New York City! I have finally made it to the city of my final destination.  Now all I have to do is walk across New York City, and I will have reached the end of my journey.  As the crow flies from the spot where I stand on Bussing Avenue in the Bronx, on the border with the city of Mount Vernon, it is 16 miles to the southern tip of Manhattan.  The route I will walk however is about 19 miles to the finish line in Lower Manhattan, the heart of old New York.  I have shown the route I will follow across the Bronx in red on the map below, and I have also drawn a straight line from my starting point in New York and the end of the trip in green.  Notice that the green line, the most direct route, follows a route that traverses the Bronx in a northeast to southwest line, crossing the East River at a point in East Harlem, then continues along the shoreline of the East Side until it begins to gradually cross the Eastern side of Manhattan to reach Broadway.  Near the green line notice Boston Road: this road was built in the late 1790s to meet the new bridge to Manhattan built in 1798 at what is now 129th Street in Harlem.  This route, which roughly parallels the green line I have drawn, reduced the travel distance between Mount Vernon and New York City from more than 20 miles to about 16 miles.  The Harlem Bridge rendered obsolete the King’s Bridge at the northern tip of Manhattan, long the only way to cross into Manhattan on foot or horseback. 

        The shorter Boston Road, as described above, is the source of  the discrepancy I have remarked upon regarding the milestones I have encountered and described in the last few entries that seem to be off by about four miles.  Boston Road is another piece of evidence suggesting that the milestones date from the post-revolutionary period and thus could not have been placed by the then dead Benjamin Franklin.  It is also a source of confusion to many New Yorkers with whom I have spoken about the road who assure me that the old road went through the South Bronx and prove it by noting that the road is called the Boston Road while I insist on walking on roads like Bussing Avenue, Gun Hill Road, White Plains Avenue, and Van Cortlandt Avenue.  I know I am on pretty solid ground, however, because ALL descriptions of travel to New York along the old roads pass over Kings Bridge, because ALL old maps of New York show the road to Boston crossing the Bronx in a west to east direction, starting at the northern tip of Manhattan, and because there are still many traces left of the old road in the Bronx despite the last two centuries of rapid growth the area that was once farmland has experienced.  As I walk through the Bronx in this entry I will point out all the traces I can find of the road that once was the major route between two of the three largest cities in Colonial America.

*****

        The Bronx.  The mere name conjures up all sorts of images of a gritty New York.  How surprised I was to discover that the area has only been part of New York City for a little more than a century and that the image of the area that I had formed in my mind for 40 years turns out to be mostly wrong.  First the facts: the Bronx is one of the five boroughs of New York City and is the only one principally on the mainland. It has a population of about 1.4 million people in an area of 42 square miles and a density of over 33,000 people per square mile, more than double that of Boston, which is about the same size but has only 600,000 residents.  Interestingly, like Boston, a very large fraction of the area of the Bronx is taken up by green space, almost a quarter of the total. Thus the actual density of the populated areas is significantly higher still, making it very densely populated indeed, far more so than any place I will visit save Manhattan on the Post Road.  It is safe to say that I am now done with farms and suburban housing, and that a lot of people await me.

        The Bronx also has a curious name that sounds funny to the English-speaking ear and has that interesting definite article attached to the front end of its name, unlike any other borough or even any town I can think of. The article is part of the official name of the borough, and derives from the fact that the borough is named after the river that bisects it, and rivers are prefaced by definite articles (‘the Potomac,’ ‘the Missisissppi,’ ‘the Hudson River Valley,’ etc.).(1)  The Bronx River in turn is named for a Swede, Jonas Bronck, who purchased 500 acres of land through which the river ran, in 1640, when the territory was controlled by the Dutch.  Bronck died in 1643 but the area became known as Broncksland, which was shortened to Bronk’s and eventually Bronx.  By the late seventeenth century the area was controlled by the English, and eventually Broncksland became the manor of the Morris family, for whom the short-lived town of Morrisania was named.

