Edenwald Projects:

My first home 1159 E. 225th Street Drive North, Bronx, NY.

The negative connotation associated with living in a Housing Project of New York City never entered my mind while growing up there.

Certainly at the time, there was nothing wrong with growing up in the projects, definitely not in the Edenwald Projects located in the North Bronx near Mount Vernon. We did consider ourselves lucky to not have to call the projects in the South Bronx or Harlem home, which we thought were far more dangerous and scarier than Edenwald ever was.

The Edenwald Projects in the Bronx is my home. It is where I came of age in New York City. In reading how it came to be, it seems there is a huge chunk of information being left out regarding its history.

The history of Edenwald Projects as stated in wikipedia goes from the dedication ceremony in 1952 to “21st century crime, infested with gang violence, police raids, and social issues in recent years.” It was not like that when I was growing up in Edenwald. The question is “Who lived there beginning in 1953 after the dedication in 1952? The history of Edenwald Projects being built on the site of the old Hebrew Orphan Asylum is murky at best and its history leaps from 1952 to the 21st century.

It seems to me that Housing Projects were originally created for the waves of immigrants who came to the US in search of a better life, but is history trying to omit that? I can recall the surnames of some of those old white people, with names ending with ‘Berg,‘Stein, and ‘Witz.

When my family lived there, I remember well, looking out of the huge living room window that faced the front of the 14 story building number 1159. Every morning there would be large groups of old white people. It was as if the building was a senior building. It wasn’t, but there did exist not far from building 1159 another 14 story building that was the designated senior building.

In 1963, we packed up and moved a short distance to a 3-story building number 1180, that included 3 bedrooms, a full bath, a large living room and kitchen with dining area. I was surprised when moving a few feet away, by the number of white families living there with lots of kids my age. We played games like: Hide & Seek; Hot Peas & Butter; Red Light, Green Light and we got along fine. Above us in apartment 2C lived Lorna, a white girl who was very friendly. Her mother, blind, could often be heard playing classical music on the piano. At times, they could hear my mother singing and playing gospel music on our piano.

By the early 70’s, the white families with children in my generation started to slowly disappear. I did not know it at the time, but “white flight” to the suburbs had begun. By the mid-70’s they were mostly gone. I recall the Russo’s who lived in our building as one of the last white families living at Grenada Place.

After “white flight” the apartments were then mostly occupied by Black and Hispanic low-income families. Lot’s of families were two parent homes, many were headed by single mothers. It seemed like most families had parents that worked jobs to support their families and many were low to upper middle class.

This article is to set the record straight about Edenwald Projects. It was a great place to raise a family with children. We were a community and everybody knew everybody. Occasionally, a tragic things would happen, but it was not the Wild West like it is being portrayed in the 21st century. As a footnote, in 2024, Edenwald Projects was added to the National Register of Historic Places.