From Sunday’s “Required Reading” Column:
Boulevard of Dreams
by Constance Rosenblum (NYU Press)
Once one of the most magnificent roadways in New York City, what started out as the Grand Boulevard and Concourse in the early 1890s, was designed by French-born civil engineer Louis Risse. Risse, writes longtime journalist Rosenblum, saw it as “a thoroughfare that would shuttle the fashionable world of Manhattan to the rural expanses of the Bronx.” She takes us through the different generations of immigrants who made Concourse neighborhoods their home, looking at the big picture and the changing details of people’s daily lives.
