Two East Tremont buildings

[1781 and 1783 Fulton Avenue, East Tremont, Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

In The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro devotes a chapter, “One Mile,” to the story of just one mile of the Cross Bronx Expressway and the havoc that mile’s construction brought to the East Tremont section of the Bronx. In mapping out the expressway, Moses chose a path through East Tremont that in 1953 and 1954 destroyed 159 buildings housing 1,530 families. He refused to make a slight alteration in the expressway’s path that would have required the destruction of just six buildings housing nineteen families and saved ten million dollars. Why? Because he was Robert Moses, and he had made up his mind.

This tax photograph shows just two of the East Tremont buildings destroyed to make way for the expressway. Google Maps shows no there there today.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io) : All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io) : Segregation by Design: The Cross Bronx Expressway

[The larger building on the corner is 1783. The smaller building to its left is 1781.]