        The area that is now the Bronx was a part of the county of Westchester, from 1683 until 1874 in the case of the territory west of the Bronx River, and until 1895 in the case of the territory east of the Bronx River.  In 1788 Westchester County was divided into 21 townships, five of which were wholly or partly within what what is now the Bronx: Yonkers, Morrisania, East Chester, Pelham, and the town of Westchester.  The territories of each of these towns closely followed the boundaries of the old manors.  Yonkers for instance, was created from the old Philipsburgh Manor, “sequestrated by the State in 1779, on account of the disloyalty of its owner, Frederick Philipse.  The territory of Yonkers that became part of the Bronx is the area to the north of Manhattan Island east to the Bronx River.  Today this area contains the neighborhoods of Riverdale and Kingsbridge, among others.  The bulk of the Bronx today was formerly the town of Westchester, which early on absorbed the lightly-populated town of Morrisania.  The area of what was once the town of Westchester makes up all of the central and southern Bronx, with the remaining areas of the northeast Bronx composed of the southern portions of Eastchester and Pelham.  The city of Mount Vernon was created in 1892 from the central portion of Eastchester, leaving the northern and southern sections divided.  Thus in 1894 the southern portion of Eastchester was annexed to New York, along with the adjoining section of Pelham.  Mount Vernon also held a referendum to decide on annexation but it was defeated, and so remained a separate city.

        Thus the spot on which I am standing has only been a part of New York since 1895; it formerly belonged to the town of Eastchester. At the first census of the new borough (also a county called Bronx County, not the Bronx County) in 1900, 200,000 people were recorded as residents of the Bronx, more than double the number residing in the equivalent areas in the decade prior to the annexation of the territory to the city of New York, and ten times the population of the area prior to the Civil War.  Thus in a few decades the area went from rural farmland described by Washington and other travelers, to densely packed urban neighborhood, home to over a million refugees and immigrants from the southern United States as well as from parts the world over.

        Today the Bronx continues to attract immigrants: according to surveys taken by the US Census Bureau fewer than half of the households in the Bronx speak English as a primary language.  Less than 10% of the population of the Bronx is made up of Non-Hispanic Whites, while Hispanics white, black, and multi-racial make up 53% of the population.  Another 30% of the population of the Bronx is made up of Non-Hispanic blacks; a large chunk of this population group is composed of blacks of Caribbean descent (Colin Powell is a former son of the Bronx of parents originally from Jamaica).  The White non-Hispanic residents of the Bronx are mainly of Italian and Irish descent, with some German- and Polish-Americans also making up the numbers.  Asians make up less than 3% of the Bronx, quite small compared to their overall share of the population of New York City (12%). 

    I have included a map below of the population breakdown of the Bronx block by block from the 2000 Census showing the racial breakdown of the borough.  The most obvious point to make is that the borough is highly segregated by racial and ethnic groups. Blacks primarily live in the northeast Bronx, whites in the northwest and southeast Bronx, while Hispanics make up the overwhelming majority of residents of the center and south Bronx.  I will pass through the areas in green and red, only briefly passing through a “blue” area towards the end of the walk through the Bronx.  The white areas on the map are made up of parkland or cemeteries and thus are not uninhabited (by live humans that is).

*****

     Bussing Avenue, as West Kingsbridge Road in Mount Vernon becomes as it crosses into the Bronx, is like many working class residential communities through which I have passed on this trip; it is lined with modest homes, many covered in vinyl siding, some with American flags in the smallish front yards.  Initially the Bronx is indistinguishable from Mount Vernon, the city through which I just passed, and I could be forgiven for not even realizing I am in New York City already as it seems a continuation of the suburbs.  For twenty minutes I walk through the northernmost reaches of the Bronx.  The only noticeable thing about this stretch of the Post Road are the undulations that the road undergoes as it descends one hill and climbs a second.  Towards the end of the walk on Bussing Avenue I am treated to a view of what lies ahead as the road is at a significantly higher elevation than the area to the south. Ahead it is apparent that I am at last in the city as I see many large apartment buildings, and the elevated highways and rail lines that cut through the Bronx are prominent parts of the landscape.  One of these highways is Interstate 95, which is known for most of its journey as the “Cross Bronx Expressway” as it slices through the middle of the Bronx en route to the George Washington Bridge and New Jersey and points south.  Fortunately I will not encounter I-95 until I reach the George Washington Bridge entrance in the upper reaches of Manhattan, as my path crosses the Bronx much farther to the north of the highway. Similarly, I will see US1 only briefly at the GW Bridge, as it too passes to the south of this route and eventually becomes one with I-95 in the South Bronx, before splitting again into two separate roads in New Jersey after crossing the George Washington Bridge.

