a fondness for dramatically styled facial hair, collaborated closely on the campus design.

The centerpiece of the new campus was the ten-story Gould Library, a temple-like structure modeled after the Pantheon in Rome.

Construction began in 1895 and was completed in 1900, six years before White was shot in the face by his ex-lover’s husband on the roof of Madison Square Garden. Built of yellow Roman brick and adorned with marble columns, Tiffany stained-glass windows, and a massive seventy-foot gilded dome, the library is often considered White’s greatest achievement.

Because of its location high on a bluff, the library required a massive retaining wall. MacCracken, who “took great pride in his country’s history and heritage,” saw the wall as the perfect opportunity to create a shrine to America’s most important and influential citizens.

Inspired by the Ruhmeshalle in Munich, MacCracken had White design a 630-foot open-air curving colonnade on top of the wall. In between the columns were niches for 102 busts, which he called the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

Every five years the public had a chance to submit new nominees (who had to have been dead at least twenty five years), and 100 delegates whose ranks included famous writers, historians, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and six U.S. presidents, voted on who was worthy of inclusion.

The only nominee ever to be elected unanimously was George Washington. Other well known inductees include Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, and the Wright Brothers.

Then there are names like Francis Parkman, Sidney Lanier, James Kent, and Sylvanus Thayer. And then there’s Elias Howe, whose sewing machine breakthrough came from a dream in which he was surrounded by a cabal of cannibals brandishing spears pierced with holes. When he woke up, he rushed back to his drawings and, inspired by the spears, relocated the eye to the tip of the needle, a development that finally made his invention feasible. Somewhat surprisingly, Howe also earned a shout-out in the Beatles’ film Help!.

More conspicuous than the inclusion of these largely forgotten figures is the near complete absence of anyone who wasn’t white, male or Protestant. There are only 11 women, two Black Americans, and one Jewish American in the Hall of Fame.

While Warhol’s prescient “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” line is often invoked in this modern age of viral videos and professional influencers, I doubt even he could have predicted the proliferation of physical Halls of Fame devoted to such seemingly mundane pursuits as quilting and cutting hair. Beyond the more well known celebrity shrines like the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (also in Ohio), there are Halls of Fame dedicated to Bobbleheads, Magic: The Gathering, and Rubber Science. There are at least four separate Insurance Halls of Fame, which frankly seems like overkill. Even billiard impresario Fred Mali, descendant of Henry Mali on whose former estate the Hall of Fame sits, has earned Hall of Fame accolades. He was inducted into the International Cuemakers Association Hall of Fame in 2014.

As uninspiring as all of those sound, they probably receive more traffic than the original which once saw over 50,000 visitors a year. Today, the Hall of Fame’s main audience consists of school kids on field trips who likely have no clue why they are there.

Of the 102 niches, only 96 are occupied. There wasn’t enough money to cast busts for the last four HOF nominees, Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, and Andrew Carnegie. Then, in 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the busts of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson removed. Hopefully, the recent recipient of a second hand Nobel Peace Prize won’t get wind of the vacancies, though rumor has it he has set his sights on bigger things.

While there may have been a lack of Jews and Catholics represented in the Hall of Fame, there were plenty who settled in the surrounding neighborhood. Proximity to a prestigious campus, along with the tree-lined streets and dramatic views made University Heights a very desirable place to live. Newspapers called it “the most entrancing home place in The Bronx,” which seems an awkward way of putting it, but you get the point.

Construction of the subway accelerated the suburban enclave’s transformation into an urban neighborhood. The Hebrew Institute of University Heights and the Church of St. Nicholas of Tolentine opened within three years of each other, in 1925 and 1928 respectively.

A majority of the workers who built the Third Avenue Railway line were Irish. Before unionization, they commonly worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, so a place to live near the end of their day’s work was essential. There was already a significant Irish population in the West Bronx who had settled in the area while working on the Croton Aqueduct in nearby Highbridge.

By the 1920s, New York City’s Jewish population had surpassed one and a half million, more than a quarter of the city’s total population. Like the Irish, Jewish New Yorkers followed the path of northward intra-city migration, with many also choosing to settle in the West Bronx.

