Morris Park, Bronx: Where Congeniality Flourishes

NEW YORK — Three years ago, Orlando Marrero was newly divorced and taking comfort at Patricia’s of Morris Park, a maternal hug of an Italian restaurant in this eastern Bronx neighborhood. Marrero, who is now 54 and works as a marketing specialist for a health insurance company, mentioned to his server that he was looking for a new home. She introduced him to a real estate agent who found him a convertible two-bedroom apartment in a brick multifamily house on Hone Street, for $1,150 a month.

An older Italian-American man across the street welcomed him with coffee and cake. “There is no barrier here to where you come from or who you are,” said Marrero, who was born in the Bronx and raised in Puerto Rico, and had previously lived on Pelham Parkway, just north of the neighborhood. Referring to his new block, he said, “I think I’m the only Hispanic here, and I’ve been very well received.”

Morris Park is a place where village-like congeniality continues to flourish among urban asphalt and flux.

First the site of a racetrack and airfield, then an Italian-American stronghold with pizza and calamari to rival that of Arthur Avenue, Morris Park presents changing faces in a largely unvarying streetscape.

The neighborhood has lost its Orthodox Jewish community and acquired large Latino and Albanian ones, but looks much as it did when Bronx sons like boxer Jake LaMotta and television host Regis Philbin lived in the area. Brick and vinyl-sided houses are scaled for one to three families, and the many independent shops lining Morris Park Avenue include Italian bakeries and candy stores that might have served the great-grandparents of today’s young customers.

Carla Diana, 50, an industrial designer and educator, moved to Morris Park from the Fordham area of the Bronx when she was 7. Impressed with the openness, compared to her old neighborhood, she recalled exclaiming to her parents, “I never thought we would move to the country!” (Today, Morris Park’s population density is about 18,400 per square mile, compared with 32,500 in the Bronx overall.)

Two years ago, after decades away, Diana returned to live in her family home with her year-old son, Massimo. She found Morris Park much the same. If, as a child, she hadn’t fully appreciated the convenience of the Bronx Zoo (a seven-minute bike ride away), she certainly did now.

However, it was when Diana recently put her home on the market, after being offered a job in Michigan, that she was struck with another realization: The Bronx is hot. A crowd of potential buyers came to see the two-bedroom apartment in a 1960s co-op building on Paulding Avenue, for which she was asking $160,000. “I got an offer right away,” she said, accepting $145,000 because she was handling the transaction herself and didn’t have to pay a realtors’ fee.

“It just seems that the Bronx’s moment has arrived,” she said.

Morris Park is well positioned to capitalize on interest in the borough. Residents not only have subway and express bus service, but expect to have their own Metro-North station on the New Haven line in the next several years. Last month, a ferry route opened between Clason Point Park, about 20 minutes away, and Manhattan.

The neighborhood has also been long rated among the safest in New York. According to city data that is updated weekly, crime in the 49th precinct, which includes Morris Park, has declined 8.5 percent in the last two years and 27.6 percent in the last eight. In the year ending on July 31, the incident rate was 11.5 per 1,000 residents, a lower figure than in the 26th precinct of Manhattan, which includes Morningside Heights, or the 17th precinct, which includes Murray Hill.

“A lot of people are trying to get in,” said John DeFonzo, manager of the Morris Park Avenue outpost of Patsy’s Pizzeria, who lives in the attached brick house on Rhinelander Avenue that his grandmother bought 70 years ago when she arrived from Italy. “In the last year and a half, when I see new faces, nine out of 10 times they’re new people living in the neighborhood.”

But Albert D’Angelo, who headed the Morris Park Community Association before becoming chair of Bronx Community Board 11 in July, sees a fine line between opportunity and opportunism. Some outside investors, he noted, are turning multifamily homes into illegal boardinghouses, crowding the community, exacerbating traffic problems and straining resources. Mom-and-pop stores prevail because a shortage of parking spots has discouraged larger businesses from opening on the commercial stretches of Morris Park Avenue and Williamsbridge Road, D’Angelo added. Congestion is one reason the community association is fighting a city plan to narrow vehicle lanes and introduce bicycle lanes on Morris Park Avenue.

He predicted that the new Metro-North station will help solidify Morris Park’s reputation as a desirable middle-class district. “There are very, very few neighborhoods in the city where you can grow up, go to school, go to college and hang out with friends that can be your friends for 40 to 50 years,” he said.

Morris Park’s boundaries are Pelham Parkway to the north, Bassett Avenue to the east, Sacket Avenue to the south and White Plains Road to the west, D’Angelo said, which means that Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael), the civil rights leader who lived in Van Nest, an area that many in Morris Park consider annexed, can be claimed as a denizen.

The neighborhood has grocery stores, big-chain pharmacies, a public library, the bowling alley where “Men in Black 3” was filmed and a renowned Columbus Day parade. The blocklong Loreto Playground has basketball, handball and bocce courts.

Anchoring the neighborhood’s northeastern corner is a hospital complex that includes the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Jacobi Medical Center, and supplies employment for many in the community.

Joseph Vega, an agent with Pantiga Group, one of several real estate companies on Morris Park Avenue, described a “sellers’ market,” with more and more clients coming “big time” from Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Inventory is low, he said, especially for two- to three-family properties.

As of Aug. 26, Realtor.com had 24 active listings in Morris Park. (The narrowly defined map showed the western boundary at Bronxdale Avenue and northwest boundary at Neill Avenue.) The least expensive of the properties, which were pulled from multiple sources, was a brick two-bedroom house built in 1956 listed at $435,000; the most expensive was a five-unit 1920 building listed at $1.8 million.

The average sales price of 37 single and multifamily houses sold in Morris Park between Feb. 28 and Aug. 10 was $608,482. Among this group, the median sales price was $580,000.

Morris Park’s low, sober buildings and wide avenues are a backdrop for vibrant multicultural signifiers: halal food vendors, hookah lounges, barber shops offering fades and straight shaves, and at least one bakery window filled with wedding cakes. Not much is green here, but then nature explodes, painting the sky at sunset.

Morris Park has several public, charter and parochial schools.

PS 108 enrolls about 570 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. On 2016-17 state tests, 46 percent met standards in English versus 31 percent citywide; 51 percent met standards in math versus 31 percent citywide.

PS 83 enrolls about 1,760 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. On state tests, 39 percent met standards in English versus 33 percent citywide; 37 percent met standards in math versus 27 percent citywide.

Icahn Charter School 2 enrolls 324 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Each grade has two classes with 18 students per class.

St. Clare of Assisi School enrolls about 500 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade. The annual tuition per student is $6,000.

The neighborhood is served by the 5 subway train, which stops at the Morris Park and Bronx Park East stations, as well as the 2 train, which stops at Bronx Park East. The BxM10 express bus runs along Eastchester Road and Morris Park Avenue to Manhattan.

In 1889, John Albert Morris, a New Jersey businessman, bought 188 acres next to a swamp to build a thoroughbred racecourse called Morris Park. The operation closed in 1904, nine years after Morris’ death. The track was taken over by automobile racers and also used as the first formal airfield. A 1910 fire destroyed much of the property.