        Stephen Jenkins, in his history of the Bronx from 1912, eloquently disparages the change of the original Kingsbridge Road name that once graced Bussing Avenue: “This last portion of the road [heading east out of the Bronx] is called Bussing Avenue, which begins at East 231st Street, one block east of White Plains Avenue, and continues on to the city line.  As soon as it enters the city of Mt. Vernon, its name becomes what it has been for over two centuries, the Kingsbridge Road.  With all due respect to the Bussings, who were extensive landowners in this vicinity, the ancient road should not have been called anything else than the Kingsbridge, or Boston Road.  In fact, a few of the old signs bearing both titles are still to be found along the Bussing Avenue part of the roadway; and, in the opinion of the writer, it is not too late to restore the old names and thus preserve an ancient landmark.” (2)  Alas, I found none of these signs in my perambulation along the mile-long stretch of Bussing Avenue I walked. 

*****

        One thing I want to point out on the map of my walk is the fact that Bussing Avenue is almost alone among streets in the Bronx that do not follow the grid pattern, a clear indication of the antiquity of the road and a testament to fact that the road was built with human locomotion in mind and followed the contours that best suited the walker to negotiate the rolling topography characteristic of the Bronx.  The grid came later as the population swelled, and the city planners mapped out a strategy to manage the construction of thousands of buildings to house the new residents who continued to pour into New York daily a century ago.  As I will show in the next entry, planners early on adopted the same strategy for Manhattan, as maps of the era show the topography and the existing roads as well as future roads that would be built on the grid pattern.  The old Post Road managed to survive for much of its original route in upper Manhattan but the grid obliterated the route through most of the Upper East Side and Midtown Manhattan, and the road only reappears at Madison Square, where its original route can then be followed through the remaining length of lower Manhattan.

        Only at East 231st Street in the Bronx near White Plains Road, in the Wakefield neighborhood of the Bronx does Bussing Avenue end and the old Post Road conform somewhat to the grid for a short spell.  Here too I feel as though I am finally in the city.  White Plains Road has an elevated rail line running overhead along the route of the old road here.  Both sides of the street are densely packed with small ethnic grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and the usual number of fast food and other commercial chains, and there is an incredible energy as the street is jam-packed with people coming and going up to the train platforms above the street, going in and out of the stores whose produce often bursts out of the small confines of their interior space onto the sidewalk.  The crowd is mostly black, with a strong admixture of what appear to me to be Latinos, probably from the Caribbean for the most part based on my superficial analysis of physiognomy.  Census data backs me up however, as most of the residents of the stretch of the Post Road that is White Plains Road is black, while a significant minority is Hispanic or Latino.  Some census blocks in the area through which I am walking (specifically 215th Street to 224th Street on the east side of White Plains Road) statistically have no white residents at all, which is the first time that has happened along the entire route of the Post Road. Not until I cross the Bronx River do I walk in an area that has even 10% White Non-Hispanic residents.  I definitely stand out here.

        Before I walked this area, I often ruminated over what it would be like to pass through an area so large that was so different from the vast majority of the road.  Specifically I worried about my safety, as did many others who warned me not to walk through the Bronx, or to circumvent this whole area and pass through Riverdale instead.  I was brought up on stereotypical imagery of the Bronx as a savage war zone, where most of the whites had fled and the remaining ones were members of the Mafia or Irish thugs with somewhat dubious links to the IRA.  I saw “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” I saw all the movies where the dopey white kids end up in the wrong ‘hood and suffer the consequences.  I was not immune to the Hollywood image of the Bronx as the worst place to be if you are white. 

