The Bronx and Other Places In Between

As with any other self-respecting mixed-race New Yorker, I am inevitably from Queens, having lived there for half a year before moving to the Bronx, where I’ve been for the past 19 years. I once heard an anecdote from my violin teacher of the phenomenon of immigrants first settling in Queens, attaining a middle-class life, and then promptly moving to Westchester, an affluent suburb north of the city. For my family, however, it seems we didn’t quite make it all the way, instead getting stuck halfway in the Bronx.

New York City is very much a transitional space in this sense, where people try to make their own and then move on. Amidst the chaos of the people and cultures of the world folding onto itself are the individuals that comprise city, each finding a niche to wedge themselves into. 

I myself am very much a product of this chaos. Both my parents moved to New York alone in their teenage years, my mother from rural Japan and my father from Tehran, Iran. They met in Central Park dancing Argentinian tango. My cultural perspective is very much the filter for my experience of the city. Having been raised culturally Japanese, and there being no consolidated community per se, my perception of the city is that of a web of different establishments I patronized, such as bookstores like Kinokuniya and Book-Off, and grocery stores like Sunrise Mart, Dainobu, and Katagiri. These were places I often visited with friends, and as they were somewhat concentrated around Bryant Park and Grand Central, those were the places that constituted my conception of the city center.

While this is what the city is to me, atop the same cityscape are millions of different perceptions of what it constitutes. While there are the big shiny business districts like Midtown and FiDi as well as New York as a commodity, the city in reality is the storefronts, homes, and other places wedged in between the streets.

The Bronx, my home borough, orbiting around the immense gravitational mass of Manhattan, has been treated as an in-between place, with many people’s experiences of it shielded behind the windscreen of a car. For a long time I was resentful of living in the Bronx, as, in my mind, it was an ambiguous place that wasn’t quite the city but was still tangled in a seemingly inescapable sea of duplexes. My own world and my own city were in Manhattan, where everything happened, and so I felt a detachment from where I lived and regarded it only as a place I returned to in the evening. 

Apart from the cultural perceptions of the Bronx are the unequal realities that are embodied in the environment. While Manhattan and Westchester are home to some of the wealthiest communities in the country, the Bronx is home to some of the most impoverished congressional districts, likely as the city puts many of its Section 8 and NYCHA tenants in these areas (Food Research and Action Center, 2020). From my street, I can see the tops of the thirty-five towering high-rises comprising Co-Op City, the largest housing cooperative in the world, providing affordable housing to nearly 40,000 people (New York City Department of Planning, 2020). Despite the scale of this neighborhood, Co-op City has no direct subway access aside from peripheral stations beyond the New England Thruway, which encircles the neighborhood. 

Co-Op City

Although I live in the Bronx, I was a detached outsider for a long time, and was influenced by the negative cultural and economic perceptions of it. But, I’ve found that my resentment evolved into a curiosity as I grew up and explored areas like Co-Op City. As places that I passed by irreverently became familiar, so did these other conceptions of the city. I think that there is personally a lot to gain by decentering the spectacle and detached allure of the suburbs and, rather, build enriching spatial relationships in the city proper. The ideal end, it seems, is to facilitate each perspective of what the city is by improving the conditions for accessibility and the creation of different niches.

References

New York City Department of Planning. 2020. “Population MapViewer (NTA).” Accessed February 11, 2026. https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/c625a78991d34ae59deb7a33806ac0d1/page/Population-%7C-Density.

Food Research and Action Center. 2017. “Number and Percent of People Below Poverty by Congressional District, 2017.” Accessed February 11, 2026. https://frac.org/maps/acs-poverty/tables/tab1-acs-poverty-cd-2017.html.