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Introduction

Welcome to Bronx Business for Everybody

Lehman College Library of The City University of New York (CUNY) is happy to share this web site with everybody who knows the Bronx, or wants to find out more about it.  We know that you will enjoy viewing the photographs of Bronx buildings, streets, businesses, recreational sites, organizations, and educational sites.  We hope, too, that you learn some new things about the Bronx by reading the selections of minutes, newspaper and magazine articles drawn from this business collection.  This web site can be a starting point for your discovery of the Bronx. So that you can further explore a variety of topics on the Bronx, this site also recommends interesting books and web site links. Children and young adults will enjoy the activities and projects, specially prepared by an educator, for using this web site.

Background

The Bronx Chamber of Commerce donated this business collection to Lehman College on August 31, 1988. The Chamber wanted to make its materials available to the general public, students, researchers and scholars.  Founded for the purpose of promoting Bronx commercial, industrial, civic and cultural interests, the Chamber was previously known as the North Side Board of Trade (1894-1914) and the Bronx Board of Trade (1914-1968).  By 1969 the organization evolved into the Bronx Board of Trade & Chamber of Commerce. This name was later shortened to the Bronx Chamber of Commerce.  Digitized materials shown on this site, in jpeg and pdf formats, are largely from the Bronx Board of Trade years– focusing on the 1920s through the 1950s.  

Coverage

Since the records in the Chamber’s Collection span 1894-1968, one comes to appreciate their mission of advocating for the Bronx.  No civic concern escaped their sphere of interest, whether it was traffic, housing, sanitation, health provision, bridge and highway needs, schools, colleges, parking, dredging of rivers, recreational sites or landmarks. The collection provides researchers a chronologically unbroken perspective on diverse times in which: county government was debated; the population was booming; transportation facilities were growing; industries were expanding and businesses were relocating to the area. We see the Bronx, too, during the Depression and its recovery period; handling defense work; coping with post World War II housing shortages; Civil Defense activities; and such Robert Moses arterial projects as the Bronx-Whitestone and Triborough Bridges, and the Cross Bronx Expressway.

The Bronx matured and became known as the “Borough of Universities.”  The selection of the uptown Hunter College site (now Lehman) for the first meeting of the Security Council in the United States brought international attention to the Bronx, as did the presence of the “Botanical Garden,” the “Bronx Zoo” and Yankee Stadium.  Celebrated writers such as Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe at one time called the area home; and R. Hoe & Co, Biograph Studios, Ward Baking Co, and Farberware Co. were among the businesses that found the Bronx a convenient and congenial location.