        So it was not without some trepidation that I embarked upon this stage of the walk.  I had done my research, investigating the census data for racial breakdowns, for income disparities, and even scouring the crime blotters and various websites seeking information on the different neighborhoods regarding the relative danger of passing through.  Of course I always walk in daylight as much as possible, because getting run over has always been a much more clear and present danger than being knifed by a gang banger, and I knew from the statistics that the vast majority of urban crime occurs after dark.  I also knew that most crime, specifically homicide, is perpetrated upon people who know each other.  In fact I spent a good deal of time studying the New York Times Homicide map of New York City, which tabulates data on each and every murder in the city for the last seven years (through 2009), trying to figure out if any neighborhood through which I would pass had a high rate of killings.  What I discovered was that the overwhelming majority of killings in New York involve young black or Hispanic males killing each other.  Of the 3780 murders recorded in New York between 2003 and 2009, only 8% of the victims were White Non-Hispanic, while 61% were Black and another 27% Hispanic or Latino.  A quarter of all murders in the five boroughs were in the Bronx, so it does have a higher homicide rate than the other boroughs, which is troublesome [at 11.0 per 100,000 quite high but sadly lower than the 11.8 rate for the entire state of Louisiana and much lower than the rates of entire cities such as New Orleans, (an astonishing 52.0/100,000), Detroit (40), Washington D.C. (24), or even Buffalo (22, which makes the Bronx safer than Buffalo!), and only slightly higher than Fresno (9).  Incidentally, New York is very low on the ranking list of most violent cities based on the FBI crime Index, placing 54th among the 80 or so cities with a population of more than 250,000, behind Portland Oregon, a place renowned for mayhem.].  But I studied the map of all the homicides broken down by race of the victim, and I found only four White murder victims in the past seven years anywhere near the route of the Post Road on its way through the Bronx.  Of these, two were killed in the wee hours of the morning and the other two were killed by White males. Conclusion: avoid White males in the Bronx at 4 a.m. 

        As it happens my research turns out to be academic because I feel quite comfortable after about fifteen minutes wandering through the Bronx.  In fact, I start to feel foolish that I ever had any worries at all.  The neighborhood is much like many neighborhoods I routinely pass through at home in Boston without a second thought.  It is bustling, full of commercial activity, noticeably devoid of empty and isolated areas teeming with drug dealers and other assorted scoundrels.  Perhaps it would seem different at 2 a.m but I rarely venture out on the streets of my own neighborhood at 2 a.m. not out of fear but because I am asleep and am not in the habit of seeking out drug dealers at all hours.  Also, I am not in a gang and do not look like I am in a gang so I need not worry about being a victim of internecine turf battles.  Finally, a cursory glance at the homicide map from the link I have provided will show that few homicides have occurred along the route of the Post Road through the Bronx in the seven years of recorded data shown, (about 50 in seven years, or seven per year or one every other month, but only three in 2009, the last year of data shown) and the majority of those were in the 11pm to 6am window that I call sleep time. 

        I buy a mango from a store run by a man from Senegal and contemplate eating in one of the many Caribbean and African restaurants that line White Plains Road, but since I just ate an hour ago, and I have only another hour of daylight I feel compelled to push on until I have to call it quits for the day.  Sadly there are no hotels along the road in this area so I am forced to return to my hotel in New Rochelle for the night, then return tomorrow morning to the spot I stopped at the night before near the Bronx River, which marks a divide of the Bronx in more ways than one.

        Christopher Colles shows the old Post Road in the area of the Bronx on the left two strip maps of Sheet 2 of his seven sheet series of maps of the road from Manhattan to the Housatonic River in Connecticut (see below). The mile 19 mark is near the Bronx/ Mt. Vernon boundary today, after which the road travels southwest for a mile until at mile 18 it turns sharply south for another mile.  At mile 17 the road abruptly turns to the west and immediately crosses the Bronx River.  The first mile described above corresponds to todays’s Bussing Avenue. Mile 18 to Mile 17, the southward portion of the road, corresponds exactly to todays White Plains Road. When White Plains Road meets Gun Hill Road the road turns west and follows Gun Hill Road over the river.

        Williamsbridge is the name of the neighborhood east of the Bronx River and is named for the bridge that crossed the river here, near the land which long ago belonged to John Williams.  On the western side of the river the terrain becomes much hillier, and it was here that the British built a series of fortified redoubts on the hills overlooking both the Williams Bridge and the Kings Bridge during their long occupation of new York City during the Revolution.  Brissot de Warville mentioned them as he passed them on the road to New York in 1792, saying “we passed by these places which the English had so well fortified while they were masters of them.  You still see their different redoubts and fortifications, which attest to the eye of the observer the folly of this fratricidous war.” (3)  The Reverend Manasseh Cutler mentions both fortifications on the hills and the Bronx river “ which was the separating line between the two armies for a considerable time.  The name of the river he (a fellow traveler) had forgotten.”(4)   Today the river is still often forgotten but the borough is not, so the Bronx name lives on.  Interestingly, none of the other travelers whose diaries I have consulted on many occasions mentioned the area, leaving off their descriptions of the terrain in Pelham or Eastchester and resuming at Kings Bridge.  Even President Washington made no mention of the fortifications along the route, one of which was called Fort Washington (in Manhattan) before being taken by the British in 1776, essentially describing only the tavern at which he stopped near Kings Bridge and nothing else on his way home.  Nor do any of the Almanacs from the eighteenth century mention the area; all of them list taverns in Eastchester then jump six miles to the taverns near the King’s Bridge.

