Unspecified/General

The northernmost of New York City's five boroughs, and the only one attached to the United States mainland, the Bronx is named after Jonas Bronck, a Scandinavian settler who farmed the area in the 1600s. Coextensive with Bronx County, it is home to roughly 1.4 million people across neighbourhoods that range from dense apartment blocks to the waterfront enclaves of the east and the leafy estates of Riverdale in the northwest. Its best-known attractions sit close together in the central Bronx: the Bronx Zoo, one of the largest urban zoos in the country, and the adjacent New York Botanical Garden. Sport anchors the borough's identity too, above all Yankee Stadium, home of baseball's most decorated franchise, where game days fill the surrounding streets. Arthur Avenue, often called the real Little Italy of New York, draws food lovers to its old-school markets, bakeries and restaurants. The Bronx also holds a particular place in music history as the widely accepted birthplace of hip-hop, traced to a 1973 block party on Sedgwick Avenue, and that legacy is marked today by murals, tours and a dedicated museum. Green space is plentiful: Pelham Bay Park, the city's largest, sits in the northeast and includes a public beach, while the grand, tree-lined Grand Concourse runs Art Deco apartment buildings down the borough's spine. For visitors, the Bronx is less a single destination than a collection of strong ones, and the zoo, the garden and a ballgame can each justify a trip on their own. It carries a tougher reputation than the other boroughs, rooted in its troubled 1970s and 1980s, but its main attractions are well served by subway and draw millions between them each year. City Island, a small fishing community with seafood restaurants out on Long Island Sound, offers an unexpectedly maritime corner at the borough's edge. Transport is straightforward, with several subway lines running up from Manhattan to the zoo, the stadium and the garden in well under an hour. The borough also stages the long-running Bronx Week celebrations and the New York Botanical Garden's seasonal shows, and its food scene reaches well beyond Arthur Avenue into Caribbean, West African and Latin American kitchens.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: New York City, NY, United States