Harold Apsis grew up in the neighborhood and was interviewed about his time there for Fordham University’s Bronx Jewish History Project:

It was mostly middle-class Jews and Irish Catholic people. Some were in the professions. My father was a professor. There were some doctors and lawyers, but there were many people who were what I call the last generation of the Jewish union members. One of my friends’ fathers was a printer, and I don’t even know what some of the others did. Some of the Irish fathers worked for the City Fire Department, that kind of thing. I would call it middle-class, Jewish and Irish. Nobody was rich, nobody was poor. From my sense of it, nobody was poor in the sense that everybody had an apartment, everybody had food, everybody was well clothed. Many of the people, at least most of the people, had cars, even though it was the city. We went away for the summer.

In the spring of 1969, during a time of widespread protests on university campuses, four Molotov cocktails were tossed into the Gould Library. Two detonated and caused significant damage to the auditorium.

At the same time, the first wave of residents were just beginning to move into Co-op City which would soon become home to over 60,000 people, many of them exiles from other neighborhoods in The Bronx including University Heights. The neighborhood’s older Jewish residents, in particular, were attracted by the relative calm and modernity promised by the Towers in the Park in the borough’s northeast corner.

Meanwhile, NYU’s University Heights campus lost more than 40% of its student body. Concerns about urban decay in the surrounding Bronx had deterred prospective students and, facing a $6.7 million budget deficit, NYU sold its 55 acre campus to Bronx Community College (BCC) for $62 million in 1973. While BCC took stewardship of the buildings on campus, many of the area’s private homes and apartment buildings that were home to NYU professors were vacated and later abandoned. Even so, the neighborhood fared better during the chaos of the ‘70s and ‘80s than much of the South Bronx.

Today, University Heights is on the cusp of another transformation, one that starts at its edges. In 2017, Jerome Avenue was rezoned to allow for mixed-use development, a decision that had faced criticism for its potential to raise rents and displace small businesses. On the neighborhood’s western edge, there is the pending One Fordham Landing, a $2 billion waterfront project which promises over 900 units of 100% affordable housing with a charter school, grocery store, and 3 acres of public waterfront. However, developer Dynamic Star LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025, so the future of that development is unclear.

This week’s field recording, captured mostly on Jerome and Fordham Avenues, features the standard trifecta of street banter, singing, and traffic, along with a healthy dose of sniffling.

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I made several attempts to walk on to the BCC campus and photograph the library and other buildings but was rebuffed by a humorless but exceedingly competent security team. I tried a mix of honesty, bravado and even a little subterfuge, but I was denied at every entrance. They run a tight ship over there. I thought at least I would be able to access the Hall of Fame, not exactly the hottest ticket in town, but it is currently closed for repairs.

I found these four uncredited photographs in the NYU Archives, all taken in the early 1920s. I was especially drawn to the extensive mottling and deterioration of the emulsion, a patina that attests to the century that has elapsed since they were made. The last photograph is simply a beautiful image, a place that is hard to believe once existed in the Bronx.

According to the website, once digitized, these cellulose nitrate negatives were discarded as hazardous waste because they posed a fire safety hazard.

Want to see how many “Great Americans” you can identify from the Hall of Fame? Take this quiz to see how many names you recognize and would be able to give at least a vague answer as to what they were famous for. And no, John Paul Jones does not refer to the bassist in Led Zeppelin, though he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Feel free to report your score or suggest new nominations.

HALL OF FAME CHALLENGE

David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam, spent a year at Bronx Community College.

Taylor Mali, whose bio lists him as a spoken-word poet, teacher advocate, voiceover artist, and game designer, is a descendant of Henry Mali. He is also known as the Don Quixote of Plastic Bags.

I learned a ton and sourced several photos from The College on the Hill, a web exhibit created by Catriona Schlosser for completion of a Master’s degree in Public History and Archives at NYU.

The University Heights Bridge was originally built in 1895 as the Harlem Ship Canal Bridge and connected upper Manhattan to Marble Hill. When the IRT extension required a heavier bridge, rather than scrapping the old one, it was floated downstream in 1904 and installed at its current location in 1908.