*****

        The Bronx River to the south of Williamsbridge flows gently through the parklands of the New York Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo before reaching Long Island Sound near Riker’s Island nearly opposite LaGuardia Airport in Queens. It is fairly narrow but in a deep valley so it seems bigger than it really is when crossing over the bridge.  The divide between the two sides of the river is more than just a historical anecdote about the battle lines of the American Revolution: the river also marked the boundary between Yonkers and Eastchester.  The western side (the southern half of Yonkers) was annexed to New York City in 1874 while the eastern side (Westchester and the southern sections of Eastchester and Pelham) were annexed after a vote of the residents in 1895.  Interestingly, Westchester voted against annexation by a vote or two but was duly annexed anyway, dramatically increasing the size of New York City overnight. (5)

        The Bronx River also marks a modern divide readily apparent from the Census map above: Hispanics are the overwhelming majority of the population west of the river in the area known as Norwood, while Blacks make up more than 60% of the population east of the river in Williamsbridge.  New York is incredibly diverse but it is interesting how segregated the diversity actually is: the city resembles more a patchwork quilt  than the interspersed points of color of a Seurat painting. On the west side of the Bronx River, the area is all red, indicating a Hispanic population of more than 50%.

        The landscape undergoes a dramatic change as well. The landscape had been gradually sloping southward as I walked on White Plains Road, but after I cross the Bronx River the road quickly climbs up a much steeper incline, readily apparent on maps of the terrain drawn during the Revolutionary war and ostensibly the reason the British chose to fortify the land west of the Bronx River, as mentioned by de Warville and Cutler. The architecture changes as well: here there are more handsome nineteenth- and early twentieth-century apartment buildings.  I follow Gun Hill Road for about three or four blocks before I turn left and follow Reservoir Place for a short block before reaching a large sunken oval green space surrounded by elegant apartment buildings.  This park is built upon the site of the former Williamsbridge Reservoir and was constructed during the Roosevelt Administration as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).  The reservoir obliterated part of the old road which would have crossed here, so I follow the edge of the park, admiring the mock-Tudor buildings and the two dozen boys trying to outdo each other with potentially lethal skateboarding tricks off the various railings and staircases leading down the incline to the playing fields below.

        At the far end of the park I reach Bainbridge Avenue, where a lovely landmark awaits. Here is the Bronx County Historical Society’s Valentine-Varian House, built in 1758, “one of the last of the farmhouses that once lined Boston Post Road,” according to the wayside nearby.  That it existed in 1792 I am in no doubt because a house owned by a Valentine is located on Colles’s map about 3/4 mile past the Bronx river, which is where I stand as I admire the curious stonework of the house that makes it seem so exotic to someone weaned on Colonial New England architecture.  Alas the sun is setting and I must curtail my walk for the day but I pick up again at this spot the next morning to complete my trek across the Bronx. (An interesting aside- As I sit in a bar enjoying my well-earned dinner and beer I watch the Knicks game on TV, featuring the highly anticipated debut of native son, Carmelo Anthony, I reflect on one fact I learned in my investigation of the history of New York:  the orange and blue colors of the New York Knickerbockers, the same colors of the New York Mets, and the flag of the city of New York, all are a reflection of the Dutch heritage of New York, as these were the colors of the Dutch flag under the Prince of Orange in the seventeenth century.)

     *****

       

        A bright and early start to my penultimate day’s walking finds me in front of the Valentine House in the Bronx at Bainbridge Avenue opposite Van Cortlandt Avenue, which leads west towards Kingsbridge and is  “one of the oldest roads in the Bronx, having been an Indian trail that subsequently became part of the original road to Boston.”(6)  The fact that the road curves like a Spanish tilde is a sure sign this is an old road, and I follow Van Cortlandt Avenue downhill to reach a valley through which runs the Moshulu Parkway, which I learn was, in the eighteenth century, the site of the Scuil (or School) Brook, now filled in.  Colles shows the road crossing a small brook at mile 16, so I have a feeling this is the spot shown as Mile 16 on Colles’s map, a little over two miles to the site of the Kings Bridge. 

