Community
Home > Community > Feature Stories > Andrew Freedman House Charrette

The Grand Concourse Charrette 2005

Ever Grand, Ever Changing

The Grand Concourse: a grand name for a grand boulevard, what one writer calls “the Champs Elysées of the Bronx.” The Freedman Home, built in 1924, is an old age home endowed by an early owner of the New York Giants baseball team. The Concourse has undergone a lot of change since Louis Risse, in 1892, first conceived of it as the “Speedway Concourse.” He envisioned a thoroughfare of stylish apartment buildings lining a tree-lined park that would provide access from Manhattan to the large parks of the Bronx.

The Freedman Home, built in 1924, is an old age home endowed by an early owner of the New York Giants baseball team. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

And that process of change continues today. On Friday, September 23, 2005, on the spacious second floor of the Andrew Freedman Home, 90 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students from PS/MS 218 met with 13 high school students from the Pablo Neruda Academy for Architecture and World Studies; 10 architects and engineers from New York City Transit, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Thornton-Tomasetti Group; and 10 educators from the Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) to take up the challenge of “re-designing” the Freedman Home. The BMA and the Salvadori Center, with help from the Bronx Borough President’s Office and the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council, sponsored the charrette.
How The Charrette Came About

Adolfo Carrión, Jr., Bronx Borough President The charrette was part of a week-long series of walking tours, workshops, and talks about the Grand Concourse put on by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in preparation for the boulevard’s centenary celebration in 2009. Adolfo Carrión, the Bronx borough president, has long been interested in getting schoolchildren more involved in thinking about and being active in their community. Bronx Museum of the Arts In response to this call, the BMA, along with the Center and the officials at the Freedman Home, put together the charrette so that children would have an opportunity to say something significant about the future direction of at least one small section of the Bronx.

Continue on to The Challenge.