Morrisania: On Bristow’s Turf

The Bristow School on Bristow Street

On Bristow St. Friday afternoon

The Bronx doesn’t apologize—it just is.

On this Friday afternoon in Morrisania, the neighborhood that was once home to 19th-century American composer George Bristow, I walk in search of traces of a life we know so little about. Camera around my neck, notebook in hand, I begin to ask a question for which I know there may be no answer. This is not the Morrisania Bristow once knew, and that’s fine by me.

I rode for about an hour on the 2-train from Brooklyn to Freeman Street Station, then walked west along Bristow Street. Just a few yards north of the intersection stands Public School 134, a relatively modern building sitting across from the Soul Tabernacle City of Refuge—a gospel church that proudly calls itself home to the “Soul Children of New York.” The school, like the street, is named for George F. Bristow, the composer whose life I’m now shadowing. José, a Puerto Rican neighbor, tells me no one ever mentions Bristow’s name. He grew up across the street and went to school there, but says nobody really knows who it was named after.

From a nearby patio, the sound of Celia Cruz blasts. But this is no longer a Cuban space. José assures me Celia is international—she belongs to Puerto Ricans too.

Morrisania today is Dominican, Boricua, Jamaican, West African—and thoroughly American. I saw a woman in Ghanaian dress leading her son past a Jamaican man lighting what might be the most formidable joint I’ve ever seen. Farther down Bristow Street, a thirteen-year-old girl danced gleefully through the spray of an open hydrant.

The Soul Tabernacle

The farther east I walked, the more I felt Africa’s presence—churches with names like Poder, Gracia y Amor; tire shops spilling onto the sidewalk; hand-wash car services; voodoo saints in makeshift shrines; and gospel billboards preaching resurrection in Morrisania. Here, the sacred and profane live side by side: a church on one side of the street, a botanica on the other. Somewhere between a Michael Jackson track booming from a 4x4 and the cry of a police siren, I reached Boston Road—its turn-of-the-century buildings catching golden light on their yellow and white bricks, five stories tall with old iron fire escapes.

Community speaks its own language: a barbecue grill smoking in a narrow passage between buildings, kids playing ball, a woman selling watermelon under an umbrella, and a magical place—the Mary Brooks Community Garden—serving as a cooling haven for the elderly and their dominoes.

I came expecting to be looking over my shoulder. But I felt safer here than in the streets of the 20th arrondissement of Paris. This is The Bronx. This is where Bristow lived with his wife and two daughters.

Hispanic and Black pride in Morrisania

I made my way to Forest Avenue and East 166th Street, where the First Congregational Church of Morrisania was established in 1851. The building still stands—weathered, locked, its windows barred, its original tracery just visible beneath layers of grime. It hasn’t reopened since the pandemic. Locals tell me it’s private property now.

I searched for 1086 Forest Avenue—Bristow’s home—but it’s no longer there.

From here, Manhattan’s skyline floats faintly on the horizon. Two worlds. A chasm bridged only by the elevated tracks connecting the Bronx to the rest of the city.

From a truck loaded with old car radiators, where men mine for copper, comes the sound of a sweet bachata. At the next corner, a veteran waves as if we’ve known each other for years. At PS 140, the school motto is “Reaching Unlimited Possibilities.” The signs are in English and Spanish.

In Morrisania, eclecticism rules—in architecture, in belief, in identity. Colombian cumbia fades into Dominican merengue, then into the rasp of an old gospel tune from a passing Buick. I saw a young woman in shorts so tight I wondered how she managed to fit in them, a mother in a white dress, two tall Muslim women wearing colorful burkas and sandals. Then I met D., a photographer like me, who told me the neighborhood was safer now that the police are everywhere, and that most people don’t know the man who gave Morrisania its name—Morris—was a slave owner.

That, too, is part of the Bronx’s history.

As I headed back to the train station for the ride to Brooklyn, I passed a woman seated on a walker outside a modest church. She greeted me with a “Buenas tardes.”

I replied instinctively, “Buenas tardes.”

She smiled—After all, here, the white men don’t speak English.

This is Morrisania. George Frederick Bristow’s turf. I came looking for the composer’s ghost and found others—many—perhaps even my own.