Bronx Apartment Rental Info:

In 1891, the Chancellor of New York University moved the undergraduate college from crowded Washington Square to the rural Bronx. Construction began in 1894 and the area was re-christened University Heights. As NYU campus expanded in the 1900s, the area along University Avenue became heavily residential, with elegant apartment houses rising north and south of Fordham Road. After a turbulent period in the 1970s and 1980s, when residents left for the suburbs and housing was abandoned, University Heights is today anchored by Bronx Community College which bought the NYU campus in 1973. Shopping districts cluster at the boundaries of University Heights, although the hill sometimes make it tricky to walk the streets. West Tremont Avenue, W 183rd Street, Fordham Road and the tail end of the Burnside Avenue shopping strip supply most of the neighborhood shopping needs. Bodegas share blocks with residential houses and apartment buildings. Large, gracious houses line Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. The smaller blocks have newer one and two-family homes. The city's largest Vietnamese and Cambodian enclaves are in this neighborhood.

Fordham ("village by the ford") refers to a settlement near a shallow crossing of the Harlem River, which until 1693 was the only entry to Manhattan from the north. In 1841, the New York and Harlem Railroad opened a station at what is now Fordham Road and Webster Avenue. The Fordham area remained rural until cheap public transportation supplemented the rail line and opened the neighborhood to people who moved from Manhattan and the lower Bronx. That same year, the campus of Fordham University next to the New York Botanical Gardens was opened, bringing even more excitement to the neighborhood. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe moved to Fordham. On Grand Concourse stands the cottage where he lived and wrote Annabell Lee and The Bells. Today, Fordham is an active student-centered community. Just south is the Bronx's Little Italy in an area called Belmont, but some consider this a part of Fordham.

A postmaster invented the name Tremont for this neighborhood in the mid-1800s for the three local estates Fairmount, Mount Eden, and Mount Hope. Served by a streetcar, the elevated subway, and railroad lines, Tremont developed earlier than many neighboring sections. Sadly, its decline was equally rapid: In the 1950s, the Cross Bronx Expressway cut across the neighborhood isolating it from Claremont and Crotona. In the 1970s an imaginative set of residences, called the Twin Parks project, helped to stitch Tremont together again. Today, immigrants from Jamaica, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Ecuador, and Guatemala enliven the neighborhood.