        Unfortunately, modern developments again have put an obstacle in my way.  After continuing back uphill on Van Cortlandt Avenue, crossing the Grand Concourse, Van Cortlandt Avenue ends, and I walk on 205th Street, which passes through a series of railway tracks, before reaching the Bronx High School of Science. On the far side of the High School is the large empty space that is the Jerome Park Reservoir.  This structure is undergoing some kind of restoration project and so is relatively difficult to access.  The reservoir is built on the site of an old racetrack called Jerome Park, which was the site of the first Belmont Stakes in 1867.  The road once made its way across the area that is now the reservoir, and thus I am obliged once more to take a detour, following Goulden Avenue north to the junction with Sedgwick Avenue, which I follow around to the west side of the reservoir. 

        Sedgwick Avenue heads downhill, passing Fort Independence Park along the route, the site of an early fort from the Revolutionary War.  The neighborhood here seems quite “gentrified,” a word which seems to have acquired a negative connotation, although the presence of smart restaurants, a bakery, and well-kept houses in the middle of the Bronx seems to me to be a step up from the blight and abandonment of the 1960s and 1970s.  After a few more minutes walk down Sedgwick Avenue I branch off onto Kingsbridge Terrace, a sure indication of my proximity to Kingsbridge.  The neighborhood here is in fact called Kingsbridge, and for a brief time in 1874 it was an independent town, breaking away from Yonkers before being annexed by New York.  Once an Irish enclave, it is today primarily inhabited by immigrants from the Dominican Republic. 

        The last part of the walk in the Bronx is brief, convoluted, and has a surprising twist at the end. This area originally posed the double difficulty for the walker of having steep inclines and a number of streams to cross in the low lying areas.  Thus the road twists and turns to climb the hilly terrain in the most efficient manner while simultaneously crossing brooks and streams at narrow fording places.  Thus the road curved sharply northward, on what is today Albany Crescent, a curve shown on Colles’s map just beyond Mile 15.  A road branches off to the south here on Colles’s map leading “to Westchester.”  This is likely to be today’s Kingsbridge Road, which confusingly is also named for the place from which it would have originated, but runs to the southeast away from Kings Bridge rather than to the northeast.  At the northernmost point of the curve another road branches off to the north on Colles’s map which leads “to Albany Bridge.”  This is the old Albany Post Road, which headed north away from Kings Bridge.  Here the road crossed a small creek before turning due south again, and then making one final loop north to reach the Kings Bridge. 

        A sharp turn left from Albany Crescent onto 231st Street brings me to Broadway, which reminds me of White Plains Road with all its hustle and bustle and the elevated tracks of the Number 1 train rattling overhead.  I walk one block south before turning sharply right and slightly north on 230th Street. I follow this for two short blocks to reach the junction of Kingsbridge Avenue (another Kingsbridge appellation!!) and West 230th Street.  The surprise is that, even though I am still on the mainland, I am actually on the border of the Bronx and Manhattan.  This is because somewhere below my feet is the Kings Bridge that once crossed the Spuyten Duyvil Creek to reach the island of Manhattan.  The landscape and the waterways were completely altered here in the last century, leaving a small piece of Manhattan, the part from which the Kings Bridge crossed onto the mainland attached to the mainland itself as a result of landfill of the creek over which the bridge once crossed.  Supposedly the bridge was buried with creek and lies below the ground here at this site.  Thus I take one step south and find myself in Manhattan (New York County), though I have yet to actually set foot on the island itself.  The Bronx has been crossed, I am alive and well and wiser for having walked across the much-maligned borough.  I now turn south and begin the final stage of my travels down the Post Road, walking the length of Manhattan Island.

        A century ago, Stephen Jenkins, in The Story of the Bronx (1912) wrote “Within the Borough of The Bronx there are still a number of historic landmarks.  If this book lead to the the preservation of but one of these, I shall feel that it has not been written in vain.”  The Post Road, one of these “landmarks,” is battered and bruised, but still cuts a five mile swath across the width of the Bronx, connecting Manhattan to the hinterlands and beyond to Boston.  My walk across the Bronx would have been much the poorer without his eloquent effort to record the story of the Bronx for posterity.  I dedicate this entry to his memory.

CHRISTOPHER COLLES’S MAP OF 1792, PAGE 2, SHOWING THE POST ROAD FROM NEW ROCHELLE TO THE TOP OF MANHATTAN ISLAND,  INCLUDING WHAT IS TODAY THE BRONX FROM MILE 19 TO ABOUT MILE 14.